When
Joe Biden failed to crumble, there was no reason for Pete Buttigieg to exist. It’s still incredible that he got so farThe idea of Pete Buttigieg was so much better in the original Norwegian.The nation’s favorite small-town Indiana mayor looked and sounded so much like the part of a presidential candidate. His debate delivery was flawless, like his stubble. His intonation was measured, like his intelligence.All that was missing was a reason for being: a purpose, a mission. Something with more meaning than a talented youngish man who was on the rise. Something more meaningful than a preternatural prescience that the former vice-president would implode.When Joe Biden failed to do so, there was no reason for Pete Buttigieg.Mayor Pete, as he was branded, was more of a symptom than a cure: a sign of a party’s desperate need for a new generation of leaders and ideas, especially from the spiritual center of successful politics: the actual center.But having managed a small town of 102,000 souls, Pete’s best claim to becoming commander-in-chief was that he lived in something close to the center of the country. Geography is rarely destiny, especially if it involves a place called South Bend.Pete wanted
Washington to be “like our best-run communities” but that folksy, gauzy vision sounded both small and intangible in the fight to
fire a corrupt and racist president.Still, the Buttigieg campaign achieved several remarkable feats that initially seemed as unlikely as his last name.He broke through as the first openly gay candidate for president with a claim to the top tier. In fact he smashed that barrier for anyone who follows, including himself in any future presidential cycle.Unlike the candidate he clearly modeled himself on, Buttigieg had even less Washington experience than
Barack Obama when he ran for president as a freshman senator: which is to say, none at all. His ability to rise close to the top of the 2020 pack spoke volumes about his political talent and the team of staffers and consultants around him.Like Obama, Mayor Pete had one shot at winning the nomination and it started and ended in Iowa. Remarkably Buttigieg edged out a win there, but Iowa’s
Democratic party did its best to walk all over his win through a catastrophic case of vote-tallying incompetence.The lack of clarity about the Iowa caucuses effectively destroyed the rocket from South Bend while it was on the launchpad. It also probably destroyed the Iowa caucuses forever.It is traditional to gloss over the flaws of candidates when they finally reach the sad state of their own demise. But at this time, when the political world is promising such a bright future for Mayor Pete, it’s also worth remembering the bright future of Beto O’Rourke, which never came to pass.To understand Mayor Pete’s limitations, you need look no further than the last Democratic debate, staged in such chaos last week in South Carolina.When asked whether Mike Bloomberg’s embrace of stop-and-frisk policing was racist, Buttigieg said yes. He went on to explain, in nuanced and perfectly constructed sentences, how that judgement was not judgmental, and how he entirely understood something he could never fully understand.“I’m not here to score points,” he began, notching up the points. “I come at this with a great deal of humility, because we have had a lot of issues, especially when it comes to racial justice and policing in my own community.”Somehow that humility sounded less humble when he said it out loud.“And I come to this with some humility because I’m conscious of the fact that there are seven white people on this stage talking about racial justice,” he continued. “None of us – none of us have the experience, the lived experience of, for example, walking down the street, or in a mall, and feeling eyes on us, regarding us as dangerous, without knowing the first thing about us just because the color of our skin.”Without this experience of being African-American, Buttigieg still sounded so experienced. It was even more remarkable when he white-mansplained what it was like to be a woman of color.“None of us had the experience that black women have had that drives that maternal mortality gap that we are all rightly horrified by, of going into a doctor, and being less likely to have your description of being in pain believed because of your race,” he said, sounding both wonkish and wokish at the same time.“Since we don’t have the experience, the next best thing we can do,” he told the voters of South Carolina, “is actually listen to those who do.”He spoke so many words, so perfectly, as he told us all to listen to someone else.And so, in keeping with the flawless rise of his own campaign, Pete Buttigieg shuffled off this presidential stage with flawless timing and flawlessly emotive language. Just before Super Tuesday, so he could keep his vice-presidential ambitions alive.“We walk on in the knowledge that better leadership is possible,” he wrote to his supporters. “One day we will stand in the future we create, a future where every
American is empowered and everyone belongs.”Is it truly possible? Can we really walk on in the belief that we can one day stand in the future we create?For we might still be sitting, awed by the sight and sound of this tale, told by a Rhodes scholar, full of hope and rhetoric, signifying nothing.
* Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist