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But the overarching theme of his speech, and the argument for his candidacy, I heard over and over from people who were there, was change. He could make that case partly because of something his friends had called The Proposal.

I remember there being a faction, said Heather Woodruff Grizzle, naming Sitaraman and Warrenand Joe Green, too, the gregarious, Hawaiian shirt-wearing roommate of then unknown Mark Zuckerberg. And then there was Buttigieg. Peter, Ganesh and Previn came forward with The Proposal, a student who also was heavily involved with the IOP told me.

This proposal advocated essentially for more open, less cliquish elections and ramped-up student say-so and power within the structure of the IOPless busywork and fewer administrative chores, more reading and writing and assisting staff and professors on research. The manifesto, which had circulated to acclaim from some but the exasperation of others, contributed to the reputations of its authors. Ganesh, Previn and Joe were all sort of agents of change, so to speak, said Jason Semine. And Buttigieg, I was told, was with them.

As much as he was aligned, though, with the ringleaders of this reform effort, Buttigieg wasnt seen as an agitator. He was lauded by nearly everybody at the IOP, then and now, for his deliberative, understated nature. He was, though, a believer in a more head-down inside game. In the run-up to the vote for leadership of SAC, Buttigieg displayed his talent for that inside game by approaching Seminethe forum committee chair who by virtue of that role had a relationship with a lot of underclassmen. In other words: persuadables. And he wasnt hiding the ball here, Semine said of Buttigieg. He was pretty clear: Hey, Ive got this election, I need to drum up votes For Semine, who knew Buttigieg well, it was unexpected, and pretty savvy, he said.

This, people thought, was pretty savvy, too: When it came time to pick a running mate, Buttigieg pivoted away from the lefty, rabble-rousing connotations of The Proposal. Betsy Sykes was a Republican. The cross-party-lines pairing wasnt that unusualthese were nonpartisan elections, and Tuckers vice president was Woodruff Grizzle, also a Republicanbut what else Sykes brought was her status as the chair of the fellows committee, another one of the primary leadership feeders. Having Betsy as his running mate I think very much helped, said Jonathan Chavez. Now, in the rough contours of this tight-knit electorate, Buttigieg had the votes to his leftplus more than he would have had to his right.

Buttigieg, too, was liked by the staff. The adult professionals who ran the operations of the IOP didnt have SAC votes. But thats not to say their approval didnt carry some weight. And Buttigieg could be a measured intermediary between the two groups.

You had all these really smart kids around you who had every idea in the world, and he was always somebody I could go talk to, to try and get a good read on what was accurate and what was not accurate in terms of what we were likely to face.

- Dan Glickman, former Kansas congressman and director of Institute of Politics in early 2000s

You had all these really smart kids around you who had every idea in the world, and he was always somebody I could go talk to, to try and get a good read on what was accurate and what was not accurate in terms of what we were likely to face, Dan Glickman, the former congressman from Kansas who by then was the director of the IOP, told me. Cathy and I used to talk about that, said Glickman, referring to Cathy McLaughlin, then the executive director of the IOP, now the executive director for the Biden Institute. Whenever we had an issue, shed say, Well, go talk to Pete.

Buttigiegs opponent in the election, meanwhile, was Caroline Adler, kind of like a Hillary Clinton type, said Houseintelligent, industrious, ultra-prepared. Tracy Flick, said Chavez. Since Harvard, Adler, now Adler Morales, has worked for Clinton (on her 2008 presidential campaign and in the State Department) and for Michelle Obama (in the White House and still as her communications director). In December 2002, she was the favorite going in, Tucker said. But Buttigieg won, and Adler, according to a close friend, was devastated. Her allies stewed about unjust gender dynamics at work. She was ambitious, and showed it, and that was and remains, they said, dicier for a woman than for a man. Buttigieg, they said, along with pretty much everybody else I talked to for this story, was equally ambitious. He was just more subtle about it.

His first full month in his new position, at a forum with Senator Ted Kennedy, Buttigieg again approached the standing mic. Forum regulars had come to expect from Buttigieg a certain something.

I was responsible for a thousand graduate students, said Joseph McCarthy, a Kennedy School dean at the time, but I still noticed Peter, which is rare. He would ask very searching questions and yet do it very respectfully and thoughtfully and seemed older than his years.

You could hear the commas and the semicolons, said McCarthys wife, Marina McCarthy, a Democratic consultant.

Sen. Edward Kennedy during the Sept. 2003 dedication of the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum of Public Affairs at the Harvard JFK School of Government. | Getty Images

Here Buttigieg faced Kennedy. It feels like a lot of your colleagues have adopted a posture of being for whatever the Republicans are for, only less, he said (around 51:30). The tax cutsjust a smaller oneand the warjust maybe not quite as quick as the Republican war. And then there are voices like your own, which are more forceful in opposition. I wonder if you see this as a split in the Democratic Party, and how you think, politically speaking, in the next few years your partys going to sort out what it thinks the meaning of opposition is.

Well, Kennedy responded, I would certainly expect that those differences would be clearerI think they are getting cleareras time goes on, certainly with regards to the involvement in Iraq.

That certainly was true for Buttigieg. Opposition to him on this front meant standing up and speaking out. In the middle of March, a week before the invasion of Iraq, he gave a speech to some 350 people in front of the Science Center at an Emergency Anti-War Rally.

Major events during Buttigieg's junior year at Harvard: the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the fall of Saddam Hussein. | Getty Images

Bush wants us to remember American security but forget that there might be consequences to American security if we alienate all of our allies, Buttigieg said, according to coverage in the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. He pointed to the signature spire of nearby Memorial Church, where names of alums killed in action are carved in marble. They remind us of a time, he said, when we had to take up arms against another nation, and there may be a day we have to again, but that day isnt today.

It was a riskparticularly, perhaps, for anybody at all interested in a future run for elected office. It was not a consensus view on the campus, Semine said. A lot of our peers shared it, but it was not consensus.

What it was, too, was another something neweven for the people who knew Buttigieg the best.

That was probably the first time I saw him speak in public, roommate Pete Schwartzstein said. And he definitely took on a different personalike a very commanding tone.

The thing he could do, which most of the sort of intellectuals at Harvard couldnt, was that if he ever needed to give a speech, or summon himself for a public moment, he was just extraordinarily good at it.

- Brian Goldsmith, friend of Buttigieg at Harvard

He was able to kind of straddle two worlds, said Brian Goldsmith, a friend who was a year younger than Buttigieg (and popped up the other day on his list of bundlers). One world was the very academic, intellectual world but then the other thing he could do, which most of the sort of intellectuals at Harvard couldnt, was that if he ever needed to give a speech, or summon himself for a public moment, he was just extraordinarily good at it.

It was, thought Previn Warren, a watershed moment.

The summer before his senior year, Buttigieg was a research assistant for Harvard Kennedy School professor David King for a paper that would run in a book called Lights, Camera, Campaign! When I look back on the students I have had, King said when I met with him recently in his office, he stands out as one of a handful. Like its a very, very, very small number. Truly outstanding. Really something. And you knew it within the first few days of spending time with him. The paper Buttigieg helped King with dealt with Gores campaign in 2000 and specifically a whistle-stop bus-and-boat trip he took down the Mississippi River. Buttigieg crunched numbers from polls and campaign finance data that showed it helped Gore win Iowa and Wisconsin. Kind of interesting, King said with a smile, that we wrote a paper about traveling through Iowa and generating votes.

On and around campus that fall, Buttigieg and his roommates downed bottles of Sam Adams while rooting for the still-cursed Red Sox as they almost beat the hated Yankees in the baseball playoffs. At the same time, Buttigieg and his IOP mates followed along intently as Democrats mounted runs for president.

Onstage at a 2004 Democratic primary debate: former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, retired Gen. Wesley Clark, Al Sharpton, Sen. John Kerry, Sen. John Edwards, Sen. Joe Lieberman and Rep. Dennis Kucinich. At right: Kerry and President Bush shake hands during a debate in the fall of 2004. | Getty Images

That years accelerating Democratic primary was not dissimilar to this years, a big, unwieldy fieldalbeit with only nine candidatesvying to oust an Oval Office occupant who had lost the popular vote and was seen by party aspirants and their supporters as inept and unfit. Buttigieg watched all the candidates come through the IOP for televised sit-downs with MSNBCs Chris Matthews, from John Edwards to John Kerry to Al Sharpton to Dick Gephardt to Howard Dean. Buttigeg asked Gephardt a question about the youth vote. He lamented in conversations with King in his office the mealy-mouthed way in which Kerry had talked about his faith in a debate. In spite of that, though, and even though his stance on the war might have made him more simpatico with Dean than with Kerry, Buttigieg opted nonetheless to support the Massachusetts senator.

He was liberal, Brian Goldsmith said, but he was an institutionalist. And he was pragmatic. And I do remember him thinking Kerry would be a much better choice for Democrats than Howard Dean in 2004.

In classrooms and libraries, Buttigieg worked to cap what would prove to be his Rhodes-worthy rsum, earning a perfect score on a project in professor Alyssa Goodmans class, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The title of his project? Young People and Politics. Goodman remembers Buttigieg well. Very serious, she told me. Very disciplined.

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How Harvard Made Pete Buttigieg the Moderate That Progressives Love to Hate - POLITICO