evidence: How Harvard Made Pete Buttigieg the Moderate That Progressives Love to Hate [...] He started in these elite environs as an untested academic. He ended as much an orator and operator, less theoretician, more fledgling politician. He railed against the timidity of the Democratic Party coming out of 2000, then embraced its safest, most centrist candidate in 2004. He spoke out against the Iraq invasion but would join a military becoming mired in two wars. The Buttigieg increasingly evident on the campaign trail today, politically liberal, tonally and temperamentally moderate, by predisposition an idealist and institutionalist but ultimately a pragmatist, came into sharp relief for the first time through what he did at Harvard.