For many decades of municipal history — amid the ribbon cuttings and council meetings and constituent complaints about trash pickup — generations of small-city mayors have caught their reflection in a City Hall bathroom mirror, taken stock of it all and concluded, consciously or not: That person should probably not be the next president of the United States.

Well.

Because such pessimism eluded one of them, Pete Buttigieg, the millennial former mayor of South Bend, Ind., who is now a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination, these past several months have inspired a fit of heady introspection for the rest.

It is not quite jealousy, though there is some of that. It is not exactly disbelief, particularly for those who have encountered Mr. Buttigieg, meticulous and striving, during national conferences or other official mayoral bonding exercises through the years.

Mostly, fellow mayors from the population-100,000-or-so set have landed on a kind of grudging respect for the brazenness of the gambit. They did not know that this sort of mega-promotion was available. And, in some cases, they are not entirely sure that it should be.