Pete Buttigieg's Focus: Storytelling First. Policy Details Later.NYT

'The question was simple enough, but Senator John Edwards squirmed painfully. For 49 long seconds, the North Carolina Democrat, a masterful courtroom orator, sputtered before a crowd at Harvard, unable to settle on a favorite movie. Taunted by the MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews, who accused him of scrambling political calculations in his head, Mr. Edwards eventually supplied a thoroughly inoffensive answer: “The Shawshank Redemption.” Pete Buttigieg watched in horror.

Two weeks later, in October 2003, Mr. Buttigieg vented his dismay in The Harvard Crimson. Contrasting Mr. Edwards’s hollow presentation with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brazen campaign for governor of California, Mr. Buttigieg wrote that Republicans had cornered the market on political swagger. “Across the aisle,” Mr. Buttigieg lamented, “members of a Democratic Party, aghast at the hypocrisy of their counterparts’ personalities, seem themselves reluctant to demonstrate any personality at all.”

Sixteen years later, that observation informs Mr. Buttigieg’s underdog campaign for the White House, an enterprise driven powerfully by personality. Other candidates have anchored their candidacies in ideological or social causes, like Senator Elizabeth Warren’s opposition to corporate power or Senator Cory Booker’s concern for racial justice.

Mr. Buttigieg’s distinctive political passion appears to be storytelling, wrapping conventional liberalism in an earnest, youthful persona that Democrats might see as capable of winning over the middle of the country. Dan Glickman, a former secretary of agriculture in the Clinton administration who knew Mr. Buttigieg at Harvard, said he saw him as a “tonal” moderate with a “calm, sensible demeanor.” “He’s got this way of articulating a vision, which is progressive but not off-putting,” said Mr. Glickman, 74, who led Harvard’s Institute of Politics at the time.

A Times review of Mr. Buttigieg’s writings, starting in college, found that rhetorical task to be a consistent preoccupation. As a student, Mr. Buttigieg, now 37 and the mayor of South Bend, Ind., habitually discussed Democrats’ challenges in terms of language and argument, rather than policy or ideology. Mr. Buttigieg urged liberals in his student columns to speak in terms of “effective political values,” and he recalled corresponding in college with the University of California, Berkeley, linguist George Lakoff, who in 2004 published a best seller about political communication.

In an interview, Mr. Buttigieg said his college writings were no longer fresh in his mind. But then, as now, he acknowledged, he was focused on the interaction of “narrative and politics,” and how parties connect with people beyond policy decrees. “The story that we tell, not just about government but about ourselves, and the story we tell people about themselves and how they fit in, really grounds our politics,” Mr. Buttigieg said.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/us/politics/pete-buttigieg-2020-writing-message.html?