Pete Buttigieg, suddenly a hot Democratic ticket, draws a crowd in SF

Democratic presidential candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg at a Commonwealth Club of California event at Marines’ Memorial Club in San Francisco, Calif., on Thursday, March 28, 2019. Democratic presidential candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg at a Commonwealth Club of California event at Marines’ Memorial Club in San Francisco, Calif., on Thursday, March 28, 2019. Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Pete Buttigieg, suddenly a hot Democratic ticket, draws a crowd in SF 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

When Pete Buttigieg’s Democratic presidential campaign passed through San Francisco in February, he was greeted by a throng that consisted of pretty much me. Plus a radio outfit, a handful of donors and some techies curious about what he would say at the headquarters of the on-demand delivery company, Postmates.

The two most pressing questions then for the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., were: “Who is this guy?” And, “How do you pronounce Buttigieg?” (It’s BOOT-edge-edge.)

But Thursday night, Buttigieg packed a 300-seat room at the Marines’ Memorial Club for an onstage interview. Somehow over the past month, Democrats have figured out who Buttigieg is.

He’s “the hottest candidate in the Democratic presidential field,” CNN’s Chris Cillizza said the other day. “Don’t look now, but a (nother) skinny kid with a funny name is turning heads in the presidential race. In 2008, it was Barack Obama. In 2020, it’s Pete Buttigieg.”

Cillizza wasn’t the only D.C. pundit having an Obama flashback over Buttigieg.

“The only other time in twelve years that we heard from as many people about a guest was after @BarackObama appeared on Morning Joe,” tweeted “Morning Joe” Scarborough.

Mika and I have been overwhelmed by the reaction @PeteButtigieg got after being on the show. The only other time in twelve years that we heard from as many people about a guest was after @BarackObama appeared on Morning Joe. pic.twitter.com/PoEK4Obtul — Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) March 21, 2019

It’s a little early, however, for Buttigieg fever. At this point, it’s more like Buttigieg runny nose.

Buttigieg is starting to be noticed, but it could be that the masses are trying to figure out what the Beltway fuss is all about. More people searched for him on Google in the past week than searched for former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren. And nearly as many searched for him as for “Beto,” which is how people look for former Rep. Beto O’Rourke.

Key words: “searched for.” I searched for “Antonio Brown” several times in the past week, but I’m not voting for him for president.

Preview

Yes, Buttigieg is moving up in the polls. He’s gone from zero to 2.2 percent in the latest RealClearPolitics.com amalgamation of major polls — good for seventh place among confirmed and possible Democratic candidates. For perspective, Biden is first at 29 percent, followed by Sanders at 22 percent.

And Buttigieg is starting to raise grassroots money. His campaign says he has met the Democratic National Committee’s requirement to participate in its first two debates — the bar is receiving donations from 65,000 people in at least 20 states. That’s impressive for a mayor whose city has fewer people than Concord.

All of this attention has come organically, earned over months rather than minutes — in contrast to, say, O’Rourke, the subject of a Vanity Fair hagiography and nonstop cable news coverage.

“I’m a little surprised by the pace of it because it happened so swifty,” Buttigieg conceded Thursday.

It helps that Buttigieg has made the most of his brief turns in the national spotlight. He comes across as an everyman — he nearly always wears a white shirt, thin tie and no coat, like a guy dressed for his first job interview — and yet speaks with the intellectual gravitas of the Harvard/Oxford grad that he is. Often in complete paragraphs.

“He gives a straightforward answer to the question he’s asked,” said Darrin Brocca, who asked him one Thursday. “Most politicians don’t do that.”

While San Francisco resident Jenifer Shriver is also scoping out Warren, Harris and O’Rourke, she’s leaning toward Buttigieg “because he’s the freshest face out there. He’s just so well spoken and intelligent and sensible.”

He’s an Afghanistan war veteran who married his boyfriend three years ago. He’s managed to be elected twice in deep-red Indiana, though that’s not quite as unlikely as it might seem — South Bend is a reliable Democratic outpost. He’s a concert-level pianist, and he taught himself Norwegian so he could read the works of author Erlend Loe, after reading Loe’s novel, “Naïve. Super.”

He rarely raises his voice to the lectern-pounding volume that Sanders lives in, but he can fire off a decent zinger. During a discussion of how his Christian faith shapes him, he told CNN that his state’s former governor, Vice President Mike Pence, “stopped believing in Scripture when he started believing in Donald Trump.” He also called Pence the “cheerleader for the porn-star presidency.”

After hearing Buttigieg on Thursday, Wicky Mendoza said she finds his approach to be “like a soothing parent, who is thinking about all of the different things that could affect you. ... I’m from Texas, and Beto gets you all fired up on a guttural level. But this is different. He makes you feel good in a different way.”

Yet while he’s conversant and thoughtful on the issues, he hasn’t put forward his full platform yet. Part of that is because he’s officially still in the “exploratory” phase of his campaign. But mostly, he thinks that too often Democrats lose voters by talking first about policy minutiae.

Shortly before Buttigieg spoke Thursday, the president held a rally in Michigan where he said, “We’re opening up car plants in Michigan again for the first time in decades. ... And this has been happening pretty much since I’ve been president.” That is inaccurate. Fiat Chrysler is the only carmaker that plans to open a plant in Michigan, and that is one it planned to reopen before Trump was elected.

It is an illustration of how Buttigieg says Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan is “insulting” to voters, particularly in the industrial Midwest.

“There is no such thing as an honest politics that revolves around the word, ‘again,’ Buttigieg said Thursday. “The president is offering … to stop the clock and move backwards. It just doesn’t work that way.”

But he cautioned that Democrats shouldn’t make “this election all about him. A lot of voters are going to hear (the anti-Trump rhetoric) and say, ‘Who’s talking about me?’” he said. “I think that’s what happened in 2016, and it would be a shame if we allowed it to happen again.”

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli