It was yet another hot Saturday afternoon when yet another Democrat—South Bend’s “Mayor Pete”—technically visited Iowa City. Mayor Peter’s show was barely within the Iowa City limits, at a roadhouse where the Herbert Hoover Highway meets the Eisenhower Interstate System (I-80). With “The Crossroads of America” being Indiana’s state motto, I thought the advance team had done some serious homework and hoped Mayor Pete would maybe try to woo us with On the Road or Long Strange Trip jokes (me feeling my age), but feared he would more likely try to wow us with the Traveling Salesman Problem is NP-hard but has some usable heuristics and algorithms (him feeling his oats). Perhaps they were simply looking to get the commuter vote.
I did the several mile drive to the venue by myself as the Boys were elsewhere—for those worried, or just counting, don’t fret: they have seen more of these Strange Visitors from Another Planet than I have; even, god bless ‘em, rounding up to some of the unusual suspects more than once. The Boys are making the most of their Iowa birthright of oleaginous Caucus Candidates and State Fair Butter Cows, where both come with use-by dates but only the latter are kept cool enough not to spoil in public.
With cars lining the shoulders of the Hoover Highway, I had to park a good half-mile away. Of the several hundred vehicles I walked by, about 10-15 were Ford, GM, or Chrysler, and several of those apparently belonged to some men I passed who were vocally not there to listen to “another damn politician”.
Since almost everyone who was there to hear the damn politician had, of course, carpooled, the entry-line in the nicely preheated parking lot was a very long one. After we had baked evenly and sweated our way to the entrance, I noticed a poster advertising that night’s attraction: a Pink Floyd tribute show. Other local wall hangings promoted an arrestingly wide range of mutually enhancing pork sandwiches and mixed drinks.
The roadhouse (air-conditioned!) had two levels, the upper one essentially a balcony with seating; people were sardined into both (I was packed into the lower). The University was not in session, so the crowd was not especially young, but was mixed in age, if somewhat notably monochrome. Rising up behind the temporary platform on which Mayor Pete would hold forth was a permanent stage with two rows of seats where local and not-so-local arrangers were themselves arranged. US and state flags and a video screen decorated the wall behind these worthies, and they were flanked by an outsized sound system. Hanging from the ceiling above the speaker platform was, improbably, a large glass chandelier.
Mayor Pete’s introducers informed us that this venue was not the planned one but was rather a late substitution when the intended location was scratched for weather-related reasons. So much for the hope that the singularities of the roadhouse had been worked into his remarks.
Mayor Pete didn’t bound, or stride, or even really glad-hand his way in. Mayor Peter clearly doesn’t bound, stride, or, probably, glad-hand much. More like Jeeves, “he just streamed in” (though Jeeves might have raised an eyebrow at his entrance song, “High hopes” by Panic! At the Disco). He’s not a large man (basically my size); he wore a white shirt, open at the collar, with rolled up sleeves; he had brown slacks, brown shoes, and a darker brown belt; his watch was on his right wrist, and he held the microphone in his left, suggesting that he’s left-handed (again, like me—but also like POTUSes Obama, Clinton, GHW Bush, Reagan, and Ford; lefties notice such things). In his clothes, hair, face, and overall appearance he looks buffed—not in the current sense of having highly defined muscles, but in the more traditional one of being polished or made smooth and shiny.
Mayor Pete gave us about 10-15 minutes in his unaccompanied baritone followed by 20-25 more minutes in kind-of duets with us: he answered questions written out on cards ahead of time and drawn from a fishbowl. He began his solo by characterizing the present as “pretty much one of those blank pages in between chapters in the American story” that “roll around every now and then, every 30, 40, or 50 years; we had one at the dawn of the New Deal, we had one at the dawn of the Reagan era, and we’re in one now.” For those who collect academorabilia, this sounds like he’s sampling Stephen Skowronek’s account of the presidency.
His recitative took form with an extended riff on “values” not being the “property of the Republican Party”: Mayor Pete reglossed “freedom”, “patriotism”, “security”, “faith”, “family”, and “democracy” in ways that “pull you in a decidedly progressive direction. . . . [but] we’ve got a moment when we gotta find a new vocabulary to talk about these issues.” Pushing forward on his why and how to redo things with words, he offered us this: “I see industrial communities and rural communities, anyplace where young people sometimes grow up getting that message: that to succeed you gotta get out. I don’t remember anyone ever sitting me down and telling me that, it’s just the message I took on board . . . . Only gradually . . . you begin to realize you’re the product of a certain culture, and I found my way home . . . . We need to beat back the idea that the only way to connect with our part of the country is through resentment or nostalgia . . . that’s why there’s no such thing as a constructive or honest politics founded on the word ‘again’ [as in MAGA].” This last was not exactly a boffo applause line: no wild cheers and stomps came from the assembled; more like a brief puzzled pause followed by some tentative claps.
But if Mayor Pete wasn’t here quite singing with the choir, he may instead have been harmonizing with his late father. Joseph Buttigieg, immigrant from Malta and Professor of English at Notre Dame, was pretty much the English-speaking world’s leading Gramsci scholar. So when Mayor Pete talks to us about renovating words and meanings, about realizing you have your own culture, and about returning to your home, maybe he’s inhabiting what Professor Joe might have described as the role of organic intellectuals in resisting bourgeois cultural hegemony.
Well . . . that’s certainly quite a “maybe”. Maybe instead Mayor Pete really is Jeeves, and we are all his good-hearted Berties of very little brain: he’ll be ready and able to use his superior brain to solve all the endless problems we can’t cope with (unless we insist on doing something akin to wearing the blue suit with the faint red stripe rather than the brown one), all just a part of his sleekly tendered “service” (Mayor Pete of South Bend is also Lieutenant Buttigieg of the Navy Reserve, btw). As the motto of Groton—FDR’s school—puts it, cui servire est regnare (often translated ‘to serve is to rule/reign’).
Persuasive as these utterly inconsistent two ways of looking at a (semi-)Maltese rara avis undoubtedly are, neither casts much light on why Mayor Pete appeals to those who support him, a group that, while apparently not large in numbers, is willing and able to pony up with dollars.
Mayor Peter speaks with deliberate fluency—there’s nothing rushed or hesitant here—and with significant pauses in which he looks meaningfully out at or up into the audience. He can deliver, and, one imagines, turn a phrase: “The number one thing that guarantees that your government works for you and not the other way around is not your gun, it’s your vote.” “Districts are drawn so that politicians are picking their voters rather than voters picking their politicians.” “If dollars can outvote voters, then we are not a democracy.” “When I’m in church there’s a lot about taking care of the last, and of the lost, and of the least, not about thumping your chest, talking about how great you are.” Still, it’s not just his minilectures that account for Mayor Pete’s appeal; there’s also the class participation component.
Think of the best professor you (n)ever had. S/he’s fully at ease and at home in the subject and in the classroom; enthusiastic (but not dogmatic or proselytizing) about the subject and teaching it; elicits and welcomes questions and comments from the students, who may find the going either fascinating or difficult (perhaps both). This last is crucial. S/he looks at the student while listening, then repeats the comment or question, apparently so everyone hears it, but often recasting it while checking to make sure s/he’s got it right. That way any less than fully coherent or on target utterance is revealed to be in fact a real contribution, to which the professor provides an engaged and elaborating response that promotes further student talk.
Mayor Pete comes across as this person. We didn’t see Mayor Pete actually field questions. He fished for them in a bowl. But he then sought out the questioner by name, looked at him/her, thanked her/him for the question, and then repeated / recast it for the rest of us before engaging and elaborating. It’s also true that as a faculty-brat (yeah, he grew up in South Bend, but he’s from the tribe of professors, and, trust me, that matters), Mayor Pete has native speaker knowledge of this stuff.
And who does it speak to? Obviously, only people who have gone to college—but not nearly most of them. While almost all professors hope to be someone like this, overwhelmingly many of them have far too many classes and far too many classes that are far too large to be this professor often enough. So the relevant group is pretty small: people who’ve gone to colleges and universities quite unlike the ones most students attend.
But there’s more. Mayor Pete is, famously, a Rhodes Scholar, earning an Oxford degree. Rhodes Scholars, whatever else they may or may not be, are going to be talkers, more specifically, question-answerers. The application process has several high interview hurdles to clear, and at Oxford weekly tutorials are the game. Anyone getting through all this is what we can call a “first-class responder”: not rushing in (no fools they) but not shying away; never sounding off-balance or surprised; appearing neither fawning nor unyielding (because, as Hume instructs “disputes with men, pertinaciously obstinate in their principles, are, of all others, the most irksome”); and never, never, never being judged, in the British way, “brilliant, but unsound”. Mayor Pete talks about having “a glide-path” to universal health care, and that nicely characterizes the habitat of the first-class responder.
But there’s more more. Less famously, Mayor Pete was a McKinsey consultant for several years after Oxford. Twenty years ago in the New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann gave us the low-down on being newly McKinseyed, and there’s no reason to think it has changed. “[T]he McKinsey culture exactly replicates your run of experience up to that point. The first thing that happens . . . is that you go to yet another in your life’s progression of elite schools—a short-term training program where they sand off whatever rough edges are remaining in your self-presentation. . . .” More buffing, gliding, streaming, smoothing, so that resistance is futile. “The McKinsey method isn’t merely about business, it’s about making the chaos of the world yield itself to the intelligent and disciplined mind. . . . In truth, it is more a simulacrum of intellectual mastery than intellectual mastery itself, but what’s more important is how it feels.” And even more important still: how it plays. Just as the Great Professor resonates with a smallish group, the Benevolent Consultant will resonate with a tiny one. These are Mayor Pete’s people.
With his size, appearance, and manner, I thought Mayor Pete seemed like a wind-up doll for kids whose parents found it available in the Reader’s Catalog from the New York Review of Books. This is (a bit) unfair. During the question period, there were two that especially stood out. They were both from kids (not even teens). Mayor Pete was terrific answering them. The first one asked “What are you going to do about Putin?” He found her and talked to her, making the question about Russia and foreign policy more generally. He was simple and direct without at all talking down or condescending to her. He was obviously prepared for the subject, but he addressed himself, and his answer, to her, a kid, which he was not so likely ready for. The second one was something he was surely not prepared for at all, and he was even better because of it. He was asked “Do you have any advice about bullying?” There was a brief moment when he called out Trump and mentioned his own campaign—sadly, it drew some loud applause—but that was the only misstep. Otherwise, it was all about the kid and bullying, and the difficulties of the feelings involved, and how someone might deal with them and the situation. It was very unlike anything else in any of the candidate events I’ve been to: uncanned and, even, uncanny in how he could think through this and keep it real in real time. I was impressed . . . and convinced.
Convinced that he ought not to be POTUS. Anyone, as we’ve seen, can be that (well, as long as you aren’t female); and no one has any idea what characteristics might make for being a good POTUS. If you have some actual, nonfungible abilities, don’t waste them with trying to be POTUS. Moreover, that job will be filled, unlike some which require actual, nonfungible abilities. No, POTUS is not the job for Mayor Pete, nor the work that the US needs him to do. What is sorely needed, and what almost nobody could be, as the 2018 documentary Won’t You be my Neighbor? showed, is another Mr. Rogers. Mayor Pete could do it (he even plays piano), and in this case cui servire est sanare (‘to serve is to heal’).
Addendum: I saw Mayor Pete again, this time with the Boys, at a well-attended outdoor bash (free ice-cream!) on Labor Day here in Iowa City. In his remarks, Mayor Pete recounted the answers he gave at other events to questions from a twelve, a fourteen, and a ten year-old (about fear of losing insulin, about racial tensions/abuse in school, and about fear of school shootings). Kids are evidently wanting—needing—to express deeply worrying thoughts to an adult who seems appropriately sympathetic and noncondescending. These feelings are so powerful, so pressing, that kids openly—bravely—reveal them, and expose themselves, in public. Let’s just hope Mayor Pete and his people don’t myopically transmute these kids into a mere campaign trope.