Can Pete Buttigieg, cool and cerebral, connect with voters? [View all]

[babylonsister]

Originally posted in GD/my bad.

Can Pete Buttigieg, cool and cerebral, connect with voters?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/can-pete-buttigieg-cool-and-cerebral-connect-with-voters

Can Pete Buttigieg, cool and cerebral, connect with voters?
Politics Oct 18, 2019 10:48 AM EDT


WATERLOO, Iowa (AP) — John McAnear, a 77-year-old Air Force veteran, stood in an audience of hundreds in suburban Des Moines with an oxygen tank at his side, wheezing as he implored Pete Buttigieg to protect the Veterans Administration.

The Democratic presidential hopeful offered a respectful, if perfunctory, “thank you for serving” and skipped any attempt to bond over their mutual military service. Instead, Buttigieg offered a list of proposals to fix the VA.

Of the many ways the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is different from his better-known rivals, there is this: his ingrained emotional restraint in a show-all-tell-all era.

“You don’t really get the warm fuzzies from him,” said Lisa Ann Spilman, a retired Air Force officer who attended Buttigieg’s event. “But I really like how intelligent and down to earth he is.”

As Buttigieg, whose campaign appears better positioned organizationally in Iowa and financially overall than former Vice President Joe Biden’s, attempts to climb into the top tier of Democrats, voters will be taking a measure of him in all ways, including whether he can make the kind of personal connection they have come to expect, at least since Bill Clinton showed he could feel their pain.

Buttigieg chafes at being labeled an emotionless technocrat, and his supporters cite his intellectual agility as his main draw, particularly against someone like President Donald Trump, whose strained relationship with the truth is so frequently on display.

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https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/can-pete-buttigieg-cool-and-cerebral-connect-with-voters