"...owns two rescue dogs, and plays the goddamn piano. He's actually terrifying... "

Like that's a bad thing?


Wonder Boy Pete Buttigieg is a gay Harvard alum, fluent in Gramsci, Joyce, and Norwegian. And he’s the Democrats’ folksiest heartland hope. Really!
By Olivia Nuzzi

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“I think everything about this is as improbable as it is well aligned,” Buttigieg told me. “There’s that line about me being a laboratory concoction of what a politician might be. I get where that comes from, but then again, in what laboratory would you have cooked up as your entry in a presidential contest ‘mid-size-city midwestern mayor who’s not even 40 yet,’ you know?” He’s 37, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see why a skeptic might assess what’s on offer here and come away in disbelief that a single, organically grown person prone to consultantspeak could check so many boxes relevant to this moment, including, I guess, those for the always advantageous political qualities of “false modesty” and the “ability to be all things to all people.”

Sick of old people? He looks like Alex P. Keaton. Scared of young people? He looks like Alex P. Keaton. Religious? He’s a Christian. Atheist? He’s not weird about it. Wary of Washington? He’s from flyover country. Horrified by flyover country? He has degrees from Harvard and Oxford. Make the President Read Again? He learned Norwegian to read Erlend Loe. Traditional? He’s married. Woke? He’s gay. Way behind the rest of the country on that? He’s not too gay. Worried about socialism? He’s a technocratic capitalist. Worried about technocratic capitalists? He’s got a whole theory about how our system of “democratic capitalism” has to be a whole lot more “democratic.” If you squint hard enough to not see color, some people say, you can almost see Obama the inspiring professor. Oh, and he’s the son of an immigrant, a Navy vet, speaks seven foreign languages (in addition to Norwegian, Arabic, Spanish, Maltese, Dari, French, and Italian), owns two rescue dogs, and plays the goddamn piano. He’s actually terrifying. What mother wouldn’t love this guy?

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David Axelrod, Obama’s longtime strategist and now Buttigieg’s friend, observed that Buttigieg has something in common not only with Obama but with the two Democratic presidents before him: faith. “His fluency on faith and his willingness to speak about it is an asset,” he said. “Carter, Clinton, and Obama — they all shared that quality. It was one of the cues that opened the door to voters.”

Eric Lesser, now a Massachusetts state senator, is a friend of “Peter’s” from Harvard. He worked on the 2008 campaign and then for Axelrod in the Obama White House. “He reminds me of the very early phases of President Obama,” Lesser said. “Just the fact that he is so deeply thoughtful and intellectual, and also somebody who is relatable.”

Axelrod said there are “two ways” to look at the race: You either “beat Trump at his own game,” and alienate crucial voters in the process, or you “build a bridge for people who may have voted for Trump and who may like some of the things he’s done but are troubled by him.” Buttigieg is uniquely able — and willing — to do this, Axelrod said, because such voters helped get him reelected (with 80 percent of the vote) when Mike Pence — a born-again Christian and zealous opponent of the LGBTQ community — was the governor of Indiana. Buttigieg is often asked how he would defend himself against Trump on the debate stage, or once the insult-comic campaign alter ego logs back on full time. He always says the same thing, that you’ll never be able to beat him with a savage one-liner, that beating him will mean ignoring him, to some degree, so that someone else — and their ideas — can get some oxygen.

But before he gets to present his theory of the case against Trump, he’s got to get through his case against the other Democratic contenders. Or at least that’s how I thought a primary worked. Buttigieg either sees things differently or wants to avoid meaningful bickering at this early stage with his competitors, and so he’s pretending to. “I think the thing about having so many of us in the field is that, for somebody like me, you’re not competing against any individual. You’re competing against the house,” he said. “And it’s possible, in that way, to — I think — run your own plan and talk about your own case and let others figure out for themselves all the ways in which I am simply not like any of the others.” Operationally, the strategy of his campaign seems to be: Pick up enough Democrats who found Trump’s message appealing to actually win in Iowa and New Hampshire, then ride the momentum and publicity (he’ll say yes to any interview; see here, and here) into Super Tuesday. And from there …

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