Pete Buttigieg’s Iowa surge could be the start of a new chapter of hope in the US presidential race

Something very peculiar and equally wonderful seems to be growing in the United States.

It is no more than a tiny seed. It may not flower into Pete Buttigieg being the Democrat nominee for the White House, let alone being inaugurated, the day after his 39th birthday, as the youngest ever president.

But if it did, breaking 40 wouldn’t be the only or toughest glass ceiling he smashes. According to the latest polling from Iowa, the first state to choose its Democratic contender on 3 February, a gay man leads the field by a wide margin.

One poll bears little predictive weight, and one small state is a poor guide to a long, attritional national campaign. But the Iowa numbers are sensational and early momentum can mean a lot in the primaries.

On 25 per cent, Buttigieg is ahead of Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders by way more than the margin of error.

Until now, the political status of the Indiana mayor has been restricted to comic relief. In Parks And Recreation, the enchanting Amy Poehler sitcom, the three referenced mayors of Pawnee, Indiana, are 1) a wildly corrupt figure who was thrown out of a helicopter by a drug cartel; 2) a waxwork, played in his coffin by Bill Murray, who posthumously confesses on video that he never had a clue what was going on; and 3) local government superschlub Jerry Gergich, a morbidly obese office whipping boy given the job after the latter’s death because no one else would touch it.

Well, no one’s not laughing at Mayor Pete. Suddenly, he looks a deadly serious contender.

I know, I know, it’s verging on the unimaginable that a candidate from an oppressed minority with a distinctly foreign-sounding name (there are roughly 973 pronunciations; his is Boot-Edge-Edge) could be elected to lead a nation that tends to the reactionary.

Yet Barack Hussein Obama appears to think otherwise. He hasn’t come out for him, and probably won’t endorse anyone during the primary season. But he talent-spotted Buttigieg as far back as 2004, when he tried to hire him for his senatorial campaign, and did recruit him for his presidential run four years later. His chief strategist David Axelrod has lavished enough praise on Buttigieg to hint that he is Obama’s private pick to take on Donald Trump.

Spend a few minutes with Mayor Pete on YouTube, and you’ll understand the appeal. Whether by conviction or possibly because minority candidates have to avoid scaring the horses, Buttigieg is an unthreatening pragmatic centrist in the Obama mould.

He lacks Obama’s forensic genius (who doesn’t?), but he has a dash of charisma and delivers long, fluent, unfolksy paragraphs in a reassuring baritone. He’s very smart (Harvard and Oxford; speaks seven languages), but avoids coming across as class swot.

And the back story looks almost perfect. He took a leave of absence from being mayor of South Bend, Indiana, to serve as a naval officer in Afghanistan. His medals, for disrupting terrorist cells, would contrast cutely with the bare lapels of President Draft Dodger von Bonespurs.

He is that rare creatures in US politics – an out and proud Christian from whom Jesus wouldn’t recoil in vomitous disgust. Recently married, he hopes to start a family. One can only speculate on his chances if his spouse’s ovaries were the preferred conduit.

It isn’t clear to what extent his sexual orientation is an obstacle to a match-up against the huckster almost twice his age.

He polls dismally with black voters. But while there is some evidence of greater resistance to gay marriage among black voters than white, it would be glibly racist to explain his unpopularity in such stark terms.

In his earliest days as mayor, Buttigieg fired a black police chief in a peremptory manner that didn’t endear him to the community, and never recovered from that.

He will need to now if he is to take out the only other centrist in the race, Biden, who has that crucial demographic in his corner.

There are other weaknesses. He speaks engagingly about reclaiming godliness for the “religious left”, from the hateful clutches of the evangelical right. But he has avoided detailed policy commitments in favour of generalities.

In this race, hitting the front is unusually fraught with danger. Kamala Harris, who has vanished almost entirely, Biden and Warren have all stumbled after going odds-on. Now that he is a clear and present danger to the latter two and the other old-timer, Bernie Sanders, he cannot coast on upbeat verities.

Any one of the septuagenarians could win from here, as could a late gatecrasher. But so, if he takes Iowa and is competitive in New Hampshire, could Buttigieg.

Given that his native rust belt will be the decisive battleground, and the revival for centrism (in recent state elections Republicans have been ousted by centrist rather than radical Democrats), he may be the right guy at the right moment to take down the tangerine kraken.

Astonishing as it will sound, long shot though it remains, his Parks And Recreation template might just be Adam Scott’s Ben Wyatt, who Buttigieg mildly resembles. He became a rust belt town’s mayor at 18 and made a catastrophic start, but implicitly ends the series as president.

“It is audacious, almost obscene, for someone my age to feel they belong in that office,” said Buttigieg of the Oval, and so perhaps it is. Yet in the arena of obscenity the incumbent stands alone – and anyone with the beating of him will be forgiven what another unlikely candidate knew as the audacity of hope.