Pete Buttigieg gives a surprising answer to the first question he is invariably asked at each stop on his longshot presidential campaign:

Why does the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind. — population 102,000, smaller than Antioch — think he can be the leader of the free world?

Buttigieg’s answer: He’s got more experience than the current one.

“I’ve got more years of experience in government than the president,” Buttigieg said Monday in San Francisco, before adding with a smile, “That’s a low bar.”

The two-term mayor also has more years of executive experience than Vice President Mike Pence, his state’s former one-term governor. And the Navy reserve officer says he has “more military experience than anybody to walk in that office since George H.W. Bush.”

“I get that it’s a nontraditional resume for this sort of thing. People expect you to be marinated in Washington for many years,” Buttigieg said on the “It’s All Political” podcast.

Buttigieg (a Maltese name pronounced “BOOT-edge-edge”) has become an intriguing curiosity on the campaign trail for a couple of reasons, starting with how former President Barack Obama tagged him as an up-and-comer in the party.

He’s got a resume that appears to have been forged in Democratic headquarters’ central casting department: Harvard grad. Rhodes scholar. Millennial. Afghanistan war veteran. Married his boyfriend three years ago. Elected twice in a deep-red state.

He’s popped up on the political radar a few times in recent years, including when he ferried his former Harvard classmate and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg around South Bend and when he ran for Democratic National Committee chair in 2017.

He tells Democrats he has ideas for reversing the decline of manufacturing as “a Midwestern Millennial mayor.” That’s relevant, he said, “for a party that has lost touch with the interior of the country.”

The challenge for Buttigieg is that he’s unknown outside of political circles. He needs to attract either 1 percent of voters in selected polls or 65,000 unique donors to qualify to appear in Democratic Party-sanctioned debates that start in June, and he hasn’t hit either target yet.

For the most part, he’s been spending his time in Iowa and New Hampshire. But he came to San Francisco to court donors and make a lunchtime appearance at Postmates, a South of Market on-demand delivery company, where he impressed many of his fellow Millennials by answering questions about artificial intelligence and riffing on the privacy policy in Estonia.

The way he spoke and his presence “set off all the bells for me that said ‘leadership,’ ” said Cyan Banister, a San Francisco venture capitalist who was an early investor in SpaceX and Uber.

Buttigieg doesn’t lean as far left as many others in the Democratic presidential field. While he supports Medicare for All as a long-term goal, he believes a more achievable near-term solution is to offer consumers a public option to buy into Medicare coverage.

“People aren’t interested about Medicare for All because we’re excited about socialism. We’re excited about Medicare for All because it is more efficient,” Buttigieg said. “People say, ‘Who is going to pay for this?’ If you are not insured, you’re paying too much for health care. You’re paying for it right now in an incredibly inefficient system.”

Eventually, Buttigieg predicted, his Democratic rivals will coalesce around the same policies. Voters will choose the nominee based on “tone and the messenger.”

“One of the mistakes Democrats have made is that we lead with the policy before we talk about our values,” Buttigieg said. For now, he prefers to talks about values like “freedom” in a way that Republicans don’t.

“They aren’t talking about reproductive freedoms or the freedoms afforded by having universal health care,” Buttigieg said. “Freedoms that, frankly, if the progressive side doesn’t defend them, nobody will.”

He bristled when asked if his measured approach would stand up in a general election campaign against Trump.

“I grew up in Indiana and I’m gay. I’m comfortable dealing with bullies,” Buttigieg said. “I got a lot of practice dealing with rocket fire (in the military). I think I can handle being called silly names.”

Besides, Buttigieg said, that misses the point.

“We’ve got to have a message that makes sense and that recognizes that this president is going to come and go. So it can’t be all about him.”

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli