Pete Buttigieg In The Wilderness

Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.

In May 2001, at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, a 19-year-old freshman named Peter Buttigieg asked David Gergen, a Harvard professor and horse whisperer to five presidents, a question that he might have reserved for himself, a couple of decades later. Peter (he had not yet transformed into “Pete,” let alone “Mayor Pete”) said he loved The West Wing but could feel the idealism reflected in the show slipping away from politics in real life. “The presidency has now devolved into what’s called ‘the MBA White House,’ or ‘the corporate model,’” he said, with the plaintive tone of a child asking about the spirit of Christmas. “Is that magic really gone forever?”

Last summer, by the shore of the Grand Traverse Bay in northern Michigan, I told Buttigieg that I remembered that kind of fresh-faced idealism from my own time as a Harvard student. It was earnest; it was ambitious; it kind of made me want to barf. Lust for power—that, I understood, and I recognized it in many of our classmates. (We overlapped briefly, but I didn’t know Buttigieg.) But the combination of naked ambition, absence of cynicism, and a sunny disposition seemed awfully suspicious. I always felt there was something odd about the undergraduates who haunted the IOP, Harvard’s convalescent home for politicians recently defeated in politics or retired from it. How could you trust students who, rather than getting laid or drunk with their peers, spent their free time at office hours with former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman? 

Buttigieg said he knew what I was talking about. “It could be a Puritan, self-effacing thing,” he told me, “where you’re not supposed to admit that you view yourself as the person who would want to do that.” (Even the phrasing—do that—made politics sound like an unnatural act.) The students with aspirations to high office knew that idealism and ambition put off a lot of people. The Harvard Crimson, he remembered, called all of the IOP kids and asked why they wanted to be president someday. “Almost all the IOPers were savvy enough not to respond,” he said. “You’re supposed to act as if you never even dimly suspected that you might run for office, until the moment you announce your campaign.” (Of the students who answered the reporter’s call, only one has held elected office—a term on the Montana Public Service Commission.) 

Friends who knew Buttigieg then told me they didn’t imagine him as a candidate—maybe a wonk or policy nerd, but not the guy on the ballot. He went back to the IOP in 2015, after he had become a rising Democratic star. He told the students that he knew just how torn they were, because he had felt the same way only a decade before. “Part of you is very anxious about how you could ever measure up” to the great politicians of history. “And then there’s another part of you,” he remembered saying. This other part “has had it at least cross your mind that, if by some catastrophic sequence of events, you were forced to immediately assume the presidency, you could somehow do it. And you know exactly what you would do first.”

Whoever said that long-term planning is impossible in politics has never looked at the résumé of Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg. One of the lessons a budding young would-be politician can learn at the IOP is that if you want to run for higher office, then there are steps you have to take. The Roman republic had a cursus honorum, a defined track that led an aspirant from low office to high. If America and the meritocracy that ruled it for much of the past century has a similar path, Buttigieg has followed it with uncanny fidelity.

Born in 1982, he grew up in South Bend, Indiana, where his mother taught linguistics and his father, a native of Malta and an expert on the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, taught critical theory at Notre Dame. As a high-school student, he entered an essay contest sponsored by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and wrote an ode to the courage of Bernie Sanders. Sanders’s calling himself socialist, Buttigieg wrote, was the political equivalent of “a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” and wearing the label showed the senator’s integrity. But part of what made Sanders “courageous,” he wrote (and not a “crazy” radical), was that he had been willing to endorse Bill Clinton—to offer his grudging support to a centrist. It was a peculiar argumentative turn, and perhaps a preview of Buttigieg’s later pragmatism. Be principled, he seemed to be saying. But don’t get carried away.

This type of pragmatism will take a bright young man far in the meritocracy. He was admitted to Harvard, and four years later he was a Rhodes Scholar. Another member of his Rhodes class, Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey, told me he and Buttigieg often talked politics late at night in Oxford pubs, “but one thing he never did was talk about running for office.”

After Oxford, Buttigieg spent three years in Chicago, during a money-earning interlude as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. McKinsey was, at the time, the default apprenticeship for Rhodes Scholars who wished to learn the ways of the private sector. He said that he did not expect to do the job forever (“I couldn’t really do a great job on something that I was just paid to care about”), but that it taught him “how people and money and goods move around the world.” Management consulting has since suffered in reputation, especially among progressives, who view Buttigieg’s lubrication of the mechanisms of global capital as a major turnoff. In 2009, he was commissioned in the United States Navy Reserve, another well-known proving ground for public servants. 

In 2010, he left McKinsey and jumped onto the political cursus with a run for treasurer of Indiana. As a “businessman,” his campaign materials claimed, he would “protect Hoosier taxpayers from risky Wall Street schemes and unscrupulous companies.” He lost but outperformed Democrats in other races, and a year later he ran for mayor of South Bend with a similar proposition for voters. His policy plan followed a McKinseylike template, with an assessment of the city’s current “situation” and a list of Buttigieg’s “mayoral action items.” He proposed to declare South Bend “open for business,” and mused in his announcement speech that it could shed its reputation for crime and economic decrepitude and instead become “a cool little city,” diverse and prosperous. He clobbered his opponents in fundraising and won the Democratic nomination with 7,663 votes, or 55 percent of the total. 

Whether you like what Mayor Pete did in South Bend depends on what you want from a mayor. He inherited a declining Rust Belt city and he left it in better condition, though “cool” would be a stretch. Industrial wrecks such as the old Studebaker factory are in the process of becoming data centers and office parks. His opponents on the left criticized him for courting Big Business rather than looking out for working people who wouldn’t have had the means to hire a McKinsey consultant. “Buttigieg knows how to play the game and keep the establishment in power,” Theo Randall, a professor at Indiana University South Bend who has watched Buttigieg for more than a decade, told me. Randall accused him of a feel-good liberalism that ignores deeper racial and class reckonings that South Bend (a city that is just barely half white) has coming. This progressive critique has followed Buttigieg ever since his time as mayor. 

Whether his mayorship propelled Buttigieg to national attention, however, is not open to doubt. Competence alone would not have been sufficient. In true overachiever style, he held two demanding jobs at once: mayor and Navy officer, and when he was activated from the reserves in 2014, he left the city to a deputy mayor so he could serve for seven months in Afghanistan. Back in South Bend, in 2015, he came out as gay. He revealed this “part of who I am” in a short, dignified op-ed in the South Bend Tribune, and noted that he’d been “well into adulthood” before he could admit that he was gay even to himself. One college friend, John Beshears, told me that when Buttigieg had come out privately to him, months earlier, the mayor wondered whether being gay would limit his political future.

At least initially, it did not. In 2016, he made his first appearance in The New York Times, in a Frank Bruni column, “The First Gay President?” By then, Buttigieg’s last inhibitions about the political ambition that dare not speak its name had disappeared, and by 2018 he was wrapping up his mayorship and in Iowa planning an insurgent bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Being a small-city mayor, and facing constituents every day in grocery stores and on street corners, turned out to be excellent practice for courting voters in intimate settings, and Buttigieg’s first-place caucus finish elevated him to contender status.

He was of course crushed after Iowa—first by Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire, and then by the eventual nominee, Joe Biden, whom Buttigieg dropped out to endorse. Biden appointed Buttigieg as secretary of transportation, a position in some ways perfect for his efficiency mindset. 

Being stashed in a technocratic niche, however, meant that Buttigieg’s talent at retail politics went underused. He had emerged as one of the few Democrats capable of talking to Republicans and not sounding like he loathed them. Buttigieg attributes this skill (which should be basic to the Democratic tool kit but is now unusual, like the ability to spin plates or play the zither) to “arriving on the national scene with nothing to lose,” and therefore taking on-camera requests from anyone who asked, including hostile outlets such as Fox News. “I built a comfort level with that that I might have been counseled out of, if I was a young congressman.” The talent is so uncommon that when Fox News invited him to a town hall in 2019, its audience hooted with delight several times and sent him off with a standing ovation effusive enough to move the moderator, Chris Wallace, to say “wow” on the air.

Worse than being underused, however, is being used in a campaign destined for failure. In 2024, Kamala Harris contemplated choosing Buttigieg as her running mate, then decided it was too “risky” to bring a gay man onto the ticket. “We were already asking a lot of America,” she wrote in her memoir. In a rare lack of grace, Buttigieg has never thanked her for that sleight: Being passed over has left Buttigieg the most prominent Biden stalwart to remain viable as candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2028. 

“Sometimes things have a way of working out for the best,” he told me, noting that the loss at least helped the Democratic Party “shake loose some of its insistence on purity.” After Customs and Border Protection agents killed Alex Pretti, the legally armed protester in Minneapolis, Buttigieg told me he favored a hospitable approach to gun enthusiasts and civil libertarians who were now entertaining doubts about Donald Trump’s commitments to their freedoms. The alternative would be to shriek at them for their hypocrisy. “Strategically, I think it’s more important to build on the people who are stepping forward and say ‘Welcome aboard’ than to further alienate the people who we think should have been there by now.”

Other potential candidates, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gavin Newsom, have achieved fame by berating and ridiculing the other side. Buttigieg is more staid in tone. He sounds like the youngest member of the old Democratic Party, the one that flourished before Trump: brainy, credentialed, and elite; liberal but not progressive; and personable but—this might be key—frightfully boring.

The last of these, which would have been an insult in previous eras, is part of the Buttigieg value proposition. Buttigieg is technocracy made flesh. Who could be safer than a politician who has had his card punched at all the great meritocratic institutions, and who has followed the modern cursus honorum from local office to national? And who could be less Trumpian? He is unashamed of technical competence, even when it makes him sound dweebish. Without embarrassment, he bragged to me that during his days as a management consultant, he’d worked with data sets “too big for Excel to handle.”

The crowds I saw Buttigieg work in Iowa last year did not seem to think he was a try-hard, a nerd, or anything but an unflappably upbeat guy. He had the charisma and skill that a politician needs, including the ability to sound passionate and spontaneous even about things I knew he had discussed countless times before. Performing well on Fox led to repeat invitations to appear on the channel, then an end to the invitations, possibly for the same reason. (His people speculated to me that last year he became too plausible a candidate to be rewarded with that much airtime.) But his policies, and the style in which he advocates for them, remain as vanilla as they get. Buttigieg disputes this characterization, though he admits that “tonally” there is truth to it. “I think we are ready to have a less exciting presidency,” he told me, in the sense that ordinary people can “go a day without hearing the name of the president of the United States.” A “boring” president, he says, is a president doing the job so well that you don’t have to think about him.

“There are all these structures and institutions that have just been burned to cinders by this administration,” Buttigieg said. He looks forward to the chance to rebuild those institutions—and to improve them. “Democrats need to make clear that we’re not just here to put everything back the way that it was.” USAID is one institution, he says, that needed reform. There are others: NATO, the World Trade Organization, the National Institutes of Health.

But when one side is engaged in wholesale arson, the politician who proposes to reform institutions (to be “institutionally radical,” as Buttigieg puts it) is still the institutional candidate. The systems that Buttigieg proposes working within are still the systems of yesteryear. The tempests of the second Trump administration come from the rejection of much of the post–Cold War bipartisan consensus—free trade, American-led multilateralism, and lean, market-friendly economic policy—and the chaos that replaced it. Buttigieg is that consensus revivified—a return to normalcy. 

For now, Buttigieg has chosen to wait out the tempests in Traverse City, the hometown of his husband, Chasten, a former schoolteacher. “We firmly became Michiganders at the end of 2021,” Buttigieg told me, when the couple bought a house there. From the vantage point of northern Michigan, he watches the progress of Trumpism with a combination of dismay and optimism. He sees the administration’s more “extreme behavior”—including ICE raids, which he calls “violent authoritarianism”—as attempts to deflect attention from the cracks developing in Trump’s base. Buttigieg pointed to Indiana Republicans’ unwillingness to go along with a Trump-endorsed election map in December as a sign of the president’s weakening grasp on his party. “It’s a cornered-animal problem,” he said. “He’s getting weaker and getting more dangerous at the same time.”

These, however, were observations from the sidelines. The past year, Buttigieg told me, has been about “doubling down on family.” He is relishing time as dad to their adopted twins, 4-year-old Gus and Penelope. Not having to shave daily is a relief after 15 continuous years in politics. (The pictures of him from his first campaign show a candidate so boyish that one doubts his need to shave at all.) “It’s a pretty good life,” he said. 

Traverse City is remote from Washington politics. At a local bar, I asked an employee to name the city’s most famous resident, and he struggled to name anyone. “Madonna’s brother used to be a homeless guy here,” he said. I told him that a former secretary of transportation had moved to town six months ago, and instead of continuing the conversation he found urgent barkeeping tasks to attend to. The local attraction is the region’s cherries, and if you visit in cherry season, you can see tourists walking around with bags of them, their hands stained red, as if they have recently committed gruesome crimes.

A day with the Buttigieges is a never-ending succession of wholesomeness. When I went to their house, Pete had traded running the country’s transportation sector for a different type of traffic management, in the kitchen of his exurban home. The couple had begun preparing their children for a day of camp. Pete was delivering yogurt to the table while Chasten coaxed them to eat it. “Not enough protein,” Chasten said, prompting Pete to scramble eggs, which of course the kids rejected. “Papa got an axe for Christmas,” Gus told me. “Technically,” Pete said, “it is a splitting maul.”

Later we dropped the kids at camp, then visited Pete’s in-laws’ property. Chasten’s parents, Terry and Sherri, help with child care and design and sell Christmas wreaths out of a barn—an occupation that rates a solid 10 out of 10 on the Norman Rockwell scale. Then came lunch at a shop that sold Cornish pasties—an empanada-like savory food, “quintessentially a UP thing,” Pete said, referring to the Upper Peninsula, because “you can take them camping or hunting.” We stopped at a bakery to pick up hamburger buns. The day ended with the same kid-related disarray that it began with: a cherry cone at Moomers Homemade Ice Cream, a rustic scoop shop that no less an authority than Good Morning America named the best in the country in 2008. 

Every politician these days is in a constant battle for authenticity. Back when young Peter was at the IOP, he was in awe of the nation’s great presidents, including the namesake of the IOP’s school, John F. Kennedy. Where did the magic go? Part of the answer, one suspects, was right there in Traverse City, where this politician, now midcareer, has retreated to live a simple American life. Buttigieg has to establish his normal-guy credentials because he is not one, and nowadays unabashed elitism is harder to pull off. JFK never had to do that: He was a rich kid, a priapic aristocrat, and the majesty of his presidency would have been diminished rather than enhanced by a sojourn in Middle America, shuttling kids to school and doing mental math about which store’s buns sold at the most favorable unit price. 

Buttigieg told me that he settled in Traverse City because his in-laws are “pretty key to our child-care equation,” and I am sure that is true. Whatever its advantages as a place to get free babysitting, Michigan is also a good place to position oneself for a presidential run, if your résumé is otherwise burdened with places like Harvard and Oxford. The move there, after four years in Washington and eight years as mayor of South Bend, drew sneers from cynics: The governorship and a Senate seat were opening up, and there was talk of Buttigieg’s running for one or the other. (He has since ruled them out.) Indiana is red enough to be unwinnable for a Democrat; Michigan is purple and offers four more electoral votes. When he leaves the state, it is often for carefully chosen definitely-not-campaign stops, in places like Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and La Crosse, Wisconsin.

For all of Buttigieg’s red-blooded-Michigander posturing, it is in some sense impossible for any person with the overweening ambition of a presidential candidate to be a normal guy who is authentically interested in Christmas wreaths, deals at the local bakery, and the pleasures of splitting wood for the firepit. “Right now I’m in the best of all worlds,” he said. “I’m well known enough that I could get into a restaurant at short notice. I’m not too well known to actually be able to sit there and eat.” He said that success, meaning even higher office, would entail “losing some of the best things about my life”—the peace, the time with the kids, the nice meal without judgment from passersby. 

If Buttigieg likes this tranquil existence so much—if he really values dad life—then the last thing he should do is what he clearly intends to do, which is blow it all up by running for president. “I actually think that any office but the presidency is one you can come back home from eventually,” he said. “I once went to a restaurant with Bill Clinton, and it was almost impossible just to eat: He had to greet every table.”

In previous decades, you could tell when a male politician had quit politics, because he’d grow a beard, like Al Gore. The unshaven Buttigieg, along with the bearded vice president, have ended that tell. So in Buttigieg’s case, the continued vitality of his ambition was detectable mostly in pauses. He never spoke more slowly, or sounded more rehearsed, than when I asked him about the issue he’ll be most harshly critiqued on if he runs: his silence during Biden’s cognitive decline. “We all saw what we saw: that he was old,” he said. “I never saw a decision that was different or worse because he was old,” and as long as the decision making was sound, Buttigieg had no duty to pull a senility alarm. Subtler hesitations intervened even in less tricky conversations. When he drove me around Traverse City, I asked where Gordie Howe, the hockey demigod who’d lived there in the 1990s, had his restaurant. I noticed Buttigieg tense up, as if unsure whether he might alienate a key demographic, Detroit Red Wings fans over the age of 65, by admitting that he had no idea what I was talking about.

Even the visit to the scoop shop was an exercise in crisis management, far beyond the usual family drama. When his kids melted down and started shrieking over the usual tantrum-inducing nonsense that sometimes sets off 4-year-olds, Buttigieg looked around nervously, gathered his family, and left the shop fast. I think a noncandidate might have let the kids wail a bit longer. But if these hissy fits made it onto TikTok, they might look like negligent parenting. And there go a few more votes. To live in this defensive posture is politically necessary, but it should not be mistaken for normal life.

Richard Ben Cramer, in his great campaign book What It Takes, wrote about the insane hubris that any plausible presidential contender has to have. To believe that you are the future president requires, he wrote, a “habit of triumph,” a long record of ambition and willingness to subordinate everything and everyone to its fulfillment. The book’s title is usually read to refer to the inner drive required to win. But Cramer also wrote about what this ambition takes from a man—the personal cost of running for office, and all the pain associated with being willing to “bend their lives and the lives of those dear to them to one hugely public roll of the dice.”

Buttigieg told me he liked his life in Traverse City, “and I would only put it on the line for really good reasons.” Those reasons come down to a paradoxical mix of humility and ambition. Buttigieg says that he will run only if he determines that his specific mixture of talents is irreplaceable. That means determining “what you can bring to the office that is different from all of the others,” he said, and that the difference he could make is “so compelling that it would be a mistake not to do it.” Given how clearly Buttigieg is considering running, one hears an edge of Trumpian I alone can fix it in this line, a sign of self-confidence several standard deviations above the norm.

This is another paradox of Buttigieg—that he is simultaneously the national-level Democrat most capable of speaking directly to the party’s West Wing–aficionado base, and the national-level Democrat whose background and personality are most alien to the experience of ordinary Americans. Compare him to Tim Walz. He and Harris were a doomed ticket, but even voters who disliked him knew his type. He was a high-school teacher, a homeowner, and a midwestern dad with the usual dad interests. Walz never seemed more animated than when a podcaster asked him to expound on the topic of residential rain gutters. (“It’s personal for me,” Walz said, with the tone of Liam Neeson in Taken.) He was not a preternaturally ambitious polyglot whose family business was Marxist social theory. 

In my day with Mayor Pete, he came to life most when he was at his nerdiest. He said he had recently resurrected his Norwegian, a language he learned for fun during his Chicago days. He said he was reading a Norwegian kid’s book with the twins, and was amused to learn that Brillebjørn, the main character, has lesbian moms.

Other instances of recreational nerding out abounded. When he caught a break from scrambling eggs for the kids, he showed me a bulky Soviet-era hand-cranked radio that he’d acquired in Afghanistan, and sat with me decoding its Cyrillic labels. “It doesn’t work anymore,” he said dryly, “and the last person who got a call on it probably hasn’t been around for a while.” In 2008, when he was a single guy with time on his hands, he used his frequent-flier points to go to Somaliland “for fun.” (He wrote about the experience in an International Herald Tribune op-ed.)

Buttigieg knows that pasties are eaten by hunters in the Upper Peninsula. But he acknowledges that his own upbringing did not involve any hunting trips up north. Every candidate hopes to be the guy you want to have a beer and talk football with. Buttigieg can do a very convincing impression of that guy, but deep down he is the candidate you want to sit down and have Somali camel stew with while you banter about Arabic verb forms. The median-voter theorem suggests that he should suppress that side of his personality. 

And that is what Buttigieg seems to be doing now: pausing a bizarre, hyperaccomplished life so he can collect the final punch on the card, which is the one that indicates you have spent time living like an ordinary human being. The catch, unfortunately for Buttigieg, is that many people distrust this sort of thing, just as they distrust political ambition itself. Even a good man with honorable civic intentions is caught in a bind: having to be normal without trying to be normal.

This weirdness is not lost on the Republicans, and President Trump in particular seems almost overloaded with ways to heap Buttigieg with scorn. First among them is the name, which seems to inspire Trump, whenever he pronounces it, to lapse into a strange reverie, as if he is paralyzed by choice over which aspect to mock: that it begins with butt, that it is foreign-looking, that it is quite simply fun to say. (He does not seem aware of the most amusing fact about the name, which is that in Maltese it means “father of chickens.”) He also mocks Buttigieg’s sexual orientation. “He drives to work on his bicycle with his, in all fairness, with his husband on the back,” Trump said last year.

The irony of this line of attack is that all of Buttigieg’s unusual personal traits—the linguistic talent, the Marxist father, the gay marriage—are paired with an almost painful ordinariness in his actual policy. The guiding principle of Buttigiegism seems to be that for every political question, there is an egghead somewhere who has the answer, and the job of the president is to find that egghead or to be him. So far, all attempts to associate Buttigieg with his Gramscian father have failed—if anything, Buttigieg seems to have engaged in an oedipal reversal of the Gramscian formula, rejecting radicalism in favor of precisely the kind of technocratic capitalism that Gramsci would have detested. 

This dynamic has left Buttigieg vulnerable to critique from both extremes, which accuse him of out-of-touch centrism, both politically and personally. From the left, he was maligned in his first presidential campaign as “Mayo Pete” for his bland whiteness, and for his perceived failure to fight for racial minorities and the poor. Randall, the professor in South Bend, told me Black residents came to think he was looking out for the interests of developers, and not theirs. “The word went out on the Black internet,” Randall said. Black voters approve of Buttigieg at a rate of about zero percent. 

One of the weirdest recent developments in sexual politics is that the noisiest complaints about Buttigieg’s sexuality have come from those on the left and right who accuse him of not being gay enough. This reversal is almost too bizarre to credit. In 2019, The New Republic ran (and then retracted, under fire) an article by Dale Peck, a gay literary critic, which said Buttigieg’s sole distinguishing characteristic was “what he does with his dick (and possibly his ass),” and argued that his ability to govern was compromised by his alleged abstention from enthusiastic sodomy as a younger man. Failure to experiment sexually “eats you up inside,” Peck wrote. “I want a man whose mind is on his job, not what could have been.” On the right, Tucker Carlson has repeatedly asserted that Buttigieg only pretends to be gay, and is in fact a straight man faking homosexuality for political clout. Carlson has said he wants to ask Buttigieg “very specific questions about gay sex and see if he can even answer.” 

The indecency of this extraordinary line of interrogation says more about the intrusive thoughts of Carlson and Peck than about Buttigieg. But it connects to the perception, not exclusively on the right, that Buttigieg is an unnatural candidate—not in the antique sense of homosexuality being a crime against nature, but in the new sense that he will deny his most basic instincts if he thinks doing so will further his political career.

This brings us back to what we might call the IOP problem: Buttigieg has punched his card, has followed all the prescriptions, has received every honors grade and service patch one can get by the age of 44. But it turns out that lots of people, and not just jealous Ivy Leaguers, hate this. They hate pretensions of expertise. They hate people who work to become what they are not—even when they work to become better people, or better presidents. “I’m like you,” Gavin Newsom told a crowd in Atlanta in February. “I’m no better than you. I’m a 960 SAT guy.” That score is well below average. The audience cheered. 

Buttigieg’s critics seem to fault him for the vaguest reasons, many of which come down to: he’s too perfect; he’s not authentic; he’s not a man of the people. It’s an odd line of attack. Is it possible to be too perfect? Is perfection a flaw? Social psychology has documented something known as the “pratfall effect”: the distrust of people deemed too perfect. It turns out that people like smart, charismatic types—but they really like smart, charismatic types who screw up now and then, and do not just ace every test and land every joke. This effect may also help explain the appeal of Trump, whose fans acknowledge that he is a flawed president, and whose flaws count in his favor.

This manner of politics, where flaws count more than virtues, has come to dominate. In some ways Buttigieg is a perfect candidate, and in some ways he feels like a candidate perfect for an era that has slipped away. He does not curse; he does not sleep with porn stars; he does not abandon his progeny or spouse; he does not resort to low blows. In other words, what year does he think it is—2008? It sometimes seems like the magic that young Peter thought was slipping away from politics in 2001 has vanished completely. The anti-idealism that has replaced it is even more nauseating than the idealism. 

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