The First Millennial President?

Remember this tweet, dated January 4?

NEW: At an off-the-record with journalists and political types in Manhattan last night at @MollyJongFast's house, South Bend Mayor @PeteButtigieg left the distinct impression he's not only running for president in 2020 but could announce very soon, per attendees.

— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) January 5, 2019

Pete Buttigieg hasn't announced yet but a new article in the Washington Post Magazine, titled "Could Pete Buttigieg Become The First Millennial President?," sure makes it sound like he's running. Who's Pete Buttigieg, exactly? The article includes this: 

[T]he son of a Maltese immigrant father and an Army brat mom who grew up in decaying South Bend, got himself into Harvard, summer-interned for Ted Kennedy, worked for John Kerry’s presidential campaign, won a Rhodes Scholarship, learned Arabic in Tunisia, landed a jet-setting consultant’s job, left it to return to his beat-up hometown and become the youngest mayor of a midsize U.S. city, transformed that city into a national model of renewal, and then — deep breath — volunteered for active duty in Afghanistan while serving as mayor, came out as gay in the local newspaper, married a schoolteacher live on YouTube, turned heads in a dark-horse bid to lead the Democratic National Committee, and had the New York Times’s Frank Bruni gushing about him as potentially the “First Gay President”— all by age 36.

... this: 

He has clearly made a close study of how Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy took their nontraditional paths to the presidency at young ages. “When you run young, your face says you represent change,” he says. But he doesn’t want to stop at symbolism: His message for 2020 will be centered on a clean, sharp break with the Lite Republicanism that Democrats embraced in the 1990s. While older voters still tell pollsters they favor keeping taxes low and ambitions modest, millennials overwhelmingly support Medicare-for-all, free college, heavy spending to tackle poverty and climate change, and major infrastructure investments — social democracy, in a nutshell.

Though Buttigieg prefers to label himself — if he must label himself — a “progressive Democrat,” he can deliver a spontaneous dissertation on why young Americans say they prefer socialism to capitalism that would do Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proud. Nobody should mistake it for youthful idealism or recklessness, he says. “I think the new generation that emerges now will have a different kind of seriousness about the future,” he says.

... and this:

For all his aw-shucksiness, if Buttigieg has the least bit of doubt that he’s ready to make the leap to commander in chief, at an age that barely qualifies him constitutionally for the job, it’s impossible to detect. He has often been urged to run for Congress — the next logical steppingstone — but he sees it as a dead end. “I would find it demoralizing,” he says. David Axelrod, Obama’s political guru, is among the powerhouse Democrats who see no reason Buttigieg should wait. Axelrod’s first Pete sighting was in November 2015, when the young mayor was given the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award at Harvard. “He spoke without a note in front of him and gave one of the most stirring speeches I’ve heard,” Axelrod told the South Bend Tribune. “He has that gift.” Axelrod has given Buttigieg the same advice he gave Obama after his famous Democratic National Convention keynote speech in 2004: The biggest mistake politicians make is missing their moment by hesitating.

... then ends with this: 

While others might see his age and inexperience as fatal liabilities, Buttigieg recognizes that the path to the White House often evolves. It’s actually been a very long time since Democrats recaptured power without a candidate who didn’t represent a departure from political norms: the young, Catholic JFK; the up-from-nowhere Southerner Jimmy Carter; the “New Democrat” Bill Clinton; and Barack Obama, the African American just a few years removed from being an Illinois state senator.

Could it now be time for a millennial? When we catch up in early December, Buttigieg says he saw “glimmers” of it in 2018: “We saw indications that it’s okay to talk about our values as Democrats again. That the politics of conviction that appealed to young people, with Bernie in 2016, can also be articulated successfully by the next generation.”

I mention that the day before, Biden, on his own book tour, had proclaimed himself “the most qualified person in the country to be president.” Buttigieg laughs. “So was Hillary,” he says. Game on.

You can read the article here; I'm going to be keeping an eye on Pete Buttigieg. 

And one more thing. The article also says this:

Obama is also a Buttigieg fan. In his 2017 New Yorker exit interview, the former president named Buttigieg as one of four Democrats who would lead the party forward.

I was curious about who the other three might be, so I googled the New Yorker article: 

Obama insisted that there were gifted Democratic politicians out there, but that many were new to the scene. He mentioned Kamala Harris, the new senator from California; Pete Buttigieg, a gay Rhodes Scholar and Navy veteran who has twice been elected mayor of South Bend, Indiana; Tim Kaine; and Senator Michael Bennet, of Colorado. (Read it here.)