Pete Buttigieg is, in many ways, an ideal Democratic candidate for President. He is young, attractive, an inspiring speaker and very, very smart. His name, by the way, means chicken farmer in Maltese. He was an intelligence officer and a lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve, and was deployed to Afghanistan in 2014.
He went to Harvard, was a Rhodes Scholar, but afterwards chose to live in his native culturally conservative Indiana, where he is in his second term as mayor of South Bend. There, by the way, he has successfully led efforts to clean up and demolish blighted properties, and also demoted or fired police officials who were discovered engaging in illegal wiretaps.
He won his second term with more than 80 percent of the vote. Still, ten years ago it would have been hard to imagine a serious candidate for President who had never been elected to anything higher than mayor of a medium-sized city.
However, that was before the nation elected a President with no political or government experience whatsoever, no desire to unite the nation, and little knowledge of the full responsibility and symbolic meaning of the job and less interest in finding out.
Even on Election Day, nobody really thought Donald Trump was going to win; as late as 2007, I didn’t expect to see a Black president in my lifetime.
But are we ready for a gay one?
Buttigieg, as the world knows, is openly gay, and is in fact married to a 30-year-old junior high school drama and humanities teacher from Traverse City.
He is a devout Episcopalian, and if you wanted central casting to create the least threatening gay candidate America could imagine, it would probably be Mayor Pete.
According to a recent Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans now say they would be comfortable voting for a gay candidate for President. It’s safe to assume that most of the rest would be voting Republican, or at least for Donald Trump, in any event.
But is there a hidden anti-gay vote? I talked the other day to an elderly former labor union activist, who hated Republicans in general, especially Trump.
Yet he wasn’t at all thrilled about the idea of a gay candidate. Years ago, politicians talked of something called the “Bradley effect” when it came to black candidates. This came from a California governor’s race years ago in which voters seem to have told pollsters they were going to vote for a black candidate but voted for the white one instead.
Talk of the Bradley effect faded after President Obama was elected twice with pretty much the percentage of the vote the polls forecast. But could it be that some of those white blue-collar voters who gave Trump his upset victory would balk at someone gay?
Someone married to another man? You can imagine the kind of propaganda that the haters will spread. A bigger fear might be that some religious fanatics might think that violence was justified in saving Washington from becoming Sodom and Gomorrah.
I hope I’m exaggerating the obstacles. There’s also something powerfully appealing about having a young and dynamic leader. He presents quite a contrast with an out-of-shape President in his mid-seventies, and the two potential Democratic candidates leading the polls, both of whom would both be in their eighties long before their first term in office ended.
If he were to win, Buttigieg would be the youngest President in American history by more than three years; he would turn 39 the day after he was inaugurated.
There are those who say yes, well, someday America will be ready for a gay president.
But I’ve found that when the experts start saying something will happen someday, that usually means it’s about to happen now.
