Like everyone from progressive Democrats to ex-Republican Never-Trumpers, I'm queasy about the Democrats' ability to settle on a candidate who can dump Trump. Or to even settle on a candidate.



But I've identified the root of my own queasiness: The Democratic presidential field feels like family. And not in a good way. They feel like relatives, neighbors, or childhood authority figures who definitely have positive qualities, but whose negatives are gratingly familiar.



Sure, I'd vote for any of them (or for Siba the Westminster-winning Standard Poodle) over Trump. But I'd plant myself at the opposite end of the table at a family dinner to avoid talking to several of them. Wouldn't you?

Joe Biden is your weird grandfather who grew up in a different world, and has spent decades spouting bizarre ideas about race relations from another century. Yet somehow (wait for it:) some of his best friends are black people. Really.

Bernie Sanders is your irascible uncle, who's constantly yelling about the injustices of the class system. Or just injustices. Or just yelling. (If you're Jewish, you grew up with at least one uncle like Bernie.)

Pete Buttigieg is the good cousin your mom always held up as a role model. He's won a National Honor Society scholarship to Harvard, he's Rhodes Scholar material, and you could swear you saw him play an Indiana boy mayor on Parks and Recreation.

Amy Klobuchar is your weird maiden aunt who tells cringe-worthy jokes, can't stop talking about herself, and can't stop talking. She's constantly whining about how Cousin Pete isn't really as smart or capable as her own kids, if she'd ever had any.

Tom Steyer is your crazy rich neighbor – and amateur drag queen – who keeps crashing your family parties uninvited. (He paid off the caterers to let him in.) He sputters wild drunken rants about how Cousin Pete can't be trusted, because he plagiarized his Harvard admissions essay, or something like that.

Mike Bloomberg is your eccentric rich uncle from the East Coast, who's never exactly attended one of your family parties yet. He just sits out on the lawn counting his money, and waiting...and it's really creepy. Somehow, his presence causes dessert plates with more than 100 calories to disappear before you can eat them. (Apparently, he's paid off the caterers, too. But then he stops and frisks them, checking for cigarettes.)

Andrew Yang is the neighborhood smart kid your dad sometimes held up as a role model. He's a math whiz who got into M.I.T., but then kind of flamed out. Secretly, he wasn't really that good with math. E.g., he couldn't count votes. He also couldn't compute that a 13% Value Added Tax + state tax rates around 10% = Scandinavian levels of regressive taxation, in exchange for a flimsy U.S. welfare state. Basically, a deal that didn't add up for anyone.

Then there's Elizabeth Warren. She's your cool aunt, who cracks clever jokes and always brings you nice presents. (Like a free college education, and free health care that no one has to pay for.) Except, she's reverted to her original day job as an elementary-school teacher, and become a scold.

I take the state of Warren's campaign personally, because I've admired her for so long. Gosh shucks, I've already voted for her in one Presidential primary. (I wrote her in on my 2016 primary ballot.)

Warren used to be plain-spoken, warm, and spontaneous. In her Mario Savio lecture at UC Berkeley in 2010, she ditched her script to glow about having just gotten a phone call from her daughter, telling her she'd become a grandmother.

But as a presidential hopeful, Warren has been so on-message and disciplined that she sounds over-programmed. Her campaign has relentlessly scolded giant corporations, along with billionaires who don't pay their fair share.

Which is true, but overly simplified and off-base, in a way that 2010's Elizabeth Warren would have ripped apart. Her 2020 tack ignores relatively small financial and legal actors that cause outsized harm. Along with malicious officials, judges, and reactionary PACs and think tanks that aren't corporations at all.

In all, 2020's Elizabeth Warren has gotten stuck on a consistent theme of resentment, way overshadowing a grace note about shared opportunity. And resentment isn't selling so well in this long, strong (Obama) economic recovery, which is still floating high employment and stock values. Maybe blame her consultants – and this awful thing called the Senate, which rots out its members' ability to communicate with fellow humans.

Which brings me back to Cousin Pete, the one family member who hasn't overstayed his welcome with me. He has a résumé that one wag called manufactured in a Democratic think-tank laboratory. He fits the profile of the Dems who've actually managed to win the presidency in my lifetime: younger than his opponent, and a relative Washington outsider, with a hopeful message of ethical reconstruction.

As a union-friendly Democrat from a red state, he's learned to talk in moderate terms, beckoning for support from independents and future former Republicans. But many of his stances would be pretty transformative.

Buttigieg was the first Dem to revive the idea of restructuring the Supreme Court, to catch it up to the 21st Century. And he's the only major-party candidate to call for decriminalizing simple possession of all drugs. That's the proven Portuguese solution for reducing substance abuse and most of its associated harms. Think of how many Americans we could take out of the prison pipeline by erasing these victimless crimes.

Finally, unlike other recent Democratic presidents (Bill Clinton, Obama), Buttigieg seems to have actually learned something from his Ivy League and Oxford education. He's mentally agile beyond his résumé.

Around this date, I expected to have to put away my Warren button to support an electable moderate like Beto O'Rourke – remember Beto? – who could look and shimmy like Bobby Kennedy. Yet Buttigieg actually talks like Bobby Kennedy. He quotes quotable things from literature he's actually read.

Given the other options, I've been swept right into the enthusiasm that Pete generates. I feel like he could actually win this thing. And considering the terrifying prospect that Trumpski might be unbeatable this year – given the strong Obama economy, Russian interference, digital devilry, and flagrant voter suppression by Trumpski's state-level GOP cohorts – I suspect that Pete would at least lose well.

Win or lose, I see Cousin Pete capturing more electoral votes than any other Dem in this year's race. I admire Uncle Bernie for legitimizing important ideas (and I supported Bernie in the 2016 primaries). But I also lived through watching George McGovern win Massachusetts' 14 electoral votes and D.C.'s three, while Richard Nixon seized the other 49 states and a crushing landslide of 520 electoral votes. (Hell, I even ran Massachusetts phone banks for McGovern, when he made a second run in the 1984 primaries.)

Given the past decade's angry, reactionary whitelash – which the Koch Brothers' Tea Party handed Trump, to exploit and further inflame – I unfortunately see Bernie's general-election map looking far too much like McGovern's.

This is why I'm convinced we should give the kid the chance. Pete is moderate in tone, but inspiring. He's pragmatically progressive in ways that might actually accomplish some good things. He doesn't yell, sputter, or snark out of one side of his mouth. He doesn't throw binders at his staff. He doesn't whine. And I believe that under pressure, he won't cave.