It's hard to tell what's going in the inscrutable candidate's head. Maybe his mom knows.
Even if she had been, Pete was careful to show no signs. Coming out, he wrote in his memoir, felt like it could be a “career death sentence.” But in 2014, Pete deployed with the Navy to Afghanistan and realized career death might not be as terrible a fate as dying without having been in love.
He was 33 when he came out of the closet, meaning that even as a young adult his years of experience with love, or to use a military term, his “training age,” as he put it in his book, was essentially zero. It didn’t take much time for Pete to catch up, however. Just months later, with the help of a dating app, he met Chasten Glezman. The teacher from Chicago and the up-and-coming politician from South Bend met for beers and a baseball game. Chasten asked what the future held for Pete, and Pete said honestly, “In 2020 there’s a possibility I might be considered for governor.” “We got back to the car just as the post-game fireworks began, and as the explosions and lit colors unfolded over us, he went in for a kiss,” Pete wrote of his first date. Whether this was his first kiss with a man, Pete would only say, “let’s not get into that,” but one thing was becoming clear: It was the first time he was falling in love. When Pete opened up about his sexuality, first to friends and family, and then in an op-ed in the local paper ahead of his run for mayor, Anne still noticed no change in Pete. No sense of relief, no lightness in his step. Of course he felt it, Pete said. It allowed him to fully be himself, which would have benefits both personally and professionally.Pete with his parents at the South Bend airport after returning from Afghanistan. But he also wasn’t surprised that his mother wouldn’t notice a difference. He’s always been good at compartmentalizing, something he probably inherited from Anne to begin with. When Pete told her that he would be shipping out to Afghanistan as a member of the Navy Reserve, the news almost took the wind out of her. She was shocked that a sitting mayor would be sent to a war zone, and she couldn’t get the image of her grandmother’s Gold Star pin — the one she received after losing a son, Anne’s uncle — out of her mind. But Anne never let her son know she was worried, what good would that do? Instead, she took a blue star flag, the kind mothers of servicemen get, placed it in her window, and decided to store her dark thoughts there.Pete and his husband, Chasten, at a May 2019 campaign event in West Hollywood. By the end of 2018, life and death seemed to be happening all at once for Pete. In September, his father was diagnosed with lung cancer. In October, Anne woke up in the middle of the night feeling like she’d eaten something strange and went to the local clinic, only to be sent to the hospital for emergency heart surgery . Pete was a newlywed at the time. He was bouncing between hospitals and settling on the idea of running for president. In a strange way, within the chaos came clarity. Suddenly the idea of waiting your turn in this life didn’t make as much sense. With encouragement from his dad, Pete headed to Washington to announce an exploratory committee for a presidential campaign. Four days later, Joe Buttigieg was dead.“A bit cruelly, it is in preparing for an occasion like this that I would be most likely to turn to Dad for advice,” Pete said at a memorial service for Joe held at Notre Dame. “I look back, I followed his suggestions so often, and found that they always led me somewhere I needed to be — and wanted to be.” Stephen Fredman, a fellow Notre Dame professor and friend of the family, was there for the eulogy. It was, he said, a master class in speech-writing and delivery, something he could imagine teaching in class one day. And yet, those who see Pete campaign might not be familiar with this story at all. Pete isn’t tugging at heartstrings on the trail, he’s keeping it together like the Very Fine Young Man he’s always been. He makes intentional eye contact. He speaks in a steady, sonorous voice that can sound like he’s practiced Barack Obama speeches in his bedroom. A keen observer of others since his days on the school yard, Pete has made his candidacy often seem like a reflection of what seems to be going on in the Democratic Party. He entered the race during a time of liberal ascendance, jumping in with talk of Medicare-for-All, packing the Supreme Court and abolishing the electoral college. But as the primary season became more about “electability,” Pete seemed to seamlessly become a more moderate, more pragmatic version of the same candidate. He now favorsButtigieg shifts to center, embodying the Democratic primary’s rightward driftHe talks about “revenue” and “reducing the deficit” and “the heartland,” and the older Midwestern voters watching him see their ideal version of a young person. “I think he would be an inspiration to young people,” Warren Erickson, 83, said after an event in Newton, Iowa. “Why can’t my kids be like Pete?!” Dale Vander Broek, 64, asked with a laugh. “Why can’t my kids wear white shirts?” The downside has been to turn off many members of Pete’s own generation, to be seen as not only an apple polisher, but someone whose mind operates so much like a consultant that he’s prone to blind spots. After crunching data at McKinsey, Pete showed a technocrat’s flair for development as mayor. But he could sometimes lack emotional connection to the community, famously firing the city’s first black police chief. As a candidate for president, his bottom-line thinking has brought him to at least one decadent wine cave, not a great look for a candidate appealing to the working class. For former vice president Joe Biden, another Democratic candidate for president vying for some of the same voters as Pete, emotion, especially grief, has become a central part of his candidacy. He lost a wife and child in a tragic car accident as a young senator. His elder son, Beau, died of brain cancer. Part of Biden’s appeal is his empathy. You might not want to see your president cry, but you’d like to think he knows what it feels like. Buttigieg’s calculus is different from Biden’s. Perhaps there are external factors that keep his emotions in check. To be the first viable openly gay candidate for the presidency is a big enough hurdle without being called “emotional.” To be the youngest candidate in the field gives him an extra incentive to be seen as serious. He’s been through a lot, but doesn’t like to talk about it. He has, he said, never seen a therapist. Pete's mother, Anne, and his husband, Chasten, at his town-hall interview with Fox News's Chris Wallace last month in Des Moines. Perhaps Pete hasn’t had the chance to fully grieve his father’s loss. Maybe, like his mother, he’s found a way to transfer that anxiety into a symbolic thing: his campaign. “We’re in constant motion,” he said at the Iowa field office. “I always wish we had more time to process and reflect.” The campaign has been something of a distraction for Anne, as well, a welcome one. She reads and writes letters on behalf of the campaign, touched by all the people who have been touched by her son. She travels to debates, part of a community of political families, technically opponents, but all ultimately in this thing together. Sometimes she’ll offer Pete advice from her focus group of friends at the gym, but she is mostly, as she said, an observer. The activity certainly beats the alternative: missing a husband, worrying about the direction of the country. “If I didn’t have his career secondhand,” she said, “I don’t know what I would do. I would be in anguish.”Photo editing by Moira Haney. Design by Beth Broadwater.Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. Or purchase a subscription for unlimited access to real news you can count on.
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