Buttigieg and El-Sayed Are Teaching Democrats to Speak Republican

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

When I first met and spent time with Pete Buttigieg a decade ago, he gave me a vocabulary lesson.

He was then 34, in the first year of his second term as mayor of South Bend, Ind., and a flyspeck on the national political scene. But he was going places — I was sure of it. I was even surer when he explained his frustration with the word “freedom.”

He hated how Republicans had claimed it. He hated how Democrats had let them. That contrast perpetuated the fiction that government regulations, social spending and........

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