It’s Pete Buttigieg’s moment. Again. His combative performance at the most recent debate, coupled with the release of a few polls suggesting he’s entered the top tier of candidates in Iowa, have allowed him to reclaim the national spotlight for the first time since his entry into the race. He now appears to be a serious contender for the Democratic nomination. The Mayor Pete rising now is not the candidate who initially broke out with praise of the Green New Deal and decriminalizing illegal border crossings. In his place, we find something more conventional. “While he hasn’t pivoted 180 degrees on policy proposals,” The New York Times recently reported, “Mr. Buttigieg has gradually reinvented himself as more of a moderate.”

That reinvention was presaged by Buttigieg’s long-standing quest to reform the rhetoric of the Democratic Party, a cause Buttigieg took up in his formative years. In 2003, his senior year at Harvard University, he took the Democratic Party and its standard-bearer at the time, John Kerry, to task in columns for The Harvard Crimson. Timid and tired messaging, he argued in one, put Democrats at risk of “losing a critical, though unseen, fight—the struggle over the language of American politics.”

“The real challenge for the Democratic Party, and its presidential candidates in particular, is to figure out how to reverse the Right’s stranglehold on our political vocabulary,” he wrote. “I don’t have a quick solution handy, but I’m pretty sure that if the Dems don’t act fast to reclaim our language, they risk losing the word battle before they realize they’re fighting it.”

It has been said that Joe Biden’s supporters seem to want to pick up where the Democratic Party left off before President Trump’s election. Something similar can be said about the Buttigieg candidacy—the longer it goes on, the more it seems to reflect the concerns of a different political era. This may well be part of what endears him to his backers and donors from Wall Street and Silicon Valley. It also makes him one of the candidates least suited to our political moment.

Buttigieg’s command of political language and his ideas for rethinking the way we talk about weighty concepts were some of the early selling points for his campaign. In his campaign announcement speech in April, Buttigieg argued that the Democratic Party should reclaim the language of “freedom” and “security” from the right. This material was clever, but odd. Freedom and security have been less conceptually resonant in the Trump era than questions of citizenship, nationhood, personhood, and the rule of law.