'Why not me?' Big-city mayors watch with envy as Buttigieg surges

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‘Why not me?’ Big-city mayors watch with envy as Buttigieg surges
‘The irony is that the South Bend mayor is being taken seriously and the New York mayor’s not.’
By DAVID SIDERS
05/12/2019 06:49 AM EDT
Updated 05/12/2019 10:40 AM EDT


LOS ANGELES — No mayor has ever ascended directly to the White House. So, Pete Buttigieg’s surprising performance in the Democratic primary has been met with a dose of excitement in the nation’s city halls — along with some humility.

Buttigieg, the mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city, has been steeped in television coverage, raised millions of dollars and been photographed with his husband, Chasten, for the cover of Time magazine.

Meanwhile, New York’s Bill de Blasio, the mayor of the nation’s largest city, is having difficulty persuading anyone — the media, his own constituents — to take his potential run for president seriously.

“Everybody’s going to laugh at him” if he runs, said Doug Herman, a Democratic strategist. “The irony is that the South Bend mayor is being taken seriously and the New York mayor’s not.”

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But what Buttigieg’s success brought to light more than anything is that the particulars of the position were never all that important — that the lane that once appeared to exist for mayors was, in fact, incidental to the office.

“He’s not carrying the flag for mayors,” said Rebecca Katz, a progressive consultant who advised Cynthia Nixon in her primary campaign against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo last year. “Mayor is part of his qualification, [but] he’s running as a millennial, he’s running as a veteran, he’s running a historic candidacy as the first LGBTQ candidate. So there’s a lot of things that make Buttigieg special.”

Still, she said, "I think when mayors, when other elected officials look at his actual qualifications, it’s easy to see how they could look in the mirror and say, 'Why not me?'”

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https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/12/pete-buttigieg-2020-mayors-1317436