Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg speaks at the Commonwealth Club of California on March 28 in San Francisco. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images 2020 elections Midwestern mayor Buttigieg wows progressive Dems in San Francisco SAN FRANCISCO — Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay major presidential candidate, took his campaign Thursday to San Francisco — a heartland of progressive gay politics — but said he is running “not to be a candidate for the LGBTQ community alone, or for any one group,’’ but to speak to all Americans. “I’m proud of who I am, I am proud of my husband and our marriage,’’ said the Democratic mayor of South Bend, Ind., whose spouse, Chasten, sat nearby as he addressed reporters here prior to a sold-out speech before hundreds at the Commonwealth Club. “It might just be the most normal thing in my life.’’ His husband, Buttigieg said, will have a role in his upstart campaign for the White House because he is “somebody who’s passionate about education, passionate about family ... and his story is part of my story.’’ When asked how he will get past what many believe could be his greatest hurdle in running for the presidency — his status as a married gay man — Buttigieg told POLITICO, “I don’t know how it plays in San Francisco. But I can tell you I came out, during a reelection campaign, in Indiana, while Mike Pence was the governor. And I wound up winning reelection by 80 percent." Buttigieg was greeted by a rousing standing ovation, whoops and cheers from the audience in the progressive bastion of San Francisco, the hometown of fellow Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, who served as district attorney in the city before becoming the state’s attorney general. Asked about competing with Harris, Buttigieg said, “I don’t think I’m running against any individual, especially when there’s like 20 of us. I admire a lot of the people in this process, but each of us has a different message.’’ Buttigieg said making tough executive decisions as a mayor that directly affect lives every day is a strong argument for his candidacy. "Cheeky as it sounds, as the youngest guy in the conversation, my experiences are relevant,’’ Buttigieg, 37, said. “The basic idea is that the country is going through a tectonic change right now ... that calls for a very different leadership than what we have,’’ he told the audience. “We’d be better served if Washington started looking like our cities, instead of the other way around.” The outpouring of enthusiasm for the Midwestern mayor in Northern California showcased what appears to be Buttigieg’s meteoric rise as a genuine surprise factor in the 2020 presidential contest — and came on the heels of Buttigieg’s first significant showing in a national political poll. The Quinnipiac University National Poll, released Thursday, ranked former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke as the top three in the field but placed Buttigieg in a tie with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 4 percent, just below Harris at 8 percent. With those numbers, Buttigieg, the youngest presidential candidate, outranked three sitting U.S. senators — New Jersey’s Cory Booker, Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar and New York's Kirsten Gillibrand, as well as the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Julián Castro. While Buttigieg lacks the massive fundraising mechanisms and political strategy teams of his competitors — and was barely known to many Democrats months ago — he has built up a loyal grassroots following. His appearance in San Francisco, where the $30 tickets sold out weeks ago, drew political leaders like Willie Brown, the city's former mayor, to greet him. The South Bend mayor appears to have won ground with a combination of ardent progressivism — abolishing the Electoral College and backing expansion of the Supreme Court — while at the same time addressing the kitchen-table concerns of President Donald Trump's working-class voters. Those include jobs — and the loss of jobs to automation — income inequality and what Buttigieg has called the need for a return to a “Golden Rule” in American civic life, to address concerns about Trump's caustic politics. Tim Malloy, the Quinnipiac Poll's associate director, said with Buttigieg's shockingly quick rise he has “crossed from obscurity into the spotlight without breaking into a sweat.” The success, he said, may be pegged to a rare combination of being a candidate who "is young and attractive and has command over myriad issues" and “speaks with an easy confidence without sounding wonkish or arrogant." “There is an aura of freshness and youthful enthusiasm around him,” Malloy said of Buttigieg, an Afghan war veteran and Rhodes scholar who speaks half a dozen languages. Malloy added that “comparisons will be made with Beto O'Rourke in that he is not on the attack, tearing into the administration, rather a forward-looking candidate of ideas.’’ Longtime Bay Area Democratic insider Martha Whetstone, who showed up for Buttigieg’s San Francisco appearance, said his CNN Town Hall in March — his first national introduction to voters — put him on the map for many Democrats like herself. She says she watched him navigate complex issues with awe and with the kind of natural communication skills she hadn’t seen for years — perhaps since her longtime friend and fellow Arkansas native, former President Bill Clinton. She said many Democratic donors like herself immediately "wrote him a check’’ in hopes he’d raise enough funds in enough states to be included in the upcoming Democratic debates. Whetstone says she sees many parallels with the younger Clinton, who “when he was first running faced the same problems: no one took seriously as a young, unknown governor from a conservative state. ... I couldn’t get anyone here the in the Bay Area to meet with him back then.’’ But much like Clinton, she says of Buttigieg, “When he gets in a room with people, [he] sells himself. He knows how to turn a phrase. He knows how to attack Trump, without being bitter. He’s smart and he knows the issues.”<doc-sep>When Pete Buttigieg’s Democratic presidential campaign passed through San Francisco in February, he was greeted by a throng that consisted of pretty much me. Plus a radio outfit, a handful of donors and some techies curious about what he would say at the headquarters of the on-demand delivery company, Postmates. The two most pressing questions then for the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., were: “Who is this guy?” And, “How do you pronounce Buttigieg?” (It’s BOOT-edge-edge.) But Thursday night, Buttigieg packed a 300-seat room at the Marines’ Memorial Club for an onstage interview. Somehow over the past month, Democrats have figured out who Buttigieg is. He’s “the hottest candidate in the Democratic presidential field,” CNN’s Chris Cillizza said the other day. “Don’t look now, but a (nother) skinny kid with a funny name is turning heads in the presidential race. In 2008, it was Barack Obama. In 2020, it’s Pete Buttigieg.” Cillizza wasn’t the only D.C. pundit having an Obama flashback over Buttigieg. “The only other time in twelve years that we heard from as many people about a guest was after @BarackObama appeared on Morning Joe,” tweeted “Morning Joe” Scarborough. It’s a little early, however, for Buttigieg fever. At this point, it’s more like Buttigieg runny nose. Buttigieg is starting to be noticed, but it could be that the masses are trying to figure out what the Beltway fuss is all about. More people searched for him on Google in the past week than searched for former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren. And nearly as many searched for him as for “Beto,” which is how people look for former Rep. Beto O’Rourke. Key words: “searched for.” I searched for “Antonio Brown” several times in the past week, but I’m not voting for him for president. Preview Yes, Buttigieg is moving up in the polls. He’s gone from zero to 2.2 percent in the latest RealClearPolitics.com amalgamation of major polls — good for seventh place among confirmed and possible Democratic candidates. For perspective, Biden is first at 29 percent, followed by Sanders at 22 percent. And Buttigieg is starting to raise grassroots money. His campaign says he has met the Democratic National Committee’s requirement to participate in its first two debates — the bar is receiving donations from 65,000 people in at least 20 states. That’s impressive for a mayor whose city has fewer people than Concord. All of this attention has come organically, earned over months rather than minutes — in contrast to, say, O’Rourke, the subject of a Vanity Fair hagiography and nonstop cable news coverage. “I’m a little surprised by the pace of it because it happened so swifty,” Buttigieg conceded Thursday. It helps that Buttigieg has made the most of his brief turns in the national spotlight. He comes across as an everyman — he nearly always wears a white shirt, thin tie and no coat, like a guy dressed for his first job interview — and yet speaks with the intellectual gravitas of the Harvard/Oxford grad that he is. Often in complete paragraphs. “He gives a straightforward answer to the question he’s asked,” said Darrin Brocca, who asked him one Thursday. “Most politicians don’t do that.” While San Francisco resident Jenifer Shriver is also scoping out Warren, Harris and O’Rourke, she’s leaning toward Buttigieg “because he’s the freshest face out there. He’s just so well spoken and intelligent and sensible.” He’s an Afghanistan war veteran who married his boyfriend three years ago. He’s managed to be elected twice in deep-red Indiana, though that’s not quite as unlikely as it might seem — South Bend is a reliable Democratic outpost. He’s a concert-level pianist, and he taught himself Norwegian so he could read the works of author Erlend Loe, after reading Loe’s novel, “Naïve. Super.” He rarely raises his voice to the lectern-pounding volume that Sanders lives in, but he can fire off a decent zinger. During a discussion of how his Christian faith shapes him, he told CNN that his state’s former governor, Vice President Mike Pence, “stopped believing in Scripture when he started believing in Donald Trump.” He also called Pence the “cheerleader for the porn-star presidency.” After hearing Buttigieg on Thursday, Wicky Mendoza said she finds his approach to be “like a soothing parent, who is thinking about all of the different things that could affect you. ... I’m from Texas, and Beto gets you all fired up on a guttural level. But this is different. He makes you feel good in a different way.” Yet while he’s conversant and thoughtful on the issues, he hasn’t put forward his full platform yet. Part of that is because he’s officially still in the “exploratory” phase of his campaign. But mostly, he thinks that too often Democrats lose voters by talking first about policy minutiae. Shortly before Buttigieg spoke Thursday, the president held a rally in Michigan where he said, “We’re opening up car plants in Michigan again for the first time in decades. ... And this has been happening pretty much since I’ve been president.” That is inaccurate. Fiat Chrysler is the only carmaker that plans to open a plant in Michigan, and that is one it planned to reopen before Trump was elected. It is an illustration of how Buttigieg says Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan is “insulting” to voters, particularly in the industrial Midwest. “There is no such thing as an honest politics that revolves around the word, ‘again,’ Buttigieg said Thursday. “The president is offering … to stop the clock and move backwards. It just doesn’t work that way.” But he cautioned that Democrats shouldn’t make “this election all about him. A lot of voters are going to hear (the anti-Trump rhetoric) and say, ‘Who’s talking about me?’” he said. “I think that’s what happened in 2016, and it would be a shame if we allowed it to happen again.” Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli<doc-sep>#PeteButtigieg could become the first openly gay president. He’s also the only millennial candidate in the 2020 race thus far. Meet - HIS HUSBAND - school teacher @Chas10Buttigieg! ::SOUND ON:: Chasten gives us a lesson on how to pronounce their last name: Buttigieg pic.twitter.com/G7pBMIQMJr — Kate Larsen (@KateABC7) March 29, 2019 SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- South Bend, Indiana Mayor, Pete Buttigieg, was in San Francisco Thursday night. The 37-year-old is running for President and is rising in popularity. "I believe in making yourself useful whenever you can," said Buttigieg.While speaking to a sold-out crowd in San Francisco, Buttigieg used that quote to explain why he rushed to a hospital in South Bend, Indiana, where he's mayor, to help translate for a Sudanese family.He also says it's his motivation for being a public servant. "You can really, in a lifetime or a political lifetime, bring about profound changes. And then, you know, scholars, intellectuals, maybe make the most impact of all, but often they don't live to see how that impact plays out. So I guess I wanted to play a longer game than if I were a journalist, but I'm not patient enough to be an intellectual, and so being in politics seemed like a happy medium. "The 37-year-old, openly gay mayor, is a Rhodes Scholar and veteran of the war in Afghanistan.He announced his presidential exploratory committee in January but has not officially announced his candidacy. Still, he's been on the circuit, and on Thursday night he said, that if elected president, his priority would be democracy reform. He said for example, that he'd like to get rid of the electoral college. After that, his top issue is climate change.Buttigieg also explained how he'd like to reform the Supreme Court, to make the Judicial Branch of the government less political. He pitched an idea of 15 Supreme Court justices. He says 10 would be selected through the traditional political process and the five other justices would only be seated through unanimous agreement of the other 10. He also said rotating judges off the appellate bench is an idea.Polls out this week put Buttigieg in third place and fifth place in a crowded Democratic primary field. Former Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Elizabeth Warren and former Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke are also polling in the top five.One of the main questions surrounding Mayor Pete's candidacy is how to pronounce his last name-- a question burning as hot as his political brand right now.His husband, Chasten Buttigieg, a school teacher, gave us a lesson. "Buddha-judge-- boot-edge-edge," he said.Dennis Sopczynski lives in San Mateo County, but he grew up in South Bend, Indiana and still has a lot of family in the city, where Buttigieg has been a household name since 2012. He believes Mayor Pete's small town skills will translate on a national level. "He really connects very effectively with the community."<doc-sep>
SAN FRANCISCO — As the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind. — population 102,000 — Pete Buttigieg might not have the traditional resume of a presidential candidate. But at a sold-out event in San Francisco on Thursday night, Buttigieg, the first openly gay major-party presidential candidate, showed why he’s in the middle of a breakout moment. Wowing the progressive crowd with thoughtful answers, he argued that a fresh voice was just what the country needs. “Our country is going through a tectonic change right now,” Buttigieg told a friendly crowd of about 350 at the Marines’ Memorial Theatre. “You can’t have an honest politics that revolves around the word ‘again.’ ” Call it the Buttigieg Bump: Polls in recent days have found him moving up to fifth place in the national race and an eye-popping third place in Iowa, above California Sen. Kamala Harris (although that poll had a high margin of error). He’s also jumped over more established rivals in Google search traffic, a sign that voters want to learn more about him — or at least how to pronounce his name (it’s boot-edge-edge). Of course, past presidential primaries have featured plenty of candidates who rocketed from obscurity to the top of the polls before falling back just as quickly — remember Herman Cain or Carly Fiorina or Howard Dean? To sustain his momentum, Buttigieg will need to continue charming Democratic voters like those in San Francisco with his unique background as a gay veteran millennial. “He felt like a young Obama,” marveled Susan Pfeifer, a Democratic activist in the city, who said she was still considering multiple candidates. “His intellect, the way he looks at things — it’s really impressive.” Speaking in the heart of coastal liberalism, Buttigieg sold his appeal as the mayor of a city similar to the rust belt towns that swung from supporting Obama to supporting Trump and helped seal the president’s 2016 victory. He connected Trump’s win to changes in the economy and the cratering of manufacturing jobs, describing the 2016 result as “frustration that expresses itself with a vote to burn the house down.” “It’s not just that a lot of jobs are changing. It’s that when your job changes, your identity gets thrown into disarray,” Buttigieg said. “We’ve experienced that very acutely in the industrial Midwest, and I think when that happens that can also leave people vulnerable to radicalization. … It’s the same as what happens in the Middle East. “If we aren’t paying attention to that, I think we run the risk of making the same mistake again,” he added. In addition to his sunny poll numbers, Buttigieg got another boost Thursday when Susie Tompkins Buell, a top San Francisco Democratic donor, who is supporting Harris, said she would hold a fundraiser for him. He’s already received more than 65,000 individual donations, enough to get him on the party’s debate stage in June. Buttigieg has made his mark on the race with far-reaching ideas to reform how the U.S. government works, like expanding the Supreme Court to 15 justices, five of which would be chosen by unanimous agreement among the remaining 10. “This is no more a shattering of norms than what’s already been done by the Republican Senate,” he said. And the electoral college? It “needs to go,” he said. A Harvard-educated Rhodes scholar, Buttigieg isn’t afraid of coming off as too erudite. He speaks six languages with some level of fluency, including Norwegian, which, as he told the San Francisco crowd, he learned in order to read the works of an author he admired. That came in helpful this week when a Norwegian journalist found him on the campaign trail and did an interview. He also talked about his personal life and the “awkward timing” of coming out publicly as an elected official in a rust belt town. He ended up writing about being gay in a local newspaper op-ed in 2015, the same year as then-governor Mike Pence pushed “religious freedom” legislation that would make it easier for companies to discriminate against LGBT customers. “The question was how voters would respond in my community,” Buttigieg said. “They responded by re-electing me with 80% of the vote, so I guess they didn’t care.” Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten, a schoolteacher and newly minted social media star in his own right, was at the event.