Shortest Way Home review: Pete Buttigieg as president in waiting
The 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana has written the best political autobiography since Barack Obama
Imagine waking up on 4 November 2020 to discover America has elected a man whose knowledge ranges from the Puritan origins of the phrase “city on the hill” to the details of how to modernize sewers with wi-fi connected sensors.
Imagine that this man is also an Afghanistan veteran who understands that “truly grasping and defeating the logic of suicide terrorism” was beyond the capacity of Congress or the Bush administration after 9/11; a student who connected the dots in high school between the values of his theology class and those of Amnesty International; a graduate of Harvard and a Rhodes scholar who got a first at Oxford; the mayor of a small midwestern city who managed to revitalize it in less than eight years; someone who has never slept with a porn star, and who married the very first person he fell in love with.
And imagine this is someone whose spouse just happens to be a man – which. as Stephen Colbert pointed out on The Late Show, is “only the third thing” you learn about this presidential candidate.
This is part of the life story Peter Buttigieg tells in his beautiful new book, Shortest Way Home, the best American political autobiography since Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father.
Buttigieg is the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Brimming with midwestern authenticity, he captured a large portion of CNN’s audience earlier this month in his first nationally televised town hall. That put him comfortably over the Democratic National Committee’s threshold of 65,000 individual donors which governs qualification for the forthcoming debates.
The son of a Notre Dame professor whose family hails from Malta, Buttigieg’s is a classic American success story. It begins with acceptance at Harvard, followed by his winning the John F Kennedy Presidential Library’s annual Profile In Courage Award for a high-school essay.
more:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/17/shortest-way-home-review-pete-buttigieg-president
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