But for Ms. Jones, Mr. Buttigieg’s triangulations are more banal, evidence less of a fraud than of a McKinsey-bred technocrat who might try on a policy for size and then take it off the moment it looks unflattering in the polls:

In Buttigieg, voters get a candidate who can define neoliberalism in a sentence, who will even say that he thinks it’s a negative force in the world. But he has never explained what alternative he offers. Generational change, in the mayor’s case, doesn’t mean much. Voters will just get a younger version of a Democratic Party they already know.

The electability question

If you’ve heard only one adjective applied to Mr. Buttigieg, it’s “smart.” A Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar who reportedly speaks eight languages, the mayor displays a facility with rhetoric and seriousness in demeanor that would doubtless take Aaron Sorkin several drafts to achieve.

His appeal, in aesthetic terms, is antithetical to President Trump’s. And part of his persona’s “magic,” according to the Times columnist David Brooks, is its potential to unify rather than further divide a deeply polarized country:

First, he is young and represents the rising generation, but he is also an older person’s idea of what a young person should be. … Second, he is gay and personifies the progress made by the L.G.B.T.Q. movement, but he doesn’t do so in a way that feels threatening or transgressive to social conservatives. … Third, he is a localist and a Washington outsider, but he carries no populist resentment and can easily speak the language of the coastal elite.

Jennifer Rubin, a columnist for The Washington Post, writes that his image as a “verbally adept” moderate will serve him well in the presidential race:

As he shows command of policy and of the debate stage, he is making the case for his viability in the primary. And he implicitly is demonstrating that his cool, deliberate style would be a huge asset against Trump in the general election.

Not everyone is so convinced. Jay Caspian Kang, a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine, contends that his allure may be smaller than it appears in the fun-house mirror of national political commentary, shaped largely as it is by white, educated, upper-middle-class tastes:

With his air of decency and grab bag of gifted-and-talented party tricks, he doesn’t so much represent the will of the Democratic electorate but rather the aspirations of its educated elite, maybe especially those who see a shrinking market for their erudition. This form of identity politics has its consequences.

One such consequence may be his anemic support among black voters, which currently hovers at 2 percent nationwide. (It’s 0 percent in South Carolina.) Last month, an internal campaign memo surfaced claiming that “being gay was a barrier” for him with black voters, a narrative that the Times columnist Charles Blow in turn criticized as racist.

In any case, as Janell Ross reports at NBC News, his struggle to connect with black voters most likely has a lot to do with his positions — Ms. Ross notes that support for a national health care system is far stronger among blacks than whites, for example — and with his résumé: Mr. Buttigieg has sparked outrage for how he handled the fatal police shooting of Eric Logan, a black man, in South Bend; for firing the city’s popular black police chief; and, just this month, for falsely claiming that prominent black South Carolinians had endorsed his anti-racism plan, which his website promoted with a stock photo of a Kenyan woman.

In The Nation, Dan Simon summed up the bifurcated quality of his candidacy: