Pete Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg

Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg (born January 19, 1982) is an American politician and former U.S. Navy intelligence officer. He was the 32nd mayor of South Bend, Indiana, from 2012 to 2020. He is the first openly gay person to launch a major presidential campaign. He ran as a candidate for president in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries. He dropped out of the race on March 1, 2020, and endorsed Joe Biden the following day. In December 2020, President Biden named him as his nominee to be Secretary of Transportation.

About Pete Buttigieg in brief

Summary Pete ButtigiegPeter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg (born January 19, 1982) is an American politician and former U.S. Navy intelligence officer. He was the 32nd mayor of South Bend, Indiana, from 2012 to 2020. He is the first openly gay person to launch a major presidential campaign. He ran as a candidate for president in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, launching his campaign for the 2020 United States presidential election on April 14, 2019. He dropped out of the race on March 1, 2020, and endorsed Joe Biden the following day. In December 2020, President Biden named him as his nominee to be Secretary of Transportation. His mother uses the name Anne Montgomery; his father was born and raised in Hamrun, Malta, and had studied to be a Jesuit before emigrating to the United States and embarking on a secular career as a professor of literature. He came out as gay in 2015. He married Chasten Buttigiewicz, a schoolteacher, writer, and LGBTQ rights advocate, in June 2018. He declined to seek a third term as mayor. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 2004, and was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 2007, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford. In 2009, he worked on the political campaigns of Democrats Jill Long Thompson, Joe Donnelly, and John Kerry. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree with first-class honours in philosophy, politics, and economics after studying at Oxford. He also worked on John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign as a policy and research specialist for several months in New Mexico and Arizona.

He won first prize in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum’s Profiles in Courage essay contest. He wrote his undergraduate thesis on the influence of Puritanism on U. S. foreign policy as reflected in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American. The title of his thesis is also an allusion to American historian Perry Miller’s work Errand into the Wilderness. In 2000 he was chosen as one of two student delegates from Indiana to United States Senate Youth Program, an annual scholarship competition sponsored jointly by the U. S. Senate and the Hearst Foundations. He worked as an investigative intern at WMA-TV, Chicago’s NBC News affiliate. In 2004, he won a first-place prize for his essay on the integrity and political courage of then U. S. representative Bernie Sanders of Vermont, one of only two independent politicians in Congress. In 2006, he became an editor-in-chief of the International Pembroke Review, an informal debate and discussion group of about a dozen students, and a co-founder and member of the Democratic Renaissance Project. In 2008 he was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives, where he served as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. In 2010, he received a second-place award for his work on the Democratic National Committee’s Young Americans for Equality campaign.