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Democratic Primaries

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babylonsister

(170,928 posts)
Fri Mar 22, 2019, 09:37 AM Mar 2019

Twenty Things You Probably Didn't Know About Pete Buttigieg [View all]

I learned a few things, and this conservative source didn't diss him a bit.

Twenty Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Pete Buttigieg
By Jim Geraghty
March 22, 2019 6:30 AM


One: South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg’s father, Joseph Buttigieg, immigrated to the United States from Malta and was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1979. He was a professor of European literature who taught at New Mexico State and then Notre Dame. The elder Buttigieg was a fan of Manchester United soccer and easily transitioned to become a fan of Notre Dame football. Buttigieg’s mother, Anne Montgomery Buttigieg, was also a professor at Notre Dame for nearly three decades. Joseph Buttigieg passed away in January. Mayor Buttigieg now lives on the same block as his mother and says his mortgage payment on a “large old house facing the river” is $450.

Two: Buttigieg is the youngest candidate in the large Democratic field, born in 1982. He was a child or young man for events that might seem “not that long ago” to many older voters. He remembers an elementary-school teacher explaining that the maps and globes with the label “Soviet Union” were now obsolete. He was ten when Bill Clinton was elected president, a college freshman when George W. Bush was elected president, and a sophomore on 9/11. One of his first jobs out of college was doing research and press work for John Kerry’s presidential campaign; he turned down an offer to work for Barack Obama’s Senate campaign.

Three: In high school, Buttigieg was senior-class president, valedictorian, and president of the school’s chapter of Amnesty International. In his autobiography, Shortest Way Home, he describes his high-school gym teacher as objecting to the group’s focus on “Ay-rabs.” He won an essay contest sponsored by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library as part of the organization’s annual Profile in Courage Award. Buttigieg wrote an essay saluting the courage of then-congressman Bernie Sanders, declaring that the congressman’s “real impact has been a reaction to the cynical climate which threatens the effectiveness of the democratic system.” Invited to the JFK library, Buttigieg met Senator Ted Kennedy, and the senator offered him an internship.

His thoughts of running for office started quite early. In Shortest Way Home, Buttigieg writes of his high-school years, “I had begun to wonder what it would be like to be involved in public service directly, instead of reading or watching movies about it. Could political action be a calling, not just the stuff of dinner table talk?”

Four: Buttigieg was accepted to Harvard University and found that his dorm room had previously housed Ulysses Grant Jr., Cornel West, and Horatio Alger. He describes college life in his autobiography like something out of the X-Men: “It began to feel like the academy of X-Men: everyone had some concealed special power: Cate, on the second floor, could read books at four or five times the normal pace. Andrew, on the ground floor, could do a Rubik’s Cube from any starting point in about a minute. Steve, my roommate, was like a science-fiction telepath; he could dissect social interactions and predict with remarkable accuracy how relationships among other freshmen we knew would play out with time.”

Five: Buttigieg became the student president at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, a role described by The New Yorker as being “sought by the most ambitious of the exceptionally ambitious.” At the time the institute was headed by retired senator David Pryor — who is credited with being one of Bill Clinton’s key political mentors. Buttigieg thanks Pryor for providing “the political education we really needed.”

He was a board member of the Harvard College Democrats and protested the war in Iraq. He wrote a regular column for the Harvard Crimson, and in one mocked George W. Bush for his Ivy League elitism in poetry form:

more...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/pete-buttigieg-biography-views-democratic-presidential-candidate/

If I were to vote in a presidential
primary today, I would vote for:
Joe Biden
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