Yes, many of the people at both events told me, they can actually see this 37-year-old who probably couldn’t win his local House seat being the president. Of the United States. Like, giving the State of the Union and Oval Office addresses. Picking a Cabinet, responding to foreign terrorist attacks, negotiating with foreign leaders, introducing a budget. Or as Lucas Harrington, a 22-year-old student who got the mayor to sign his autobiography, put it to me, “I would imagine President Pete, because his name is going to be just as hard to pronounce if he wins.”

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Three months ago, Buttigieg and I sat for two hours at a restaurant in New York, and no one knew who he was. A month ago, he was still being laughed off as the guy with the weird last name. He was running less of a campaign than an amazingly aggressive press operation.

These days, he’s the sensation with the weird last name: “In the Era of the Impossible, this could be happening. But can anyone pronounce his last name?” Matt Drudge tweeted on Monday afternoon.

After Buttigieg was shoved into the history section of the bookstore to answer questions from the media crush, I reminded him of our lunch. He laughed, and started looking through what was behind him, holding up Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk. He asked whether I’d read it. Then he found former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s book, In the Shadow of Statues, about the history of racism in his city. Mostly to himself, he said how great it was.

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Admit it, I said to Buttigieg, when we sat down at a bagel shop three blocks away a little while later. This is crazy.

Buttigieg gave a chuckle, but not too much of a chuckle. “Hopefully it’s not completely crazy.”

By the time Buttigieg arrived at the bookstore, he’d spent close to an hour shaking hands and taking photos. At least 100 of the people who’d come hadn’t been able to see him around the obstacle of the bookshelves, but they’d stayed for the whole stump speech nonetheless. At one point on the street in Concord, what was supposed to be a quick photo to go with yet another profile became an almost paparazzi-level crush of cameras. He and his staff are just as surprised that his campaign has taken off like this, and that he got booked for Ellen before he finished hiring Iowa or New Hampshire directors. The plan was to build slowly, get articles written about him as an intriguing curiosity, hope for a breakout line in the first primary debate at the end of June, and then try to get a turn in the spotlight like this maybe at the end of the summer.

Instead, he’s spent the past few weeks already fielding questions about whether he is gay enough, whether he stands by the opioid-related consulting that McKinsey did while he worked in a completely different part of the business, and whether he should be made to answer for some of the things his late father, Joseph A. Buttigieg, an English professor at Notre Dame, wrote about Marxism.