He describes how he first imagined leading an “administration that ran on business principles without abandoning its public character.” Initially, he disdained the ceremonial tasks that filled a mayor’s schedule: the ribbon cuttings, holiday tributes and solemn remembrances. “Shaped by my consulting background, I arrived in office wanting to get concrete, measurable things done,” Buttigieg writes. Eventually, he would learn to embrace that part of the job, equating the simple act of representing a city to a kind of moral position. “The value was not in the cleverness of what I had to say but simply the fact of my being there,” he writes. “Introvert that I am, I even came to love a good parade.”

No sitting mayor has ever been elected president; it’s rare they even seek the office at all, much less from a jurisdiction as little as South Bend, the fourth-largest city in Indiana. Yet the smallness of the town — its flyover-country coordinates, familiar mostly via Notre Dame football on TV — lends it an allegorical credibility. “The Bend” could be anywhere, and that’s the point. In the telling of its most famous current resident, South Bend’s story became an accessible, replicable tale of a proud city that was in touch with its history and confident enough in its future that its mayor was not promising to make anything great again.

Betsy Hodges, a former mayor of Minneapolis and a friend and supporter of Buttigieg, points out that the current president makes a particularly rich foil for a small-town mayor’s story. “I think the Trump agenda and Trump demeanor have increased our capacity to dehumanize one another,” she told me. Social media, she added, has already accelerated this tendency to become detached and alienated from our communities and leaders. In this regard South Bend is small enough to model a civic compact, dramatizing how politicians and people and places should relate to one another. “A mayor’s main agenda is to never forget that a policy is at its core about people,” Hodges said.

This can work in both directions, naturally, and reality does tend to assert itself in unpleasant ways, as inevitably as potholes. “There is tremendous accountability that goes with being a mayor,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former campaign and White House aide to Barack Obama who is unaffiliated with any 2020 candidate. “Every turd tends to land on your doorstep. And everyone knows where your doorstep is.”

“This hurts,” Buttigieg told me at his home before heading out to the town hall to discuss Eric Logan. “This really hurts.” He seemed to be straining to convince me, acknowledging that he is not always “symptomatic” in exhibiting emotion. He got mixed reviews from theater-critic pundits who found his “performance” at previous Logan-related events to be lacking on the Bill Clinton scale of “I feel your pain” empathy-showing. This is not a new critique of Buttigieg, who has quite clearly contemplated the subject. “I think a lot of time when people are talking about what they want to see you do emotionally, what they really are asking is that they want you to make them feel a certain way.”

He looked momentarily excited, as if a small epiphany had just struck him. “A mayor is sometimes described as having a role of a pastor and a commander in chief all in one,” he told me. “Pastors aren’t always the most emotional, although interestingly it’s certainly an important part of black tradition, and maybe that’s part of why these things sometimes read differently across cultures, right?”