Pete Buttigieg is public-spirited and decent
law of motion also helps predict America’s presidential succession. After Richard Nixon’s sleaze, voters picked a Georgian Sunday School teacher who promised never ever to lie to them. After eight years of interracial progress and cool intellectualism from Barack Obama, they chose Donald Trump. Whoever succeeds him is liable to be as different from the know-nothing New Yorker as it is possible to imagine. For a growing number of excited Democrats, this points to Pete Buttigieg.
American voters do not much like pointy-headed francophones. Yet in recompense Mr Buttigieg offers a convincing claim to public-spiritedness and decency. He quit a job with McKinsey to seek election in unglamorous South Bend—a city of 100,000 best known for a Studebaker car factory that closed half a century ago—and served as a naval reserve in Afghanistan. He is squeaky clean and prone to moralise, but not in a cloying way.
A tacit rebuke to Mr Trump’s illiberalism, this plays a contradictory role in the mayor’s campaign. It is in a sense impressively peripheral. That Mr Buttigieg can plausibly offer himself as the candidate of restoring honest Christian values, as Jimmy Carter did, shows how relaxed Americans have recently become about sexuality. Opinion polls suggest they are readier to vote for a gay candidate than an evangelical Christian one.
This is consistent with Mr Buttigieg’s broader argument that Democrats need to reclaim the traditional values which he espouses from the right. “Freedom does not belong to just one political party,” he said in his launch speech. A liberal scion of the heartland, he has long witnessed Democrats ignore that truth, delight themselves with socioeconomic policy , and lose. Presenting his marriage as an elusive example of liberalism fused with tradition looks like a promising alternative strategy.
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