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conix, Could Pete Buttigieg Become the First Millennial President?

"New face for the Democrats"

Buttigieg, (buddha-judge) Smart. Curious. Open. Interesting. Decent.
Laughs naturally. Looks a good new face to me. Thanks for the introduction.

Meet the mayor of South Bend, Ind., who wants to be the first member of his generation to run the country

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Story by Bob Moser
January 14, 2019

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A normal politician might be miffed at the low turnout. A regular human being might not be looking quite so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed under the circumstances. But “normal” and “regular” are not adjectives that apply to the son of a Maltese immigrant father and an Army brat mom who grew up in decaying South Bend, got himself into Harvard, summer-interned for Ted Kennedy, worked for John Kerry’s presidential campaign, won a Rhodes Scholarship, learned Arabic in Tunisia, landed a jet-setting consultant’s job, left it to return to his beat-up hometown and become the youngest mayor of a midsize U.S. city, transformed that city into a national model of renewal, and then — deep breath — volunteered for active duty in Afghanistan while serving as mayor, came out as gay in the local newspaper, married a schoolteacher live on YouTube, turned heads in a dark-horse bid to lead the Democratic National Committee, and had the New York Times’s Frank Bruni gushing about him as potentially the “First Gay President”— all by age 36.


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If Buttigieg becomes president, you sense, the future will be chock-full of Manhattan Projects. But first he has to overcome the considerable odds and find a way to win. He has clearly made a close study of how Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy took their nontraditional paths to the presidency at young ages. “When you run young, your face says you represent change,” he says. But he doesn’t want to stop at symbolism: His message for 2020 will be centered on a clean, sharp break with the Lite Republicanism that Democrats embraced in the 1990s. While older voters still tell pollsters they favor keeping taxes low and ambitions modest, millennials overwhelmingly support Medicare-for-all, free college, heavy spending to tackle poverty and climate change, and major infrastructure investments — social democracy, in a nutshell.

Though Buttigieg prefers to label himself — if he must label himself — a “progressive Democrat,” he can deliver a spontaneous dissertation on why young Americans say they prefer socialism to capitalism that would do Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ocasio-cortez-democratic-freshmen-look-to-shape-party-as-it-takes-control-of-house/2018/11/23/fd9d4b22-eccf-11e8-baac-2a674e91502b_story.html?utm_term=.9728127a31b3 .. proud. Nobody should mistake it for youthful idealism or recklessness, he says. “I think the new generation that emerges now will have a different kind of seriousness about the future,” he says. “It’s more immediate and personal, the younger you are. You’re going to be on the business end of climate change, of tax cuts; you’re going to be touched more by our post-9/11 wars. Matt, how old were you on 9/11?”

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“The discussion in Washington has gotten so abstracted from reality,” he says. He wants to drive politics back toward the lived experiences of the citizenry, which don’t divide them the way ideological abstractions do. “What makes a country great, really? We like to talk about ‘freedom’ and ‘security’ and ‘family values’ or whatever,” he says. “But the measure of a country’s greatness is whether it helps people lead better lives, with less worry.”

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As soon as we’ve broken free of bottlenecks, Buttigieg starts searching the side of the highway for a lunch spot. South of Fredericksburg, he spots a low-slung, ramshackle series of structures: “Hey, there’s two things I’ve never seen paired: restaurant and thrift shop.” In a split second, he’s making a quick swerve left. “Let’s check it out!” he says, as McKenna lets out a little groan.

After a quick scan of the dingy thrift shop — “Matt, look, $7 suits!” — we follow him into Lou’s Soul Food, which smells like 30 years of fried food. “It’s a buffet,” he says, as if that settles things, and we find a table near the back to talk about his first campaign experience.

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For all his aw-shucksiness, if Buttigieg has the least bit of doubt that he’s ready to make the leap to commander in chief, at an age that barely qualifies him constitutionally for the job, it’s impossible to detect. He has often been urged to run for Congress — the next logical steppingstone — but he sees it as a dead end. “I would find it demoralizing,” he says.

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“He might very well have won the DNC race if you could have had a secret ballot,” says Howard Dean, who endorsed Buttigieg for his old job. “But it’s such an insider race. … That was hard to overcome.” Dean, who has spoken with Buttigieg about his own experience vaulting from obscurity to the top of the 2004 Democratic primaries, sees a lot of Obama­esque qualities in the mayor. “He has a magnetism about him,” he says. “And I think he projects this idea of, ‘Let’s get past all this partisan crap and do something for the country for a change.’ I think his age is an advantage. I really think the American people would like to see our generation step aside and see a new generation take leadership.”

Obama is also a Buttigieg fan.

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Still, Buttigieg doesn’t much care for being identified primarily as the “first gay” anything. Millennials are supposed to be obsessed with identity politics, but Buttigieg thinks that Democrats make a serious mistake when they slice-and-dice their message to appeal to particular identities. “Along the way, the party fell into this pattern of thinking we should have a message for each constituency,” he says. “But the reality is that people care about issues that aren’t ‘their’ issues, quote unquote. Elderly residents care about education. Suburban women care about racial justice. Young people care about social programs for the elderly.”

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Earlier in the day, Buttigieg had told me how much he relishes coming into an environment like this, where “nobody knows me from Adam,” and seeing what happens when he starts speaking. “Sometimes you can watch people as you go up to the podium and they’re like, ‘What’s the deal with this guy?’ And then it’s, ‘Okay, he’s up there, he can talk.’ If it’s going right, I love to watch the faces then: Partly I like to study them to see what’s working and not, what to cut out next time or maybe expand. But there’s this look, when you know you really have them. It’s hard to describe, but it’s unmistakable.”

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Standing in front of a big fireplace and a huge TV showing the Redskins game on mute, Buttigieg is in his element, opening with some banter about where he’s from — “You might know us for our football team” — before segueing into the message he’s honing for 2020. “It’s very important for people in communities like mine to know there’s a formula for moving forward that isn’t resentment, that isn’t nostalgia,” he says, recounting his first campaign for mayor. “We didn’t go around saying we’re going to make South Bend great again.” The folks laugh heartily at the implicit dig at Trump. “I didn’t go around thumping my chest saying I alone can fix it. We came together and identified problem-solvers to get things done and actually change the trajectory of our future.”

I’m watching the faces he’s watching, seeing folks whisper low to their spouses: Who is this guy again?

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During our day trip in October, Buttigieg was coy about his plans for the future. But on Dec. 20, three days after announcing that he wouldn’t run .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/south-bend-mayor-pete-buttigieg-moves-toward-presidential-run/2018/12/17/e51930a2-fe5e-11e8-ad40-cdfd0e0dd65a_story.html?utm_term=.67c701fe4430 .. for a third term in South Bend, he spoke at the annual Progress Iowa holiday party in Des Moines — signaling his intentions to political observers. In January, he hired Marcus Switzer, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 deputy finance director. And in February, following the release of his book, “Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future,” Buttigieg plans to strike out across the country on what will likely amount to an exploratory campaign for the presidency.

He knows that the effort might add up to nothing more than one more instance of winning by losing — raising his profile for whatever else might lie ahead. But he’s calculating that the whole bundle of “firsts” he represents will make him stand out from the pack of senior citizens — Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bloomberg, Sanders — and the football-team’s worth of middle-aged members of Congress harboring White House dreams.

Plenty more - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2019/01/14/feature/could-pete-buttigieg-become-the-first-millennial-president/?utm_term=.f114a36e8662