Someone From the Midwest Running For President

For John, BLUF:  In this admittedly sympathetic review of Democratic Presidential Contender Peter Buttigieg, the Mayor of South Bend comes across as fairly thoughtful.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

---

Pete Buttigieg’s Quiet Rebellion

Here is the sub-headline:

Against the image of the millennial left, Pete Buttigieg appears to be a relatively prosaic Presidential candidate, but, in his own understated way, he is suggesting a sharp break with the past.

From The New Yorker, by Writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells, 9 February 2019.

Here is the lede:

Last week, Pete Buttigieg, the young mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who recently announced that he is exploring a Presidential candidacy, arrived in New York to meet the press.  First up, on Thursday, was an interview on “CBS This Morning,” where the show’s hosts seemed slightly impatient, like college-admissions officers who had been asked to interview a benefactor’s son.  Norah O’Donnell positioned her eyebrows skeptically.  “You’re thirty-seven, you represent a town of a hundred and two thousand people—did I get that right?  What qualifies you to be President of the United States?”  Buttigieg, who has pale skin, thick brown hair, and a formal manner, gave a self-deprecating laugh.  “I know that I’m the youngest person in this conversation, but I think that the experience of leading a city through a transformation is really relevant right now,” he said.  “Things are changing tectonically in our country, and we can’t just keep doing what we’ve been doing.  We can’t nibble around the edges of a system that no longer works.”  John Dickerson pointed out that other Democratic candidates were proposing very big ideas—Medicare for All, the abolition of private health insurance—and asked, “What is your idea that is so big that nobody would mistake it for nibbling around the edges?”  Buttigieg answered, “Well, first of all, we’ve got to repair our democracy.  The Electoral College needs to go, because it’s made our society less and less democratic.”  He went on in this vein, suggesting that electoral reform was essential, and promising that other policies, on security and health care, would follow.  Viewers were left with the image of an impressive and fluent young politician, whose presence in the Presidential race, and on their screens, had never really been explained

He is going to need a lot of luck.

Regards  —  Cliff