Top-polling, openly gay Democratic Presidential candidate Peter Buttigieg, Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, addressed a crowd of hundreds at Provincetown Town Hall yesterday.
He spoke first at a free public event, playing the warm-up act for the LGBT youth program Camp Lightbulb’s variety show, before attending a local fundraiser. He also made some surprise appearances, including at one at a local gallery where he posed beside of large portrait of himself by Provincetown artist Jo Hay.
At the Town Hall event, reported the Boston Globe:
Buttigieg — one of the top-polling candidates in the crowded 2020 Democratic presidential primary — fielded questions from audience members that focused on issues like climate change, improving the lives of LGBTQ individuals, and attacking President Donald Trump’s administration at the event in the Cape Cod fishing and vacation town that has long been a haven for the LGBTQ community.
Without naming the president once, Buttigieg took the opportunity Friday to argue that those opposed to the Trump administration are “probably underreacting” to the seriousness of the moment and its potential for changing the course of the country.
“What it all adds up to is that it will fall to us, all of us who are alive and making decisions in this moment in American history, to decide what the rest of our lifetimes will look like,” Buttigieg said. “To decide in the next three or four years, what the next 30 or 40 are going to hold.”
Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten Buttigieg, introduced the candidate and said Provincetown was “not a bad place to celebrate Friday night.”
Perhaps the loudest applause of the night came after a question from the audience about how to balance being both gay and a Christian.
“If you got a problem with how I was made, then you got a problem with my maker,” Buttigieg told the crowd, who erupted into claps and cheers.
The 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., is no stranger to the Boston area, having honed his vision for the Democratic party at Harvard University with a group of like-minded students who called themselves “The Order of the Kong” after the Chinese food restaurant in Harvard Square.
In the span of months, Buttigieg has gone from being a little-known mayor to a strong contender for the Democratic nomination for president, competing against candidates who have far more experience in public life than he does.
Buttigieg — a Rhodes Scholar and former intelligence officer for the Navy Reserves — was fourth behind former vice president Joe Biden, and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in a recent Iowa poll, and fifth in a national poll of Democrats released by Quinnipiac this week.
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