By any stretch of the imagination, Peter Buttigieg’s resume is an accomplished one. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a BA in History and Literature, first-class honours from Oxford (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) , Rhodes Scholar, veteran (deployed to Afghanistan in 2014) and by the age of 29, elected Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, winning a second term with over 80% of the vote in 2015. That he has added another distinction, running for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020 at 37, was perhaps a foregone conclusion.
Precocity aside, the Buttigieg presidential effort is more than just an exercise in hubris. His argument that he has more public service experience than either Barack Obama and Donald Trump is factual, underlined by his encyclopaedic knowledge of public policy minutiae. Furthermore, he argues that his time running a city for eight years with a $368 million USD budget gives him more executive experience than most of the senators currently running (save Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders carries with it a degree of credibility. Add to this an almost supernatural ability to project, self-assuredness and iron emotional control, and one has an explanation for his surge in the national polls (behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, two men with vastly higher profiles than his.)
Part of this has been due to sagacious planning and careful positioning.
In a race characterized by fiery left-wing, socialist-tinged rhetoric, Buttigieg has positioned himself as both a ground-breaker and a traditionalist, a norm-breaker and rule-follower: He’s an openly gay candidate who proclaims the virtues of marriage; the mayor of a midsized Midwestern city and an Afghanistan combat veteran and practicing Episcopalian who makes it a point to state that he gave up alcohol for Lent.
He’s also proving quite adept at creating straw men. In addition to exceeding admittedly bottom-feeding expectations (of the “Pete WHO?” variety) for his presidential bid, Buttigieg has managed to pick a fight with the famously mild-mannered Vice President Mike Pence, himself a former Indiana governor with whom Buttigieg has had a long and well-mannered relationship. By proclaiming his own faith in contrast with the antagonism of evangelical Christians toward homosexuality, as supposedly represented by Pence, Buttigieg has allowed himself to gain high-profile notoriety with the comment, “If you have a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.”
Like others before him (i.e. JFK, RFK, Barack Obama) who were deemed “too young” (held only be almost 50 by 2032) Buttigieg chose not to operate on conventional wisdom’s timetable. Just as in their cases, the road ahead is paved with potential pitfalls. Whereas his openness about his sexuality has this far been a boon to raising his profile, there is a subsurface worry among his supporters that there might those voters less disposed to this openness and that his appeal might be limited. How he addresses that prejudice – will he have to make a Kennedyesque-style denial of religious control or an Obama-like race speech on a more perfect union -- will likely have a huge effect on how far he can push this most improbable of campaigns.
One thing going for him is that he appears to have avoided the trap of being pigeonholed. Unlike Elizabeth Warren, Kristin Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Berie Sanders, Buttigieg is making a virtue of not forcing people to choose between progressive and moderate, between wanting to attack the global threat of climate change and wanting to preserve a strong national defense. And yet at some point, people will have to make choices. And so, will the candidate: he needs to define himself and not be defined by others. He now has to show steel, and that means taking more clearly-defined stands.
The Buttigieg balloon still can be popped. It’s early days yet, with months to go before the first vote is even counted –and he has yet to be tested in the white-hot forum of primary debates when the other would-be nominees to tear at him. History suggests that there is nothing more instructive to a candidate then to be exposed to attacks – it toughens them up, and prepares people for the withering scrutiny of an eventual battle between party standard barriers in the fall.
Especially if he does wind up winning the nomination and ends up facing the most sharp-elbowed of opponents – Donald Trump, a man known for throwing punches relentlessly and with the kind of wild abandon that makes conventional opponents look like pussy cats.