Are Your Neighbors Ready for Mayor Pete? [View all]

[brooklynite]

Politico

DECORAH, Iowa—On a cold night in a small town, a man had a question for Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay candidate with a serious shot at the American presidency. How, he wanted to know, would Buttigieg deal with leaders of foreign countries where it’s still illegal to be gay? Buttigieg, dressed as he almost always is in brown shoes and blue slacks and a plain white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, stood in the center of a stage surrounded by more than a thousand people who had packed into the gymnasium of the high school. Buttigieg gripped the hand-held mic and took a few steps forward.

“Sooooo,” he said, drawing out the syllable and the suspense, “they’re going to have to get used to it.”

Those 10 words, tough, almost defiant, elicited a response unlike anything else I witnessed trailing the ascendant Buttigieg on a pair of boisterous recent campaign swings. The sound started with a release of anxious laughter, followed by a hitch of surprise, before giving way to clapping and whistling and shouts and cheers that got only louder as what he had said sank in. It took nearly 30 seconds for the noise to subside.

Unspoken in his answer—maybe unintended but nevertheless true—was that he wasn’t only talking about, or even to, bigoted heads of state in distant, backward lands. He just as easily could have been speaking about his fellow Americans. For months now, Buttigieg’s utterly unprecedented campaign has offered a practically explicit challenge to voters: Can they accept the totality of who he is—the pragmatic, two-term mayor of a midsize Midwestern city, the earnest nerd with a facility for language and degrees from Harvard and Oxford, the Navy Reserve lieutenant who did a seven-month stint in Afghanistan … and also the 37-year-old husband of a man who teaches Montessori middle school and with whom he hopes to parent children?

Up till now, Buttigieg’s youth and sexual orientation largely have been calling cards in the Democratic primary, distinguishing him in a field whose frontrunners are in their 70s and whose back-of-the-packers are too numerous for most people to keep track of. Given his comparatively low profile not long ago, Buttigieg has raised astonishing amounts of money, from donors of all kinds but from wealthy gay supporters, too, eager to back a figure who could, they believe, crack or outright shatter the glass closet. As his poll numbers have climbed, particularly in the crucial early states of Iowa and New Hampshire, he has joined the foremost quartet of 2020 Democrats. And with that rise has come a new, more pointed question, raised by voters and political consultants alike, and rooted in electoral history: Will the one thing that makes Buttigieg totally new in the annals of presidential politics also prevent him from becoming his party’s nominee?