{"id":74461,"date":"2019-04-08T13:36:07","date_gmt":"2019-04-08T18:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/persian-heritage.com\/wordpress\/?p=74461"},"modified":"2019-04-08T13:36:07","modified_gmt":"2019-04-08T18:36:07","slug":"a-37-year-old-indiana-mayor-is-surging-in-the-democratic-presidential-sweepstakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/2019\/04\/08\/a-37-year-old-indiana-mayor-is-surging-in-the-democratic-presidential-sweepstakes\/","title":{"rendered":"A 37-Year-Old Indiana Mayor is Surging in the Democratic Presidential Sweepstakes"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"VOA – <\/span>Seems like just about no one can pronounce his name. But more and more people want to know about him. Four months ago, Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was a flat line on the political landscape outside of, well, Indiana. But after announcing a presidential exploratory committee in mid-January, he\u2019s everywhere: CNN. Vox. Stephen Colbert. Bill Maher. New York Times. Washington Post. Fox. And CNN again. While lacking in stature among a Democratic political field strewn with U.S. senators, House members, a former governor, and likely, a former vice president, Buttigieg boasts an impressive resume.<\/div>\n
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The son of an immigrant from Malta, Buttigieg attended Harvard College around the same time as Facebook founder and fellow millennial Mark Zuckerberg. He received a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, spent seven months in Afghanistan in the U.S. Navy Reserves as an intelligence analyst and driver and worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Company. Reportedly he speaks seven languages, some of them fluently, including Spanish and Norwegian.<\/p>\n

And in 2011, he was elected mayor of his hometown, South Bend, population 100,000.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are looking for something completely different,\u201d Buttigieg told HBO talk-show host Maher when discussing his wildfire popularity a few weeks ago. \u201cYou could argue that it doesn\u2019t get much different from [President Donald Trump] than a laid back, intellectual, young gay mayor from the Midwest.\u201d<\/p>\n

First openly-gay candidate for president<\/strong><\/p>\n

And while he would be the first openly gay candidate for president, recent polling shows that 70 percent of American voters said that wasn\u2019t really an issue for them in deciding who to lead the country.<\/p>\n

That has led Buttigieg to the No. 3 slot in two recent polls — behind former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders — that ask people whom they would vote for if the election were held today. A relatively inexperienced newcomer to national politics, he\u2019s bubbled up among a very large field of very experienced candidates very quickly.<\/p>\n

And before formally announcing his candidacy — although Buttigieg has tweeted followers to mark their calendars for April 14 — Buttigieg has raised $7 million so far and assured himself a spot in the Democratic presidential debates that begin in June. By comparison, Sanders raised $18.2 million over the first six weeks of his campaigning while Sen. Kamala Harris of California raised $12 million.<\/p>\n

“Pete Buttigieg and his husband [Chasten Glezman Buttigieg] actually have both been able to leverage Twitter and all sorts of social media to help them separate themselves from the rest of this slate of candidates, which is a lot of older folks, a lot of senators, and elected officials who have been around for a little while,\u201d said Leah Askarinam, reporter and political analyst for Inside Elections.<\/p>\n

In the checkboxes of qualifications for presidential candidate, Buttigieg seems to light up the words \u201cmillennial,\u201d \u201cwar in Afghanistan,\u201d \u201cHarvard\u201d and \u201cgay.\u201d Younger voters seem to delight in \u201cMayor Pete\u2019s\u201d candidacy as \u201clooking more like me\u201d than elder competitors. He talks about climate change and abolishing the electoral college. A devout Catholic, Buttigieg makes going to church sound philosophical and cool rather than predatory.<\/p>\n

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Trends well with all ages<\/strong><\/p>\n

He trends well with older voters, as well, His youthful exuberance and firm grasp of the issues is appealing not only to younger voters, but older Americans, too, who view him as a fresh breath of air or a brilliant grandson.<\/p>\n

But his lack of experience running anything more than a small Midwestern city is a persistent issue during interviews. Wildly popular Stephen Colbert of \u201cThe Late Show with Stephen Colbert,\u201d which garners 3.1 million viewers per episode seemed a bit skeptical about a young newcomer becoming leader of the free world.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot as big a leap as reality show to president,\u201d Colbert added, referring President Donald Trump\u2019s ascension from the star of his reality television show \u201cThe Apprentice\u201d to the White House. \u201cBut you have to admit, a big leap \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Jousting with Bill Maher<\/strong><\/p>\n

Talk-show host Bill Maher pushed Buttigieg about how well he could straddle issues that independents and undecided voters could get behind, saying Buttigieg\u2019s keyword issues to young voters — like transgender bathrooms — are off-putting or irrelevant to older voters. While the nation last year shifted from Baby Boomers being the largest voting block to Millennials taking that weight, the transition for dominance has not been complete: Despite increased voter turnout among Millennials in the 2018 midterm elections, more Boomers go to the polls than Millennials.<\/p>\n

Buttigieg\u2019s signature response is that unity will bring more voters back to the center, rather than the political polarization the country seems trapped in now. The coastal and metropolitan Democratic party can seem condescending to Midwesterners on the fence over national direction, he said, and that needs to change.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook, if a wealthy, coastal, liberal professional goes up to a guy pumping gas in South Bend, maybe wearing one of those [Make America Great Again] red hats and says, \u2018You know, you\u2019re voting against your economic interests.\u2019 You know what that guy is gonna say? He\u2019s gonna say, \u2018So are you.\u2019\u201d he told Maher.<\/p>\n

As his popularity and appeal surge from a post-industrialized city in the Midwest, as he typically describes South Bend, the question is often asked if Buttigieg has the wherewithal to upset Biden or Sanders in the Democratic primaries or unseat a Republican president in the general election.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s fair to say that he has earned the respect of people across the political spectrum. He\u2019s a can-do kind of guy,\u201d said dean of political science Dave Campbell at Notre Dame University in South Bend, who has met Buttigieg but is not part of his campaign or cause. \u201cHe\u2019s definitely the kind of candidate who can speak across a lot of divides.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Rocky start in politics<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cBut he hasn\u2019t had to face much Republican opposition,\u201d he said. \u201cSouth Bend is a blue dot in a very red sea.\u201d<\/p>\n

Buttigieg (whose name is pronounced boot-edge-edge) lost his bid for Indiana state treasurer in 2010. \u201cI got clobbered. I got my head handed to me,\u201d he chuckled to David Axelrod on Axelrod\u2019s University of Chicago Institute of Politics podcast. Using failure as the best lesson, he said, he ran and won the mayor\u2019s office in South Bend.<\/p>\n

And now, improbably, Buttigieg has his eyes set on the biggest political prize of all.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter Donald Trump won, we all pledged never to write off anybody again, and I\u2019m sticking to that,\u201d said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist. Buttigieg has \u201cintense support,\u201d especially on Twitter. \u201cI think he’s impressed people favorably.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut that’s very different than actually winning the nomination, because there are real risks to nominating him for president. And I think that’s obvious to Democrats,\u201d Sabato added.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, there’s an old saying: Democrats fall in love. Republicans fall in line. I’ve learned that if Democrats fall in love with a candidate — and they might well do that with Pete Buttigieg — they can ignore all of the warnings and put him forward anyway. Well, it’s perfectly possible,” he said. \u201cBut one would think given their desire to beat Donald Trump, that they’d be less inclined to gamble on someone who, after all, has only had one public position. And that’s mayor of the 299th sized city in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  VOA – Seems like just about no one can pronounce his name. But more and more people want to know about him. Four months ago, Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was a flat line on the political landscape outside of, well, Indiana. But after announcing a presidential exploratory committee in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["fa","en"],"languages":{"fa":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}