Pete Buttigieg
Author, narrator, protagonist. Pete Buttigieg became Mayor of South Bend, Indiana at the age of 29. Less than ten years later he was making an unexpectedly strong bid for the Democratic nomination for President in 2020, outlasting several other candidates with much higher profiles. The openly gay married military veteran and Rhodes scholar presents himself as the positive reverse image of Donald Trump in every imaginable way.
Chasten Glezman
Buttigieg married Chasten Glezman in 2018. The courtship and marriage to another man plays a huge role in the narrative as a portrait of true love. It also further situates Buttigieg as an alternative to Donald Trump. Not just as a result of the differences between homosexuality and heterosexuality, but in relation to Trump’s three marriages, two divorces, multiple affairs and payoffs to porn stars to keep quiet about adulterous sexual relationships. By definition, this distinction also paints the marriage as a portrait of hypocrisy of the concept that marriage “means” union between man and woman if that union is proven to be meaningless due to one partner’s promiscuity.
Mike Pence
One might expect a man who carefully constructed an entire political career upon a solid bedrock of presenting an image of religious faith that makes no allowances for the reality of human desire to be chastened by selling off that image wholesale to a high bidder. A high bidder with three marriages, two divorces, multiple affairs and payoffs to porn stars, but Buttigieg presents that “other” Indiana politician as incapable of change. Despite making the decision to sacrifice his hard-earned credibility as a icon of evangelical Christian principles, Mike Pence is presented in the book as someone who who after almost daily humiliation at the hands of the least Christ-like person in America still somehow managed to hold himself up every the morally superior being he was before the selloff of his soul.
Donald Trump
The specter of Donald Trump hangs over the book even when his physical presence is nowhere at hand. It is difficult to imagine Buttigieg making the decision run for President had another Republican won in 2016; it is impossible to imagine had Hilary Clinton’s popular vote majority translated into an Electoral College win. The publication of the book coincided with Mayor Pete’s first Presidential campaign and that campaign seems conceivable only in the climate of the country after three years of Donald Trump had produced nationwide terror over the thought of another term.
Without Trump’s having managed to somehow stumble-bumble backwards over the most ridiculous system for electing a chief executive ever devised by anyone outside an insane asylum, one gets the distinct feeling that Buttigieg would have focused his political ambitions closer to home. Perhaps he would even have been eyeing Pence’s old job of Governor. Three years of Trump seems to have accelerated not so much the pace of Buttigieg’s ambitions for himself as the necessity of that ambition for the good of the country.
