EJ Dionne of the Washington Post on Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg has broken through the noise of a cacophonous Democratic presidential field by raising issues that usually fall by the wayside in an era when politics feels prepackaged and defined by short-term obsessions.

He certainly got good news on Sunday with an Emerson poll in Iowa showing him surging from nowhere to third place and double digits.

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Mayor Pete, as he’s known, frequently talks about matters that are not strictly political, do not necessarily lend themselves to solutions by government and have more to do with how we live our lives than where we stand on an ideological spectrum. It will be useful if his recent comments on two themes, religion and community, have a contagious effect.

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“What could be more different than what we’re being shown in Washington right now — often with some people who view themselves as religious on the right, cheering it on? . . . Here we have this totally warped idea of what Christianity should be like when it comes into the public sphere, and it’s mostly about exclusion. Which is the last thing that I imbibe when I take in scripture in church.”

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Buttigieg also broke ground in placing the rise of white ethno-nationalism in the context of “a kind of disorientation and loss of community and identity.”

“The sense of belonging can be very powerful,” he told The Post’s Greg Sargent last week, “and we’re very fragile without it.”

Conservatives have tended to talk about community breakdown more than liberals have.

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In his interview with Sargent, Buttigieg turned the argument in a progressive direction by stressing work itself. For many Americans, the “very basic human desire for belonging . . . historically has often been supplied by the workplace . . . based on the presumption of a lifelong relationship with a single employer.” Economics can matter in surprising ways.

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What’s important about Buttigieg’s remarks on religion and community is that he broached issues that seem to have more traction on the right than the left. He takes conservatives seriously enough to challenge them on concerns that genuinely engage them.

If some liberals, as conservatives complain, tend to marginalize religion’s public role, might one reason be the bizarre and reprehensible invocation of faith by Christian nationalists to justify bigotry? Conservatives are right to worry about the decay of community. But the left is correct to insist that this problem is aggravated by radical changes in our economy that have shattered communities and individual lives.

Campaigns (and — I know what you’re thinking — the media) are generally not good at encouraging debates of this sort. The very unlikeliness of Buttigieg’s candidacy gives him an opportunity to change this — and good for him for trying.

  WaPo

Buttigieg is going to start getting a lot more attention now.  Not all of it will be good.  Bernie should have come out as an independent in 2016 instead of turning his supporters over to Hillary.  Now, however, I'd like to see him put his support behind Pete.  In fact, they would make a good ticket.  I'd put Bernie in as VP, and not the other way around, because Pete has a much more genial and encompassing personality.  Bernie's a workhorse.  Let him work.  (Fun factoid: Pete wrote a winning essay when he was younger about admiring Bernie's character, doing what he believes is right, not for expediency or political gain, but because he believes it's right.)