Hey Austin:

Beto O'Rourke has hired a campaign manager.

As they say, some personal news (officially this time):https://t.co/66NzLVtrs4

— Jen O'Malley Dillon (@jomalleydillon)March 25, 2019

He realized he couldn't DIY a presidential campaign.

A big get for@BetoORourke:@jomalleydillon tells me she’s going to take leave from her firm, move to El Paso and run his campaign.



She was one of most sought-after operatives of cycle and her hiring suggests Beto knows he can’t DIY a presidentialhttps://t.co/dy5nXdcYYr

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT)March 25, 2019

But it may already be too late.

Before Jen O'Malley Dillon could get to El Paso, somebody, somewhere was gulled into saying, Buttigieg, Buttigieg, Buttigieg, and an irrepressible spirit was released upon the land that is now haunting the rest of the Democratic field for president, but most especially, Beto, Beto, Beto.

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Butti — he calls himself "Mayor Pete," but that's way too corny and I like Butti — is clearly a Beto ripoff.

Or actually more of a refinement.

Buttigieg is beta-tested Beto: Yes, he's a young white male, but even younger than Beto, more compact, with fewer moving parts, calmer. He comes across as more thoughtful, his policy positions more thought out and, as a Navy Reserve veteran of Afghanistan now in his eighth year as mayor of South Bend, Indiana (population of just over 100,000, about the size of San Angelo — Brenda Gunter for President!), outweighing O'Rourke on the gravitas scale.

And, yeah, sure, borderland Beto is bilingual, but Middle America Buttigieg is octolingual.

O'Rourke's appeal is to the heart. Betomania is about losing your head in a kind of rapture. Buttimania is about using your head.

And yet, just when you think it's all too conventional and lacking a history-making edge, there's this — Buttigieg is married to a man, spared from full-on white male heterosexual privilege. He avoids being a cliche, or at any rate he is a fresher, groundbreaking cliche that innoculates him against being another straight white male who has had it all too good forall too long..

Better yet, it is something that when he talks about it reveals his deep religious faith.

Pete Buttigieg is not the only person of faith running for president in 2020, but as openly gay and openly Christian, he poses a special challenge to the heathenish president and his homophobic Christian Right supporters.https://t.co/u72tUu4QUA

— Ed Kilgore (@ed_kilgore)March 26, 2019

And, putting meat on the bones of O'Rourke's promise to bring Americans together, Buttigieg believes he can cross America's Chick-Fil-A divide.

Pete Buttigieg on Chick-Fil-A:



"I do not approve of their politics. I kind of approve of their chicken. Maybe if nothing else, I can build that bridge. Maybe I'll be in a position to broker that peace deal."

— Chelsea Janes (@chelsea_janes)March 26, 2019

Buttigieg (blue) is now beating Beto (red) in Google searchespic.twitter.com/OVFG3mF7Lk

— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini)March 27, 2019

What Buttigieg has figured out, or maybe has not figured out but is benefiting from nonetheless, is that he's just uncool enough to be cooler than cool.

In his deep still waters, he is Mr. Rogers, and if you haven't seen the documentary, that is high praise.

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On what would have been his 91st birthday, Sony Pictures has released an image of Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers in its upcoming film, 'A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.'https://t.co/rh0qY99dnT

— Esquire (@esquire)March 20, 2019

Buttigieg gonna crowd Beto out of his lanehttps://t.co/7KMItOFsc3

— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini)March 27, 2019

Perhttps://t.co/jHk0e1EAF0, Elizabeth Warren has gotten 5x more media coverage than Pete Buttigieg over the past 30 days, but Pete Buttigieg has gotten 1.3x more Google search traffic.pic.twitter.com/mEHVnHx52o

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538)March 25, 2019

“Beto is great and he knows how to work a crowd, but I didn’t take much away from what his plans are,. Whereas with Pete and everything I have heard him say, he specifically addresses what he would do and why.”#MayorPete#PeteForAmerica#PeteButtigieghttps://t.co/LHJLQUwj8v

— Diana (@shadesoftrue)March 27, 2019

Pete Buttigieg jumps to double digits in the latest Emerson poll of Iowa voters.pic.twitter.com/0ViqwbaoQ9

— Daniel Strauss (@DanielStrauss4)March 24, 2019

"11% of likely Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa said that they would pick Buttigieg as the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee in a recent Emerson Poll... Buttigieg got 0% support in the same...https://t.co/yRPV06pgbF

— Gay City (@GayCitySeattle)March 25, 2019

The Emerson poll showing Buttigieg going from 1 to 11 in a month made me wonder if anyone had risen this early so fast. The cases where this has happened are below (note that IA polling before 2000 was rare). Dean, Bachman, Cain and Trump all rose quickly.pic.twitter.com/T8O2JeaAEd

— dcg1114 (@dcg1114)March 25, 2019

(Note: He's not above standing on a chair.)

NATIONAL: Pete Buttigieg — the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who is also known by the nickname Mayor Pete — came in at third place in the Emerson Poll of which candidates in the already-crowded Democratic slate likely voters in Iowa would go for.



Leadi…https://t.co/IB9QIn0mfDpic.twitter.com/ZCf42C285L

— RoryVincent808 (@RoryVincent808)March 26, 2019

Have you heard his cnn town hall? I’ve watched it 3 timeshttps://t.co/T7hxl3YF6Y

— Steven (@QEDstevenbright)March 22, 2019

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O'Rourke knows what it's like to be lavished with positive press.

But that was then, during his Senate run. Now, as a presidential candidate, he is the object of jaundiced deconstruction.

From a March 22 Washington Post perspective piece by Elizabeth Spiers, chief executive of the Insurrection, a progressive digital messaging firm.

Beto O’Rourke is a walking, talking Generation X cliche

What happens when a whole bundle of stereotypes runs for president?

If a presidential candidate is the sum of his or her experiences, identity, policies and track record, then Beto O’Rourke looks like a pretty regular middle-aged white guy with slightly left-of-center policies, a respectable amount of experience in office, a nice (but not too nice) house, a lovely family and a photogenic dog. But so far, the early drafts of Brand Beto are less about who O’Rourke is now than how he was formed by his youthful interests and experiences. And those all tell one story: Beto O’Rourke is a very familiar kind of Generation X white dude.

O’Rourke was a skater (sort of); he was in a punk band called Foss; he was, we learned recently, part of a hacker collective called the Cult of the Dead Cow, where he ran a bulletin board called TacoLand. You know this type: Home decor dominated by vinyl. Wore eyeliner every day for three months in the mid-’90s. Still talks about that Joseph Campbell book that really made him think. I’ve never met O’Rourke, but I wouldn’t be surprised to read next that he once considered naming a pet or a child after Stephen Malkmus, the frontman for Pavement.

I don’t object to this, personally. I’m a Gen Xer, too — born in December 1976 — and I’ve been imprinted with many of the standard Xer cultural markers. I know that Powell Peralta is not a law firm; that in global thermonuclear war, the only winning move is not to play; that selling out is a moral failure and not a desirable state in which customers have purchased all your inventory. I think Fugazi is a reasonable name for a cat, and if I’m being ruthless in my self-interrogation, I have to admit that high school freshman me would have probably had a crush on high school senior Beto.

But O’Rourke so completely — and hilariously — embodies the stereotype of a white male Xer that if someone wrote him into a dystopian fantasy about a youthful 40-something ex-punk-rocker dropped into politics (reluctantly and with some conflictedness, of course) to save America from a selfish boomer narcissist who failed upward into the presidency despite a history of corruption and incompetency, the character would be way too on the nose.

Reading about O’Rourke’s past is like revisiting “Reality Bites ” or the 1991 Douglas Coupland novel that popularized the term “Generation X” in the first place — or the many disappointed magazine articles about our generation by people older than we were. We were thought to be apathetic slackers who would never turn into fully formed adults, because we were born during a period of American economic prosperity and raised by the supposedly self-absorbed Me Generation, which would invariably turn us into lazy, unmotivated nihilists.

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Since he declared that he was running for president, O’Rourke has spent a lot of time standing on things. Not because he needs to; he’s 6-foot-4, but he still often climbs atop furniture to talk to crowds. Or he climbs up and then perches kneeling to address a specific potential constituent, while emanating something akin to a cool camp counselor vibe that says: I’m here to listen to you and fix your problems. And I also maybe have a pot stash everyone knows about that I’ll consider sharing because you seem cool, and I know you won’t narc on me. The posture is a little subversive — diner counters are not for standing on! — but not too much so. O’Rourke isn’t taking a baseball bat to the counter, he’s just demonstrating that he’s not hemmed in by restrictive traditional notions of where people should stand. And because he’s charismatic and maybe a little emo, he can pull it off without seeming horribly awkward. It works for O’Rourke partly because it feels like a generational affect and thus of a piece with the rest of his persona.

But it also works for him because Gen X affectations don’t have much downside for straight white men. Having a problem with authority is more about being appealingly subversive than having experienced real oppression at the hands of people who abuse authority. It’s much easier to stick it to the man when, for all intents and purposes, you could be the man, pending a few alternate life choices. There are even some Xers, such as Elon Musk, who manage to enthusiastically exploit their authority while radiating a sense that they’re contravening it.

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Ultimately, O’Rourke plays against type by going into politics at all. In a way, running for office is the antithesis of a Gen X Thing to Do. It’s hard to distrust the state, even performatively, and then actively try to participate in it. And swaying the electorate isn’t an act of defiant isolated individualism; it’s a matter of building large coalitions around common values. It is the opposite of the obscure, exclusive experience Xers ostensibly value on the assumption that scarcity is indicative of quality. You cannot cultivate mystery and esoteric preferences to win; you have to be Taylor Swift. You need the numbers.

So far, O’Rourke’s early fundraising — a record $6.1 million in the first 24 hours, more than any other declared Democratic candidate — shows that whatever else comes, he does have the numbers. It’s an early indicator of something else Xers are supposed to hate: mass appeal.

On the other hand, here is some of what Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote in the Feb. 9 the New Yorker under the headline, Pete Buttigieg’s Quiet Rebellion:

Last week, Pete Buttigieg, the young mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who recently announced that he is exploring a Presidential candidacy, arrived in New York to meet the press. First up, on Thursday, was an interview on “CBS This Morning,” where the show’s hosts seemed slightly impatient, like college-admissions officers who had been asked to interview a benefactor’s son. Norah O’Donnell positioned her eyebrows skeptically. “You’re thirty-seven, you represent a town of a hundred and two thousand people—did I get that right? What qualifies you to be President of the United States?” Buttigieg, who has pale skin, thick brown hair, and a formal manner, gave a self-deprecating laugh. “I know that I’m the youngest person in this conversation, but I think that the experience of leading a city through a transformation is really relevant right now,” he said. “Things are changing tectonically in our country, and we can’t just keep doing what we’ve been doing. We can’t nibble around the edges of a system that no longer works.” John Dickerson pointed out that other Democratic candidates were proposing very big ideas—Medicare for All, the abolition of private health insurance—and asked, “What is your idea that is so big that nobody would mistake it for nibbling around the edges?” Buttigieg answered, “Well, first of all, we’ve got to repair our democracy. The Electoral College needs to go, because it’s made our society less and less democratic.” He went on in this vein, suggesting that electoral reform was essential, and promising that other policies, on security and health care, would follow. Viewers were left with the image of an impressive and fluent young politician, whose presence in the Presidential race, and on their screens, had never really been explained.

Beto O'Rourke campaigns in Spanish. But Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, speaks French, Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Arabic, Dari and Norwegian (although Norwegians say he has an Indiana accent).https://t.co/Fqw6QAErWc

— Dan Armstrong (@Fuertebrazos)March 27, 2019

Buttigieg, who attended Harvard, studied philosophy, politics, and economics (P.P.E.) at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and did a tour in Afghanistan as a naval reservist, can seem like an “old person’s idea of a young person,” as Michael Kinsley once said of Al Gore. Certainly, against the image of the millennial left, and of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Buttigieg appears to be a more prosaic political character—he has a habit of giving answers in numbered sequence, and he uses phrases like “pathway to peace.” But, in his own understated way, he is suggesting a sharp break with the past. If you thought in terms of the effects of public policy on millennials, he said, you began to see generational imbalances everywhere. The victims of school shootings suffered because of the gun liberties given to older Americans. Cutting taxes for the richest Americans meant that young people, inevitably, would have to pay the bill. Climate policy, he said, was the deepest example of the imbalance, but the Iraq War was perhaps the most tangible. “There’s this romantic idea that’s built up around war,” he said. “But the pragmatic view is there are tons of people of my generation who have lost their lives, lost their marriages, or lost their health as a consequence of being sent to wars which could have been avoided.” Then he quoted, happily, from “Lawrence of Arabia”: “The virtues of war are the virtues of young men—courage and hope for the future. The vices of peace are the vices of old men—mistrust and caution.”

Buttigieg's father died in late January.

From his obituary by Victoria St. Martin in the South Bend Tribune:

Joseph Buttigieg was a professor emeritus of English and retired director of the Hesburgh-Yusko Scholars Program at Notre Dame. He joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1980, according to a news release from the university.

He also was a fellow in Notre Dame's Nanovic Institute for European Studies and Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and director of the university's Stamps Scholars Program.

Joseph Buttigieg grew up on the Mediterranean island of Malta, earning bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Malta, a second bachelor's degree from Heythrop College in London and his doctorate from the State University of new York at Binghamton, according to Notre Dame.

From my little bit of research, Malta is an ancient and storied land where, it appears possible, the Renaissance is still going on, or at least was until pretty recently.

For example, according to the official Malta government site, the late Dr Anton Buttigieg (I don't know if he is any relation), not only served from 1976 to 1981 as the second president of Malta, he "also distinguished himself in the field of literature. During his undergraduate days he was one of the founder members of the University Students `Society for the Maltese Language.' He was a Member of the `Academy of the Maltese Language' and:

In 1971 he won First Prize for Poetry - "Malta Government".

In 1972 he won the "Guze' Muscat Azzopardi" prize for poetry.

In 1975 the "Circolo Culturale Rhegium Julii" of Reggio Calabria awarded him with a silver plaque for his poetry.

In 1977 he won the "International Prize of Mediterranean Culture for Poetry" awarded by the "Centro di Cultura Mediterranea" of Palermo.

In 1979 he was awarded First Prize and a Special Diploma for Poetry in the First Category by the Centro Culturale Artistico Letterario - Citta' di Brindisi.

In 1979 he won "First Prize" for the first volume of his auto-biography "Toni tal-Bahri" (Toni the Seaman's Son) in the "Malta Literary Award".

Back to the New Yorker profile of Mayor Pete.

For much of his life, Buttigieg has been giving those around him the impression of extreme promise. Both of his parents were professors at Notre Dame, and he grew up in South Bend, near the campus. His father, Joe, was a translator of the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci and a scholar of James Joyce. His mother, Anne Montgomery, is a linguist. At Harvard, Buttigieg was the student president of the Institute of Politics, a role sought by the most ambitious of the exceptionally ambitious, but he could also suggest a more inquisitive nature. His close friend Nathaniel Myers recalled that Buttigieg had become entranced by the Norwegian novel “Naïve. Super,” by Erlend Loe, taught himself the language to translate another work by the author, and then started periodically attending a Norwegian church in Chicago to keep up. He plays piano, and has sat in with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra and Ben Folds. He was elected mayor of South Bend, in 2011, when he was twenty-nine, and only came out in advance of his reëlection campaign, when he was thirty-three. His wedding, to Chasten Glezman, who was a Montessori middle-school teacher, was broadcast live online.

"Aside from Norwegian, he speaks French, Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Arabic and Dari..."

BOOT-EDGE-EDGE, WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO TURN ME ON?



BBC News - Pete Buttigieg: Why would an American learn Norwegian?https://t.co/q03ngqX5W4

— Hillary Starbright (@Starbright619)March 26, 2019

In 2015, Buttigieg gave a speech at Harvard, and David Axelrod, President Obama’s longtime chief strategist, was in the audience. The speech, Axelrod told me this week, was moving and thoughtful, and he noticed that, though Buttigieg had notes, he rarely consulted them. What struck him was a familiar kind of talent. “His story is an incredible story,” Axelrod said, “but more impressive than the story is the guy. At a time when people are aching for hope and a path forward that we can all walk, he is a relentlessly positive person.”

The following year, Frank Bruni wrote a column proposing Buttigieg as “the first gay President.” In an interview with David Remnick, Obama included Buttigieg on a short list of gifted rising Democrats. “If I told you he was anything other than a long shot, you’d hang up the phone,” Axelrod said, of the Presidential race, but he emphasized the possibility that, as he put it, lightning could strike. “The practical political point is it’s hard to see where he’s going in Indiana. If it doesn’t work out, if there’s a Democratic President looking for talent, I know Pete well enough to know he’s going to be high on the list, and higher for having run.” At the very least, Axelrod said, Buttigieg was likely to emerge from this as “an interesting voice from his generation.”

Part of the paradox of Buttigieg’s candidacy is that he has placed himself in a performative role, without the benefit of a performative personality. “He is reserved, and maybe that’s a hindrance,” Axelrod told me. Chasten Glezman, his husband, told a reporter that Buttigieg is “still coming out of some shells.” In our conversation, he seemed most practiced when talking about policy but most alive when discussing James Joyce. When I asked how he had made the decision to run for President, he brightened, and said that, though he wasn’t a Catholic, he made use of the “Ignatian process of discernment.” He pictured a world in which he became President—perhaps shy of using the word, he referred to it only as “the end state”—and then considered whether it gave him a feeling of “fulfillment or desolation.” Fulfillment, it turned out.

I had noticed that, in his interview on “CBS This Morning,” no one mentioned that Buttigieg could be the first gay President. I asked him whether he saw that as a measure of how quickly gay identity has become accepted. “Depends where you are,” he said, thoughtfully. “You quickly get plunged into this world where you’re supposed to represent your community,” but at that point he had little experience of the gay community. “Like, I will fight for the trans woman of color, but do I really know anything about her experience because I’m married to a dude?

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From Black women to Black LGBTQ millennials, Indiana Mayor@PeteButtigieg messages on economic opportunity & gun violence are resonating with black voters. He believes his gay identity exposed him to shared yet different experiences of the Black community.https://t.co/ErFMs71OjQ

— EBONY MAGAZINE (@EBONYMag)March 22, 2019

If Buttigieg won, he'd be the first openly gay major party candidate.



Polling data suggests that the country is **much** more open to a gay candidate than it has been in the recent past.



New piece + threadhttps://t.co/o1ugCvZf5Epic.twitter.com/3GHNGkPlvS

— David Byler (@databyler)March 26, 2019

From the New Yorker piece:

One reason that there are so many candidates for the Democratic nomination for President is that there is no longer much certainty about what qualifies a person for the role. The two Democratic phenomenons of 2018, Ocasio-Cortez and Beto O’Rourke, were a twentysomething activist and a congressman who emphasized his dissolute youth. The President is a former reality-show star. That Buttigieg can plausibly run for the Democratic nomination, as the thirty-seven-year-old mayor of a city that is roughly half the size of Yonkers, depends on this new uncertainty. But it also owes something, paradoxically, to his conventional political style and résumé, which can help persuade the Party’s elders that they are looking not at a revolution but at talent.

Just brutal: "But the mayor in question was not Bill de Blasio... It was Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Ind., population 102,245.



Both men are considering a presidential run but only one of their potential candidacies seems to be taken seriously."https://t.co/7xz4Dvc6mS

— Nolan Hicks (@ndhapple)March 25, 2019

A Norwegian outlet is here and asked@PeteButtigieg to speak the language. And he did!pic.twitter.com/rs4MmgIWQA

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel)March 23, 2019

Before it's over, a lot of Democrats may find themselves singing Day-O without quite knowing why.

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Buttigieg. Buttigieg. Buttigieg.