'A product of the 9/11 generation': Pete Buttigieg leans into his youth as he outlines...

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‘A product of the 9/11 generation’: Pete Buttigieg leans into his youth as he outlines a foreign policy

By James Hohmann

June 12 at 10:46 AM

With Joanie Greve and Mariana Alfaro

THE BIG IDEA: When Pete Buttigieg was born in 1982, Ronald Reagan was president. Joe Biden had been in the Senate for a decade, Bernie Sanders was mayor of Burlington, Vt., and Donald Trump was a Democrat.

The 37-year-old, who is polling in the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates, was a sophomore at Harvard when the twin towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001. He debated with classmates whether the United States should invade Iraq as Mark Zuckerberg wrote the code for what would become Facebook in a dorm across the street. Buttigieg missed his 10-year college reunion because he was deployed to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, serving as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve.

Buttigieg invoked 9/11 seven times during a 57-minute speech on Tuesday that sketched out his vision for foreign policy and national security. “As a mayor from the industrial Midwest, as a product of the 9/11 generation and as a veteran of the Afghanistan conflict, my own worldview is shaped, predictably, by my life experience,” he explained to a full auditorium at Indiana University in Bloomington.

The man who could become America’s first openly gay president is also the first member of “the 9/11 generation” to credibly contend for a major party’s nomination. Marco Rubio, as a point of comparison, was the youthful candidate in 2016. But he was already in his 30s and serving in the Florida House on Sept. 11. In contrast, Buttigieg recalled reading “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama when he arrived in college in the autumn of 2000. By the time he finished his studies at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 2007, that argument seemed tragically quaint and America was mired in two quagmires.

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