Mayor Pete’s Role Model Revealed
By CHRISTOPHER MANION
The latest episode in the life of my hometown mayor, Pete Buttigieg, casts him as a model for youth. A mother brought her son to one of Pete’s rallies. The boy, a pre-pubescent nine-year-old, apparently wanted to talk to Pete, and the campaign put him on the program. The boy had decided he was a homosexual, it seems, and wanted to ask Pete for advice on how he could be brave like Pete and tell people he was gay too.
Well, we know what Pete does best: pirouette for his LGBT supporters nationwide who have made him another permanent fixture in the Democrat anti-Trump parade.
Catholic marketing expert Richard Viguerie has coined a term that explains Pete perfectly: When you go by a pasture and see goats, cattle, and horses on your Sunday drive, what do you remember most vividly?
“Hey daddy, did you see that purple cow?”
The Purple Cow effect will give the product an extra six to eight percent in the polls, says Viguerie, and Pete the Product has made the most of it. And yet, even given the dismal character of his competition, he’s still having a hard time reaching ten percent nationally in the polls.
Everybody notices a Purple Cow, but not everybody wants one.
Pete has given his LGBT supporters plenty of soothing affirmation, condemning crass Christians who worship the wrong god (including his “husband’s” evangelical brother, who will have none of his holy hogwash) and parading his “family” on stage as the new model for true and lasting commitment.
And it’s so real! Why, soon they’re going to be expecting! (Query: If the woman whose womb they rent decides to abort her unborn child, will Mr. & Mr. Pete affirm her “right to control her body,” right up through childbirth? Rest assured, no nine-year-old will ever ask him that question on stage.)
So while it doesn’t sell close to home, Pete’s slippery, superior Christianity has a gaggle of fans. They’re just not in South Bend. But he’s popular when he’s out of town, the farther the better. And it’s been clear that, for a long time, Pete has wanted to get out of town.
But how?
Meet Pete’s First Role Model
As a young and ambitious student, Pete had his own model for success, and he didn’t have to go far to find him. Long ago, a fellow named John Brademas was valedictorian of South Bend Central High School’s Class of 1945 (he also quarterbacked the school’s football team). He joined the Navy as World War II ended, went off to Harvard University, graduating Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and headed to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
The parallels are interesting indeed. Pete went to South Bend’s St. Joe High School, a mile up the road from Central High. He graduated as valedictorian in 2002, and went to Harvard, graduating, like Brademas, Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Then, like Brademas, he headed off to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. They both even served in the Navy!
As young, accomplished men, John and Pete both faced the same dilemma: What do you do for your next act after a stellar academic career like that?
Well, when he got back home from Oxford, John got some good advice from his father. Steve Brademas had run a popular diner in South Bend that was a second home for thousands of Notre Dame students over the years. If I remember correctly, Dad had even lived in a small apartment above that diner during the 1920s. But he and Steve were good friends, and, when John was wondering what to do with his life, his dad told him, “Go see Pat Manion.” Dad, who had been an active Democrat for years, had just retired as the Dean of the Notre Dame Law School.
Dad was a good listener. When they got together, he asked the young Brademas, “What do you want to do next?” John said he wanted to go into politics. “I’m thinking of running for city clerk,” he said.
Dad laughed out loud. “John,” he said, “Are you kidding? Why don’t you run for Congress?”
Well, that’s exactly what John did. While he taught politics at St. Mary’s College, across the highway from Notre Dame, he defeated the Indiana Third District’s Republican incumbent in 1958. And John Brademas served in Congress until he lost in the Reagan landslide of 1980.
“He would’ve been Speaker of the House,” said John Foley on election night 1980 (Foley replaced Brademas as House Majority Whip in 1981 and became Speaker in 1987).
So consider the checklist: High School Valedictorian: check. Harvard: check. Phi Beta Kappa: check. Magna Cum Laude: check. Rhodes Scholarship: check.
And Congress?
Well, not quite: The political lay of the land in the Hoosier State had changed. Pete was elected mayor, a job for which he discovered Harvard and Oxford had not prepared him well. But frankly, Pete may as well have run for city clerk, because it’s not Pete the Mayor but Pete the Purple Cow whose upside-down theology of Superior Sodomy sells so well on the coasts.
No, it’s not the rage in South Bend, or in Indiana, but Pete doesn’t care. Win or lose, Pete can’t go home again. John Brademas, Pete’s role model, didn’t go home either, except for the time that the city honored him by naming a Post Office after him (that was very apt, as a matter of fact: a government building named after one of his generation’s most prolific government spenders).
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, John said he was “touched.”
I’ve often wondered what might have happened if John Brademas had indeed run for city clerk. South Bend’s entire west side, where the Democrat Club has its huge Dingus Day celebration the day after Easter, might well have turned against him. The ethnic mix there was rich indeed, but their heritage wasn’t Greek like John’s. And how would City Clerk John Brademas have survived the departure of Studebaker from South Bend, so abruptly announced just before Christmas 1963?
We’ll never know. But as a junior congressman, John got more federal money into my hometown than we’d ever seen. And the gratitude just kept on giving, as John presided over federal spending that brought on the historic inflation of the seventies, as he rose ever higher in the leadership ranks of the Democrat Party.
The Once And Future Pete
Brademas won (after two tries). But Pete might not. So what will he do?
Well, Brademas became president of New York University, a natural for the man who had opened the federal floodgates to send billions of taxpayer finding to universities in the profligate sixties and seventies. And how did those institutions of higher learning reflect their gratitude? They lobbied Congress for more federal student loans for a broader swath of students, and raised their tuitions to astronomical levels while they gloated at the federal trough.
Pete has a future, but it’s in Washington. But why not academe? Brademas’ only shot at a faculty position as a freshly minted Rhodes Scholar was a spot as lecturer at St. Mary’s College, where he told me later that my sister had been his best student. But with his new-found fame, Pete might have a bright future at Notre Dame, where his father had taught as the country’s premier expert on Gramsci.
Right now Pete might actually be a perfect fit for the Golden Dome. Our Lady’s university is now vying with Georgetown to be the premier pro-homosexual LGBT-ETC college with a Catholic past in the country. I wouldn’t be surprised if today’s student body wouldn’t welcome him with open arms — in a figurative way of speaking, of course.