Chicken wings were distributed. Someone cracked open a White Claw hard seltzer. As we headed over the White Mountains, a young CNN reporter tentatively referred to the healing that the candidate said he has been seeing under way in the country. Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten Buttigieg, a thirty-year-old schoolteacher, comes from a conservative Michigan family that struggled at first with Chasten’s sexuality. But now, Buttigieg had been saying on the stump, Chasten’s parents had embraced the couple, and the candidate planned to go deer-hunting on Thanksgiving morning with his father-in-law. “Have you spoken to Chasten’s brother lately?” the reporter asked. He was referring to Rhyan Glezman, a born-again Christian pastor who has appeared on Laura Ingraham’s show, and who told the Washington Post, “I just don’t support the gay lifestyle.” Would he be coming to Thanksgiving dinner?

Many politicians, when asked a delicate question, pause, as they weigh what they want to say, and the sympathies their answer might provoke, and then the antagonisms. “Well . . . ,” they begin, and then they inhale, and we wait. “Buffering,” the MSNBC host Chris Hayes recently called it, referring to Obama, who does it often. Buttigieg did it now. Eventually, he said, “I think that part of my Thanksgiving will stay off the record.” The bus went quiet, and he sat there a little stiffly, no longer so pure an embodiment of the yearning for reconciliation.

The central parable of the modern Democratic Party is of the young prodigy who returns home to a scene of decline. It is Bill Clinton, from “a place called Hope,” in Arkansas. The tale gets told even when the facts don’t exactly fit—when the politician is Cory Booker, for example, who has supplanted his middle-class upbringing in the New Jersey suburbs with his decades in Newark. One of the first ads that the Obama campaign released in Iowa in 2007 featured the Harvard constitutional-law professor Laurence Tribe, praising his former student’s decision to settle in Chicago. “It was inspiring, absolutely inspiring, to see someone as brilliant as Barack Obama, as successful, someone who could’ve written his ticket on Wall Street, take all of the talent and all of the learning and decide to devote it to the community and to making people’s lives better,” Tribe said. The parable is about selflessness, but it isn’t just that. The country is politically divided, between the cities and the countryside, and the coasts and the heartland, in ways that, because of the distribution of electoral power, have mostly benefitted Republicans. Hence the desire for the liberal prodigy, and hence the unusual expectations on him (so far, he has almost always been male): that, having returned to a struggling place, he could learn to express the sensations of both sides, ambition and loss.

Pete Buttigieg was born in South Bend in 1982, the son of two Notre Dame professors, Joseph Buttigieg, a Maltese immigrant and a scholar and translator of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci; and Anne Montgomery, an Indiana native and a linguist. Buttigieg notes in his elegant campaign memoir, “Shortest Way Home,” that the central trauma of South Bend, the closure of the Studebaker plant—which resulted in the loss of seven thousand jobs—occurred in the sixties, decades before he was born. “Growing up in any place with a lost golden age, you absorb its legacy in fragments, hearing once-great names—Oliver, Morris, Bendix, Studebaker—without being able to match them to anything living,” he writes. “You take them in at first without comprehension, like the names of the saints.” His family stayed in “South Bend proper,” near Notre Dame, even as many white families moved to the suburbs, and he was intensely aware of the deterioration of downtown: “You no longer went to get your first Communion suit from Gilbert’s or Robertson’s downtown anymore, you went instead to J.C. Penney at the mall in nearby Mishawaka.” De-industrialization had more severe effects in South Bend than the occasional trip to Mishawaka—in 2011, black poverty spiked to fifty-three per cent—but Buttigieg says little in the book about the African-American experience. He recently acknowledged that, as mayor, he was “slow to realize” that, in part because of white flight, the public schools in his county were effectively segregated.

In 2004, Buttigieg graduated from Harvard, where he was the student president of the Institute of Politics, a nonpartisan center founded in honor of John F. Kennedy. For a young political hopeful, it was a heady but circumscribed time—Democrats seemed desperately in need of big ideas, but the center of the country was still understood to be pretty conservative. Buttigieg started a group with some college friends, the Democratic Renaissance Project, whose members read up on John Dewey, Louis Brandeis, and other liberal intellectual icons, and tried to imagine how Democrats might reclaim the initiative. K. Sabeel Rahman, a member of the Renaissance Project who is now a professor at Brooklyn Law School and the president of the liberal think tank Demos, told me, “There seemed to be all these crises—the Iraq War, the Bush tax cuts, the sanctioning of torture—and yet it felt like conservative ideas were ascendant and progressive ones kept losing, in part because we kept moderating ourselves and stayed within the bounds of a generally conservative world view.” Obama’s election in 2008 provoked hope and then some anxiety in Buttigieg’s circle. Rahman said, “There was a sense that the infrastructure of progressive ideas was not set up yet—that Obama had arrived after thirty years of Reaganism, while F.D.R. had followed thirty years of progressive agitation.”

Buttigieg pursued his interest in political theory as a Rhodes Scholar, studying in the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics program at Oxford. He also wanted “an education in the real world, if there was such a thing,” he writes. This led him to a two-and-a-half-year stint at the Chicago office of McKinsey & Company, the prestigious American consulting firm, known for its discreet counsel to the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. It was a deeply conventional choice for an ambitious Harvard graduate, and Buttigieg has struggled to explain it to progressives. McKinsey’s reputation has been badly tarnished by recent reports that it has advised state-owned companies in China and Russia and the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, and that it helped Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency identify “detention savings opportunities,” including cuts to food and medical care for detainees. Under pressure from Elizabeth Warren and the Times editorial board, Buttigieg released a summary of his work at McKinsey, and then a list of clients, which included Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Best Buy, and the U.S. Postal Service. While working for another client, the Defense Department, in 2009, he travelled to Iraq and Afghanistan as part of an economic-development project.

Buttigieg moved back to South Bend in 2007, when he was twenty-five. It was time, he writes, to seek out “the things that mattered most.” Contemplating how few Harvard graduates now served in the military, he signed up for the Navy Reserve and began training as an intelligence officer. It cannot have been lost on him that his service would be an asset for a political career. In 2010, Buttigieg was the Democratic nominee for Indiana’s state treasurer and lost to the incumbent by more than twenty-four points, but two years later he ran in an open mayoral race and won with nearly seventy-four per cent of the vote. Buttigieg governed as a modernizer at a time when cities everywhere are modernizing. As mayor, he widened sidewalks, slowed down traffic, and used tax breaks to attract new businesses. “The idea was that a city couldn’t thrive without a heart, and that meant making the downtown and the city a place where people wanted to be,” Scott Ford, who helped lead the redevelopment effort, told me. By the most basic measure, Buttigieg’s administration was a success. The economy improved everywhere during his tenure, but it improved a bit more in South Bend, where the unemployment rate dropped from ten per cent to three and a half per cent, and a half-century-long decline in population began to reverse.

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Shopping Cartoon by Mick Stevens

Buttigieg writes with palpable fondness about his time as mayor, but there are discordant notes: in particular, a pattern of friction with the black community, which makes up nearly a third of the city’s population. In the winter of 2012, just weeks after Buttigieg’s inauguration, he learned that federal prosecutors were investigating South Bend’s first black police chief, Darryl Boykins, for recording the phone calls of white officers, who were said to be making racist remarks about Boykins and others. Buttigieg demoted the chief and hired a white replacement. A series of lawsuits followed, and Boykins, the white officers, and several others involved in the scandal received settlements from the city. As for Buttigieg, he has said that he cannot listen to or release the tapes, citing continuing legal restrictions. “It was right after the murder of Trayvon Martin, and black people were stirred up all over the country,” the Reverend Michael Patton, a longtime South Bend pastor who now leads the city’s N.A.A.C.P. chapter, told me. “We had a lot of stuff that was going on that was affecting people’s emotions over a ninety-day period, and the Mayor didn’t really seem to understand that context.” Three years later, Buttigieg, speaking about racial reconciliation, used the phrase “All lives matter” in his State of the City address. He explained this spring that he did not know at that time that the phrase “was coming to be viewed as a sort of counter-slogan to ‘Black lives matter.’ ”

In his first term, Buttigieg also clashed with housing activists over a plan to demolish or repair a thousand vacant homes in a thousand days, largely in black and Latino communities. “Some of those homes needed to be knocked down,” Oliver Davis, a South Bend city councilman who has endorsed Biden, told me. “But then you’ve got to have a plan to build up those neighborhoods.” Several local officials and activists contested Buttigieg’s narrative of the city’s recovery, pointing out that black residents had not fared so well. The black poverty rate remains in the double digits. “He was not aware of how much animosity there is out in the community,” Jorden Giger, a Black Lives Matter activist in South Bend who supports Sanders, said. “When you finally see the faces at the bottom of the well, he’s not prepared for that—he’s not prepared for that visceral reaction to his policies, because for so long he’s had people in his ear telling him that what he’s doing is good.”