It was an early December evening on Capitol Hill, and Pete Buttigieg needed help. As friends milled around his home for a dinner party with former top aides to his presidential campaign, the transportation secretary was deep in the chaos of a one-on-two bath time with his potty-training toddler twins. Bath time in the Buttigieg household is Pete’s moment — he typically dons a bathing suit or gym shorts to enter the splash zone and often sings a self-penned song called “Bath Time Is the Best Time of the Day” — but on this particular night, things were starting to get out of hand. “Hey love, can I get some backup?” he yelled to his husband, Chasten.
Lis Smith, who had been Pete’s top media adviser in 2020 and was there that evening, remembers thinking how striking it was to see “someone who would gaggle in Norwegian on the campaign trail or could recall entire poems and recite them to a reporter in the car … cry uncle during bath time.” Smith, who recently had a child of her own, told me, “There was sometimes a perception of Pete that he was Mr. Perfect and that everything did come a little too easily to him. So there is something new and different seeing him sort of struggle like the rest of us with the challenges of child-rearing.”
The Pete Buttigieg who called for backup was indeed a changed man — more willing to acknowledge he needed help, yes, but also differently disposed toward politics and power than the hyper-confident small-city mayor that America first got to know in 2019. According to Pete, his husband and a dozen people who have known him for years, parenthood has altered everything from the kind of future he wants for himself to the say-yes-to-every-invitation attitude that helped him climb to the top rungs of American politics. “I’m more attuned to all of the different ways you can have a good life, only some of which involve public life,” he told me recently over lunch near the Department of Transportation’s headquarters in Washington.