“Does Running a City of 100,000 People Make you Presidential Material?” ran the headline on the January 11 New York Times piece by Matt Flegenheimer. No clear answers emerged from other mayors, but “voters tend to find Buttigieg compelling for reasons other than the job he held.”

For one thing, he is an “openly gay” candidate, but with midwestern roots, plus a “military background.” Flegenheimer does not get into Pete Buttigieg’s high-profile progressive pedigree.

As Emily Larsen and Joseph Simonson noted in the Washington Examiner last April,  “The father of Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was a Marxist professor who spoke fondly of the Communist Manifesto and dedicated a significant portion of his academic career to the work of Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, an associate of Vladimir Lenin.”

s the authors note, the Malta-born Joseph Buttigieg, a longtime professor at Notre Dame, was an advisor to Rethinking Marxism and authored a paper critical of Human Rights Watch. Joseph Buttigieg also covered a celebration of the Communist Manifesto for the Chronicle of Higher Education. The senior Buttigieg was a disciple of Antonio Gramsci who was “all about applying Marxist theory to culture and cultural institutions.”  In other words, forget the workers and instead launch a long march to capture the command posts of the culture.

Last February in The Nation, Sara Marcus canvassed Notre Dame colleagues to learn what “insights” Joe’s “scholarship and politics might yield about Pete.” Like his father he was smart, and some cited Joe’s “genuine, powerful strain of social justice.” Son Pete was on record about “campaign themes of freedom, democracy, and security” but like his father he was not an ideologue and all told, “a politician worth watching.”

Those who had been watching Pete Buttigieg had different take. Over at PJ Media, Jim Treacher was puzzled by Buttigieg’s concept of freedom.

“We’ve allowed our conservative friends to get a monopoly on the idea of freedom,” Buttigieg explained last year. “Now, they care about freedom, but they care about a very specific kind of freedom. Freedom from. Freedom from regulation. As though government were the only thing that can make us unfree.” Therefore, “don’t let anybody tell you that the other side is the side that’s got a handle on freedom. We are the party of freedom, and we shouldn’t be afraid to go out there and say it.”

As Treacher wondered, “So freedom means getting things from the government? Freedom means everybody has to approve of, if not actively participate in, your personal choices?” To Buttigieg, being “free” means, “the government taking care of you from cradle to grave. As a fellow Hoosier, I was taken aback by how much Mayor Pete sounds like a damn communist.” The Democrat “sounds like a chip off the ol’ Eastern Bloc to me. He’s basically a younger, more polished version of Bernie Sanders. That’s what the kids are into these days, right?”

Sanders’ “rights” to free college, free health care and such come right out of the 1936 Stalin Constitution. For all his talk of Denmark, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the place where Sanders actually showed up. Democrat candidates who never made the trip still sign on to Sanders-style socialism, and Democrats show special fondness for Stalinists like Harry Bridges.

He was a leading Communist and Soviet agent, but Nancy Pelosi celebrated the “progressive” union boss in the Congressional Record. In similar style, Pelosi touts Vincent Hallinan, the Communist-backed “progressive” party candidate in 1952, and last Thanksgiving inspired the Speaker to recall strumming Stalinist Pete Seeger.

For his part, the author of Dreams from My Father got instant credibility in Chicago, where his beloved “Frank” made a name for himself. As the Dreams author acknowledged, Frank was Frank Marshall Davis, a dutiful African American Stalinist who spent his life defending all-white Communist dictatorships.

In similar style, Joe Buttigieg championed Antonio Gramsci’s tactics as the best path to socialism. Son Pete shares his father’s leftist concept of freedom, and in some ways his candidacy is a throwback to 2008.

The candidate calling himself Barack Obama postured as someone who could unite blacks and whites. According to his “narrator” David Axelrod, those critical of Obama and his policies are racists.

Openly gay Pete Buttigieg is a kind of homobama, presumably capable of uniting gays and straights. As Jim Treacher noted, Pete Buttigieg sports an automatic defense mechanism similar to the Dreams author.

“Everything you just read is homophobic,” Treacher wrote, “because Buttigieg is gay and we’re not allowed to criticize him. I apologize for my hate speech, and I promise it won’t happen again today, probably.”

According to official biographer David Garrow, Dreams from My Father was a novel and the author a “composite character.” Even so, the composite character became president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world.

Progressive Pete Buttigieg, aspires to the same office and, as he told National Public Radio, “none of the candidates for the presidency right now has been president, except one, Donald Trump, who I think is the least qualified of all.” As President Trump says, we’ll have to wait and see what happens on November 3.