Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.In May 2001, at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, a 19-year-old freshman named Peter Buttigieg asked David Gergen, a Harvard professor and horse whisperer to five presidents, a question that he might have reserved for himself, a couple of decades later. Peter (he had not yet transformed into “Pete,” let alone “Mayor Pete”) said he loved The West Wing but could feel the idealism reflected in the show slipping away from politics in real life. “The presidency has now devolved into what’s called ‘the MBA White House,’ or ‘the corporate model,’” he said, with the plaintive tone of a child asking about the spirit of Christmas. “Is that magic really gone forever?”Last summer, by the shore of the Grand Traverse Bay in northern Michigan, I told Buttigieg that I remembered that kind of fresh-faced idealism from my own time as a Harvard student. It was earnest; it was ambitious; it kind of made me want to barf. Lust for power—that, I understood, and I recognized it in many of our classmates. (We overlapped briefly, but I didn’t know Buttigieg.) But the combination of naked ambition, absence of cynicism, and a sunny disposition seemed awfully suspicious. I always felt there was something odd about the undergraduates who haunted the IOP, Harvard’s convalescent home for politicians recently defeated in politics or retired from it. How could you trust students who, rather than getting laid or drunk with their peers, spent their free time at office hours with former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman? Buttigieg said he knew what I was talking about. “It could be a Puritan, self-effacing thing,” he told me, “where you’re not supposed to admit that you view yourself as the person who would want to do that.” (Even the phrasing—do that—made politics sound like an unnatural act.) The students with aspirations to high office knew that idealism and ambition put off a lot of people. The Harvard Crimson, he remembered, called all of the IOP kids and asked why they wanted to be president someday. “Almost all the IOPers were savvy enough not to respond,” he said. “You’re supposed to act as if you never even dimly suspected that you might run for office, until the moment you announce your campaign.” (Of the students who answered the reporter’s call, only one has held elected office—a term on the… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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