The Malta Independent on Sunday
‘A serious-minded kid:’ Pete
Michelle R Smith
It was a running joke in his US history class at Saint Joseph High School: Would Peter Buttigieg — the smartest kid in class, language whiz and devotee of John F. Kennedy — use his unusual last name in his eventual run for president of the United States? Or would he have a better shot of winning the voters of the future if he went by Montgomery, his middle name?
His father, Joseph, was an English professor who grew up in Malta. His mother was a linguist and army brat. They met while teaching in New Mexico, married and moved to South Bend in 1980. Peter was born two years later, and they eventually settled on a tree-lined street less than two miles from the elite Catholic university.
It was the late 1990s, Bill Clinton was in the White House, and a round-faced teenager in South Bend, Indiana, was viewed by many around him as an eventual successor. As early as grade school, Buttigieg exhibited an attention-grabbing combination of brains and curiosity, the sort of kid with a reputation. He would be named high school valedictorian, voted senior class president and chosen ‘Most Likely to be US President’. He sat at the adults table.
Now, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg — not Montgomery — is indeed running for the highest office in the land.
It is an audacious leap. No mayor has ever gone straight to the White House (let alone from a city of just over 100,000). No president has ever been so young (he will be 39 on Inauguration Day). And no commander in chief has ever been openly gay (or had a husband).
But people who have known Buttigieg since his Indiana boyhood say it all feels predictable.
Interviews with nearly two dozen people who knew him in his formative years paint a picture of a child with an extraordinary range of talent and ambition, cultivated by a tightknit family able to indulge his many interests. Friends and family say he worked to overcome an early shyness by throwing himself into challenges. All the while he felt a bit apart.
“It was always understood,” says Patrick Bayliss, a high school friend. “It was just kind of matter of fact that he was special and brilliant.”
Now Buttigieg’s intellect is at the core of his campaign narrative. Admirers often cite his intelligence when asked about his appeal, arguing it makes up for a shortage of experience.
But as he rises in early-caucus Iowa, Buttigieg’s self-confidence is exposing him to accusations that he is pretentious and entitled. When he declared Iowa was becoming a two-person race between Elizabeth Warren and him — dismissing a former vice president and several senators — Sen. Kamala Harris called him naïve. Sen. Amy Klobuchar has said the young mayor is benefiting from sexism — a woman with such a short resume would not be taken seriously. On Wednesday, she pointedly noted Buttigieg is a ‘local official’ who lost his only state-wide race.
Buttigieg does not argue much with the knocks, but does not seem bothered either, telling reporters during his New Hampshire bus trip this month: “I guess I’m comfortable doing things in a way that’s kind of out of order or unusual for my age and my experience.”
Before he was an accomplished pianist, a polyglot, a Harvard graduate and a Rhodes scholar, Buttigieg was the only child of college professors growing up in a bubble of academia in the Rust Belt.
On the campaign trail, he frequently invokes the hollowedout city of South Bend, the onetime home of the automaker Studebaker, which shut down two decades before he was born.
But Buttigieg grew up in another side of South Bend: the cluster of neighbourhoods around the University of Notre Dame. His parents had stable jobs there, and he was educated in private schools whiter and wealthier than the surrounding community.
Across the river and downtown, abandoned factories, boarded-up stores and empty lots plagued South Bend. Up the hill, it was just a walk to the Golden Dome, the halo at the centre of campus.
Peter — the name he went by before he became known as ‘Mayor Pete’ — was a curious and quiet toddler who learned to read at age two or three, his mother, Anne Montgomery, said in an interview.
He attended a
Montessori