Pete Buttigieg Spent His Younger Days Pushing Democrats Off Middle Ground
When Pete Buttigieg arrived in England, he was a curious, bookish 23-year old known to his friends as Peter.
The year was 2005. The Iraq War, unpopular among Buttigieg's college peers, was raging with no end in sight. John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president, had lost the 2004 election to an increasingly unpopular Republican president.
And Democrats, like Buttigieg, were soul searching.
"It felt like a pretty dark moment," said Dan Weeks, one of Buttigieg's friends from Oxford who now lives in New Hampshire and is active in Democratic politics in that early nominating state. They were eager, Weeks said, to find like-minded progressives who were not "content with the 'Clinton Third Way' status quo that had defined the Democratic Party for basically our lifetimes."
The Third Way refers to the moderate
