“W e are living
on one of those
blank pages
in between
chapters in
American
history. What
comes next
could be ugly
— or it could be
amazing.”
66 | Rolling Stone | July 2019
a voter about his favorite book. Buttigieg is ready. He
extols the connection between the American work-
er’s daily struggles and, uh, Leopold Bloom. “I’ve
got to go with Ulysses,” says Buttigieg. When he ran
for Indiana state treasurer in 2010, his staff told him
ixnay on the Oyce-Jay. He still lost by 400,000 votes,
so that advice has been discarded.
Buttigieg laser-locks eyes with his questioner, one
of his connecting techniques. He does this with ev-
eryone, from a man advocating for incarcerated mur-
derers having voting rights, to the Spanish- language
reporter whom he tells, “Estoy teniendo una conferen-
cia de prensa después del evento” (“I am having a press
conference after the event”). He shrugs: “I don’t
know how to say press gaggle in Spanish.”
He then lays out how James Joyce sorta, kinda led
him to run for president.
“It’s not beach reading, but I think it is a really im-
portant book because it puts everyday life at the cen-
ter, and it’s doing the same thing in literature that
I’m trying to do in politics,” Buttigieg says, but ad-
mits — as any AP English student knows — the book is
somewhat indecipherable. “It’s one day in June, and
it’s mostly about this one guy, this middle-class guy
talking about his life in Dublin.”
There are some wrinkled brows in the crowd.
What the hell does this have to do with Trump, Joe
Biden sniffing some lady’s hair, and Chinese tariffs?
Then comes the pivot.
“I think American greatness has more to do with
the everyday than anything else,” says Buttigieg. “In
the post-Cold War period, we’ve been taking away in-
vestment in all the things that make everyday life bet-
ter in our country. We’ve been disinvesting in public
education. We have been disinvesting in infrastruc-
ture. We have been disinvesting in health care, and
it’s making our everyday lives harder.”
He pauses for a moment to let this sink in.
“No matter how spectacularly powerful our mil-
itary is, no matter how impressive our space pro-
gram is, it isn’t going to come to much if we can’t de-
liver a good everyday life for Americans.” He smiles
a little smile. “So, I guess my literary tastes are like
my political tastes: I want things that focus my view
on the everyday.”
The crowd goes wild! OK, maybe NPR singles-night
wild. Still, there is light in their eyes as they contem-
plate replacing our porn-star-banging, syntax-man-
gling president with a 37-year-old gay Rhodes scholar/
Afghanistan veteran who likes to install Wi-Fi sensors
in his city’s sewers and plays Spoon on the piano.
(Buttigieg’s most baffling inconsistency is that he in-
sists he loves Dave Matthews and Radiohead.) He is
married to a 29-year-old man who adores 30 Rock.
It is not clear if we are still in Iowa or in an Evelyn
Waugh novel.O
N THE SURFACE, Pete Buttigieg should be
number one on the “What the hell are
you thinking running for president?” list.
He likes to say that, with his seven years
as mayor, he has more executive experience than
Trump or Mike Pence. Still, the number of people
in South Bend who have voted for Buttigieg could fit
into the end-zone section of Notre Dame Stadium,with room left over for Touchdown Jesus and the
Twelve Apostles. A telling fact in his otherwise read-
able Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a
Model for America’s Future is that not much happens.
While Biden was counseling Barack Obama about
Osama bin Laden, Buttigieg was drawing up round-
abouts to improve traffic flow and beautifying down-
town South Bend.
And yet he has caught fire. There’s been a Time
cover, a stint slow-jamming the news on Fallon, and
a standing ovation at a Fox News town hall in New
Hampshire. He has raised $7 million, not Biden or
Bernie Sanders territory, but more than enough to
build an operation in early primary states. Trump
slagged him, saying the country was not going to
elect a man who looks like Alfred E. Neuman, im-
mediately cementing Mayor Pete as a credible candi-
date. Buttigieg zinged back, “I guess it’s a generation-
al thing — I didn’t get the reference.” (Buttigieg speaks
eight languages , so the idea he never heard of Mad’s
Neuman seems dubious.)
Some of his success can be attributed to his
being the first openly gay candidate for president.
( Buttigieg came out in 2015 at age 33.) He mentions
a BYU student who was inspired to come out be-
cause of him. “It’s not unusual for someone, usual-
ly someone a little older, to come up to me in the air-
port or on the street, start to say something, then just
begin crying,” Buttigieg tells me. In person, he comes
across as brave and unflappable, which, he suggests,
might be a defense mechanism. “One reason that
some people develop a calm personality is that you
feel emotions so strongly that you learn quickly to
govern them,” he says with a wry smile.
He is matter-of-fact about his sexuality. His mar-
riage exists “by the grace of a single vote on the U.S.
Supreme Court,” Buttigieg has said in his speeches.
He even launched some finely aimed barbs at Pence,
telling an LGBTQ political-action committee, “If me
being gay was a choice, it was a choice that was made
far, far above my pay grade. That’s the thing I wish
the Mike Pences of the world would understand. Thatif you’ve got a problem with who I am, your problem
is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”
Buttigieg’s campaign has been careful not to pi-
geonhole him as “the gay candidate.” In the 2020
Democratic race, there isn’t a major wedge issue —
like the Iraq vote in 2008 — to separate candidates.
Most hold similar positions on Trump, abortion, gun
control and health care. (In June, Buttigieg came out
more forcefully for impeachment, and is in favor of
Medicare for all who want it, with private insurance
still available as a supplement.) His Afghanistan ser-
vice protects him from the “lightweight” charge, but
is also a distinctive perspective that few elites have in
America. Buttigieg split his time between investigat-
ing how the Taliban financed terror and something
more visceral: avoiding roadside bombs as he drove
supply trucks outside of the wire. His military service
gives him gravitas when he is asked what is and what
isn’t worth American blood.
“Our whole set of ideas on this was scrambled by
seeing things like the failure in Rwanda and the fail-
ure in Iraq and wondering how between them we can
find a good doctrine,” Buttigieg tells me as we sit in
a glorified walk-in closet at his campaign office that
seems also to be a resting place for audio visual equip-
ment. He says that in Afghanistan he felt lost when
considering what success there would look like.
“If we’re talking about military intervention, core
American interests have to be at stake,” Buttigieg
says. “Anything we’re about to do in our interests
must be vetted against our values, because part of
how Afghanistan got to be the way it is is that we got
lazy about our values and who we supported, and it
came back and bit us.” A few seconds later, he adds
another qualification — “Then there’s the Obama pro-
viso: Don’t do stupid shit.”
Buttigieg’s campaign has been a sly combination
of ambition and love, wearing boxing gloves while
singing about hearts and flowers. He throws elbows,
but they’re tempered with Midwestern politeness,
hitting Biden’s pledge of a return to bipartisanship
with “Normal hasn’t been working for a lot of peo-
ple.... We’ve got to create a new normal.” He doesn’t
mention the former vice president by name.
Buttigieg throws the left some red meat by calling
for the abolition of the Electoral College and stack-
ing the Supreme Court. At first, he didn’t talk about
Trump explicitly except to say, “It is the nature of
grotesque things that you can’t look away.”
Instead he speaks of the nation at a crossroads.
“We are living on one of those blank pages in be-
tween chapters in American history,” he said. “What
comes next could be ugly — or it could be amazing.”
But does Buttigieg have a path to victory? He has
already out- Beto’d Beto O’Rourke on the shiny-new-
thing front. Part of that is Buttigieg being gay. So far,
that has played out in a somewhat counterintuitive
way, with voters thinking, “Mayor Pete may be gay,
but he is just like us.” Calmness and intelligence are
his calling cards, a stark contrast to our current pres-
ident. He is the opposite of angry, and that appeals to
an exhausted and tormented nation. Still, will Amer-
ica turn over the nuclear codes to the mayor of Indi-
ana’s fourth-largest city?
“The closer you get to Iowa and New Hampshire,
the more voters start playing it safe when there’s a
sitting president you want to get rid of,” says political
consultant Joe Trippi, who saw this happen to How-PETE BUTTIGIEG
Senior writer STEPHEN RODRICK wrote about the
suicide epidemic in the American West last issue.