Mayor Pete and the Order of the Kong: How Buttigieg's Harvard pals helped spur his rise in politics

[demmiblue]

A tired-looking Senator Ted Kennedy was nearing the end of a question-and-answer session with students at Harvard’s Institute of Politics when a young man in a white button-down shirt approached the microphone. It was January 2003, President George W. Bush was enjoying high approval ratings, and an ambitious college junior with his own political aspirations wanted to know whether Democrats would ever find their way out of the wilderness.

“Thank you, sir. My name’s Peter. I’m a student at the college,” said a 21-year-old Pete Buttigieg in a surprising baritone. “It feels like a lot of your colleagues have adopted a posture of being for whatever the Republicans are for, only less: The tax cuts just a smaller one, and the war, just maybe not quite as quick as the Republican war.”

As the Lion of the Senate appeared to snap to attention, Buttigieg asked whether the rest of the Democratic Party would ever “sort out what it thinks the meaning of opposition is.”

More than 15 years later, that skinny college junior with a bone to pick with the Democratic Party is putting forward his own vision for a liberal opposition as a presidential candidate — one that is deeply informed by his time in Cambridge. When Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., first broke through as a candidate during a CNN town hall in March, he pondered the future of American democracy and questioned the merits of the fixation among religious conservatives with sexuality in paragraph-length answers that his friends from his Harvard years recognized immediately as quintessential, undergraduate Pete.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2019/05/18/mayor-pete-and-order-kong-how-buttigieg-harvard-pals-helped-spur-his-rise-politics/mtwDwVYz0HMIgEZ01Apd6H/story.html

[Skidmore]

1. Really good article. nt

[KPN]

2. I'll second that. Well worth the time.

[Celerity]

3. the guy to Pete's right looks a wee bit like a young Bill Clinton

great article btw!