The Eternal Sunshine of Mayor Pete

Bad weather did Pete Buttigieg a favor when he made his presidential candidacy official on Sunday. With an ugly forecast in South Bend (surprise!), the mayor’s original plans for an outdoor launch to match the slogan he’d be unveiling for the occasion — the sunny promise of a “new American spring” — were scuttled in favor of a former train dock in one of the city’s long-abandoned Studebaker auto factories. Even with the big, raw space festooned with the campaign’s way-hip new logo, the optics weren’t exactly what Roger Ailes would have chosen for Ronald Reagan back in the day. But the setting turned out to be as weirdly charmed as the rest of Buttigieg’s formerly far-fetched quest for the presidency has been so far.

The joint was jammed with 4,000 “Pete”-chanting enthusiasts, cheering as lustily as if Notre Dame was playing USC down the road — even while a long parade of speakers, including the candidate’s favorite teacher, made them wait 70 minutes for the sheepishly grinning mayor to materialize. When he did, Buttigieg uncorked one of the rare political kickoff speeches worth attending, turning Studebaker Building 84 — which now houses start-up companies — into a metaphor for his message of generational transformation.

“Think of what it must have been like that day in 1963,” he said, referring to the date when Studebaker went bust. “Think of what it was like when houses that had been full of life and love and hope fell crumbling and vacant.” This made a smooth transition to Buttigieg’s one thin purchase on the kind of political experience that (pre-Trump) used to qualify someone for the presidency: the economic revival he’s led since he took office in 2012, shortly after Newsweek profiled South Bend as one of America’s “dying cities

In Buttigieg’s telling, the story amounts to more than another spin on the “Massachusetts miracle” genre; he makes it emblematic of the kind of candidacy he aims to run against Trump, and Trumpism. The tale goes that when he ran for mayor at 29, having returned home after Harvard and a Rhodes Scholarship and a stint with the consulting giant McKinsey and Company, he won by telling folks the hard truth — that when politicians kept pledging they’d bring manufacturing jobs back, they were “selling a promise of a return to a bygone era that was never as great as it was purported to have been.” Just like Trump in coal country. Just like Trump trading on “resentment and nostalgia” to appeal to aggrieved Rust Belt whites. “And that’s why I’m here today,” Buttigieg said. “To tell a different story besides Make America Great Again.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/pete-buttigieg-2020-announcement-822324/