Illustration: Ben Kirchner

The day I met Pete Buttigieg in his Washington, D.C., office in April, his morning had begun with an NPR interview conducted out of a van parked outside his house. His twins, who are not yet three, were up before 6:30 a.m., and their noise had already taken over. The early wake-up left no discernible impact on Buttigieg: He is the same indefatigable person he plays on TV — eerily intense eye contact, emphatic hand movements, crisp bullet points — a role he plays frequently as one of the Biden administration’s most ubiquitous surrogates. As Matthew Yglesias once