I want to show you two images.

These are pitch contours — visual representations of what’s called the f0, or fundamental frequency, of an utterance — the melodic pitch. I made them in Praat.

The top image is Barack Obama, the night he won the 2008 Iowa caucus, saying “You have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do.”

The bottom image is Pete Buttigieg, the night of the 2020 Iowa caucus, saying “We weren’t well known, but we had a new idea.”

Look at the tail end of each of these phrases — see that sharp descent? That’s unusual in the everyday speech of most standard American English speakers. For comparison, here’s my roommate, a white male, reading the same phrase as Buttigieg:

This pitch contour is more typical of everyday speech: the general shape of both “we weren’t well known” and “but we had a new idea” is a quick rise, followed by a gradual descent.

The Obama and Buttigieg contours, obviously, are not identical — Buttigieg has a little more variability through the middle of the phrase — and looking at longer sections of each of these speeches, that difference also holds. Obama uses this shape more consistently. But it’s not an anomaly in Buttigieg’s speech, either. Here he is saying “…would start on January 21, 2021,” in that same speech:

Here he is saying “…in spite of every trampled norm and every poisonous tweet”:

This is highly anecdotal, and there are, of course, many variables at play any time you look at someone’s speech in a particular context. The big one here is that this isn’t everyday speech, but a specific register for a context most people never find themselves in. Still — also anecdotally — this isn’t something you hear from any of the other current candidates. Nor, when we look at the actual content of the speech, is it really possible to imagine any of the other candidates saying anything similar:

What a night! Because tonight, an improbable hope became an undeniable reality. So we don’t know all the results — but. We know. By the time it’s all said and done, Iowa, you have shocked the nation. Because, by all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious! You know, one year ago, it was in the deep freeze of an Iowa January where we began this unlikely journey to win the American presidency. We weren’t well known, but we had a new idea. The idea that at this moment, when Washington has never felt further from our everyday lives, a middle-class mayor from the American Midwest could carry the voices of the American people all the way to the American capital and make sure they’re actually heard.

If political speeches are a distinct linguistic register, what Buttigieg is doing here is a kind of sub-register we might call “inspirational speech.” It’s got a lofty, literary feel; look at the tidy parallelism between “improbable hope” and “undeniable reality,” and the triple repetition of “American” in the last sentence. Look at the rhythmic descriptiveness of the phrase “the deep freeze of an Iowa January” — it sounds straight out of a poem, not a speech where a centrist Democrat declares kind-of victory in a caucus that didn’t actually have a result.

You can, on occasion, catch other candidates using this kind of language, usually at climactic moments. Elizabeth Warren switches to a rhythmic, emphatic tone right before she announces her candidacy, saying:

This is the fight of our lives. A fight to build an America where dreams are possible — an America that works for everyone.

But no one else, as far as I can tell, does it nearly as consistently as Buttigieg, nor, crucially, does anyone else use the particular Obama-like prosodic pattern I showed above, at least not often enough to be noticeable.

It seems fairly clear to me — and, I would hope, to anyone who pays much attention to American politics — that stylistically, Buttigieg has too much in common with Obama for any of it to be a coincidence. You can hear it in his speech, and you can also see it in the way he’s been covered by the media; he’s “thoughtful” and “bookish,” has a “calm temperament.” GQ literally ran a profile of him called “The Audacity of Pete Buttigieg.”

The truth value of all those descriptors is beside the point here. I have no doubt that Buttigieg is bookish and calm. He’s clearly intelligent, as most Rhodes scholars are.

The point is this: Buttigieg is a politician who represents at best the same bland centrism his party has been wallowing in for the last 30 years, and at worst nothing at all, and he is straight-up aping Obama’s style, literally note for note, in an effort to appear to be more than that. It’s the aesthetic and rhetorical equivalent of Buttigieg taking the phrase “Medicare for all,” something that has come to be seen as broadly symbolic of progressive politics, and adding a little tiny “…who want it” at the end.

What makes this even more annoying is that Buttigieg isn’t doing this imitation very well. He uses Obama-like wording and syntax, but it’s shot through with clunkers. The repetition of “instead of____” here builds a nice rhythm, but just as soon as it gets started, he cuts it off — then ends with a phrase that feels utterly out of place:

We saw that Americans were ready to come together, but our politics were not. And to seize this moment, we needed a new path forward. A path that welcomed people instead of pushing them away. Brought them together instead of driving them apart, because this is our best and maybe our last shot. We knew that with this American majority, we are on the cusp of changing the game for ordinary Americans…

Going back to the excerpt I quoted above, look at the sentence with the triple repetition of “American” — this strikes me as a very Obama-like technique, but Buttigieg lands the sentence with an absolute thud, unnecessarily tacking on “and make sure they’re actually heard.”

These are all personal stylistic hangups, but I would also argue that what Buttigieg is doing isn’t just annoying, but appropriative. That he, a white guy, is imitating the style of the first black president is one thing — but we also need to consider the roots of Obama’s rhetorical style.

As Michael Eric Dyson wrote in 2009, Obama’s style is rooted in an African-American rhetorical tradition that finds one expression in the black church. This is a highly complex, nuanced style that is basically unknown and unappreciated by outsiders[1]. Dyson writes:

In 2007, Senator Joe Biden made his gaffe about Obama being “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”. Behind his praise was an assumption of the vices of black speech, a suspicion of its ability to be eloquent or analytical. But black speech at its best proves style is not a substitute, but a vehicle, for substance.

This, of course, is exactly what Buttigieg does when he copies Obama’s speaking style — more on that in a moment. But now, I would like to show you one more pitch contour. This is a moment from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech[2]:

You hear this fairly constantly in Dr. King’s speech. It gives it the chant- or prayer-like quality that is one of its defining prosodic characteristics — but, obviously, this is just one aspect of a rhetorical style he employed to deliver incredibly powerful, masterfully written speeches.

Obviously, I don’t know whether Obama consciously imitated this pitch contour, or if he did so unconsciously, or if it’s a prosodic feature belonging to the African-American tradition of public speech more generally. What I do know is that Obama, a black man who attended a black church for many years before he entered national politics, both can claim to be licensed to use features of that style and — to refer back to Dyson’s article — knows its structural nuances and can skillfully employ them for both black and non-black audiences.

Meanwhile, Buttigieg has taken a series of surface-level features — the pitch contour, the phrasing, the general feel — thinking they represent not a rich rhetorical tradition with deep historical roots, but vague notions of “hope” and “change” and “unity.” This is practically the definition of cultural appropriation.

Buttigieg, in short, sees what Obama did in 2008 as a kind of magic trick, which can be repeated by anyone who owns the right shirt and knows all the steps. He sees it as a grift or a swindle. It wasn’t, in his imagining, the candidate or his ideas who were special, but the messaging around the candidate. This says something about what he thinks of Obama, but what bodes worse for his future in a hypothetical general election is that it reveals what he thinks of the American voter. He thinks, to be blunt, that they are rather stupid.

[1] See, for instance, the way the media found a video clip of Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, saying “god damn America” and played it on loop, cut out of context from what was actually a masterful piece of oratory.

[2] From Shih, Chilin & Kochanski, Greg. (2002). Prosody Control for Speaking and Singing Styles.