Mayor Pete?

As a former protégé of Gary Hart, Martin O'Malley has cultivated a few protégés of his own, and they're all running for President in 2020.  Beto O'Rourke, whom O'Malley is backing, jumped in first, and his sole supporter in the 2016 presidential campaign from the House Democratic caucus, Eric Swalwell, is also running. And then there's Pete Buttgieg.

Currently the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Buttigieg - his spell-checker-unfriendly name is Maltese, as his father was an immigrant from Malta - is a veteran ofthe war in Afghanistan and a dynamic leader who has worked to revitalize his hometown and is known to be a thoughtful, philosophical politician.  He should be, as he was a Rhodes scholar.  That, his age (he's 37), his fluency in seven languages, and his sexual orientation - not only is he gay, he's shown affection to his husband in public have made him the hot Democratic presidential candidate as I type this.

Buttigieg has been upfront about his sexual orientation, explaining how he has found inner peace in both his marriage and his Episcopalian faith.  He is sincerely interested in how work defines a person's life and he sympathizes with the plight of the Midwestern worker who senses a lack of self-identity and self-worth after having lost a job.  Buttigieg hopes to define the dignity of work and the identity of the working class by urging such people to place their faith in a future where we work to restore the American dream and work together to move the country forward.  He cleverly announced his candidacy in the former Studebaker plant in South Bend, which I thought was a masterstroke.  I once opined on social media that you shouldn't automatically assume that white men who pine for the 1950s are racist, misogynistic jerks who want to go back to a time when women and people of color were not so dominant . . . because maybe they just miss Studebakers.  By announcing his candidacy in a former factory that hasn't produced a car since Studebaker went out of business in 1966, Buttgieg reminded us that we can't go back to these days and we can't re-create the elements of the past that we want to bring back.  Yes . . . we don't want to bring back institutionalized racism, but we can't bring back Studebaker cars or the economic aberration that allowed so many Americans working in factories like the Sutdebaker plant to prosper - that aberration being the industrial competition that was temporarily eliminated in other countries by the Second World War.  We need to start something new.

Buttigieg is counting on his own new-ness - new leadership, new generation, etc. - to get him the Democratic presidential nomination, and I'm so impressed by him that I wonder if O'Malley supported the wrong protégé by backing O'Rourke, who seems to have been forgotten.  There's just one thing - like O'Rourke, Buttigieg hasn't advanced any detailed policy proposals.  And as with O'Rourke, many party activists who want to see policy papers from every candidate are skeptical of Buttigieg.

Buttigieg has masterfully gone on the offensive with his sexual orientation, reconciling it with his faith in God and making his fellow Hoosier Mike Pence look like the homophobic twit he is, but as the trolling hecklers staging evangelical morality plays at Buttigieg rallies demonstrate, Mayor Pete still has his work cut out for him.  Meanwhile, some gays are actually saying he isn't gay enough . . . apparently because he presents himself as too clean-cut and too all-American (he's from Indiana, for crying out loud - what do you expect?)  Or maybe it's because he doesn't like Streisand.

None of this, however, makes me doubt his chances of winning the White House.  This does.  South Bend is a town of 101,166 people . . . more than Burlington, Vermont, where Bernie Sanders was mayor in the 1980s, but fewer than Newark, New Jersey, where Cory Booker was mayor from 2006 to 2013.  The idea of a guy who's practically a kid going from the mayoralty of South Bend to the Presidency is like the idea of a mail room foreman at a Fortune 500 company becoming chairman of the board.

Once again, Unn D. Sided is my pre-election Democratic favorite for the Presidency in 2020.  And if you think I'm going to settle on a candidate soon, I have a brand new Studebaker to sell you.