HANCOCK, N.H. — It’s a gorgeous day in the eye-squinting New Hampshire sunshine, a becoming natural setting for a 37-year-old candidate who seeks to embody youthful vigor and hope. Soon enough the Democratic mayor from the Midwest with the tongue-tying surname, Pete Buttigieg, appears before us. He sports snug-fitting blue jeans, a white long-sleeve shirt folded neatly up to the elbows and, for me, a genial decency reminiscent of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.”

“His mayoralty, it seems, has taught him a kind of patient interest in everyone. His focus on a questioner, whether at a country fair or in a college gymnasium, is canine in its intensity.”

You remember “Our Town,” don’t you? That canonical play from the 1930s that recorded the cycles of life in the unremarkable New England village of Grover’s Corners? Why, come to think of it, “Our Town” takes place in New Hampshire, too! Standing before us on a platform in the middle of rolling farmland, his silhouette framed by a red barn draped with the stars and stripes, the candidate seems as if he could indeed be a figure conjured out of Wilder’s imagination: a pleasant fellow of homespun virtues, the sort who would leap to help a little old lady cross a street.

Mayor Pete maintains a gentlemanly facade offstage. He’s preternaturally mild-mannered. In two days of watching him work New Hampshire crowds, from a meet-and-greet in a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in Manchester to a walking tour of downtown Lebanon and a boisterous college-town rally in Hanover, I never once saw the mask of calm come off. He never seems to get steamed up, rarely even raises his voice. Pete the Imperturbable. Read more via Washington Post