The future of the Democratic Party? Obama names a small-town mayor
Pete Buttigieg is as surprised as anyone to be on the president’s lips – but his credentials speak for themselves
Days after the US election, with the baton he had stretched toward Hillary Clinton tumbling to the ground, President Barack Obama insisted that not all was lost for the Democratic Party.
A new leader would pick it up, he said, and lead the Democrats onward. In an interview with the New Yorker magazine, Mr Obama offered four contenders for the title that had once been his – the Future of the Democratic Party.
Two of them, Tim Kaine and Michael Bennett, are currently in the senate and a third, Kamala Harris, will soon join them. The fourth leader-inwaiting holds a more humble office: mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Pete Buttigieg – also a lieutenant in the naval reserves – said he was “as surprised as anybody else” to learn that his name had been on the tip of the president’s tongue. But while few may have heard of Mr Buttigieg outside South Bend, a blue-collar town of 101,000, Mr Obama did not select the name at random.
Mr Buttigieg, 34, is a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar who, even after five years in office, is one of the US’s youngest mayors.
He shared an international Mayor of the Year award in 2013 with New York’s Michael Bloomberg and was reelected last year with 80 per cent of the vote.
Amid the collective soul-searching after the election of Donald Trump, Mr Buttigieg has been floated as a dark horse candidate for chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In an interview with The Sunday
Telegraph in the wake of Mr Trump’s victory, he echoed the disappointments of Mr Obama and other Democrats, but added a stark personal note: “I could be sent to war by President Trump.”
Mr Buttigieg decided to join the military while campaigning for Mr Obama across rural Iowa counties during the 2008 primary elections.
“You’re in this tiny town and you’re knocking on doors and more than once somebody who looked to me like a child would come to the door and we’d get to talking and the kid would say that he’s on his way to basic [training], and I would know that meant he was on his way to Iraq sooner or later,” he recalled.
“And I thought, ‘how many people that I went to college with wound up in the military?’ And I could count it on one hand.”
That the path from Harvard to Oxford to the Navy seemed so unorthodox ultimately convinced Mr Buttigieg that he should pursue it.
“Military service used to be something that we had in common,” he said. “It’s where people like a young John F Kennedy would meet farm kids and would work side by side with African Americans, maybe for the first time in their lives.”
Mr Buttigieg joined the Naval reserves in 2009. Five years later, midway through his first term and fresh off his “mayor of the year” award he handed over his responsibilities to a deputy and deployed to Afghanistan.
Most of the officers Lieutenant Buttigieg ferried between Bagram airbase and Kabul neither knew nor cared that there was a “rising star” in their midst. “They wanted to know if I read the Intel brief last night about where the IEDs might be and if I knew how to handle my weapon,” he said. “If anyone was looking at our vehicle with bad intent I don’t think they gave a s--- what my day job was either.”
After returning from Afghanistan and ahead of his re-election, Mr Buttigieg came out as gay in an essay printed in the local newspaper. The announcement garnered some national attention – a New York Times column in June carried the headline, “The first gay president?” – but in a conservative state such as Indiana, it carried political risk.
Mr Buttigieg said he made the statement in part so that he could appear in public with his partner and not cause people to “wonder if I was trying to hide something”.
It’s clear in speaking to him that he would much prefer to discuss street paving projects, but he does express pride at having expanded his margin of victory after coming out. Apart from some “ugliness” online, he found that most were willing to judge him on how he did his job and not “who I’m going home to”. He added: “If anything, I think my story might help illustrate why categories aren’t as important as we think. I’m a churchgoing, gay, millennial, Red State mayor. I’m also a left-handed Maltese American. I also spent Thanksgiving in a deer blind with my partner’s father. So am I supposed to be a Republican or a Democrat?”
Mr Buttigieg believes that sentiment carries over into politics and his own party has become too concerned with demographics and geography rather than “the lived experience of real people”. One of his primary criticisms of Mrs Clinton’s campaign – that after “years or even decades” seeking the presidency the White House seemed to “become an end in itself ” – is also an argument for fresh faces.
But he is quick to note that he still has three years on his term in South Bend. “The attention is very flattering, but we still have potholes,” he said. “I’m in no hurry to be famous.”
He added: “Time is on my side, and the one thing that is abundantly obvious to me as I think about where everything is headed is that if I do a good job as mayor the future will look better for the city and also for me.”
The day after the election, while Mr Obama offered assurances that the world would continue to turn, Mr Buttigieg was trying to help 30 “shellshocked” college Democrats at Notre Dame university on the outskirts of South Bend. “There was shock and there were tears,” he said, “but it didn’t take long for the conversation to turn to, ‘OK, what’s next?’ ” If Mr Obama is right, the answer just may be Mr Buttigieg.