Aside from building out campaign staff and using paid media to further increase his name-ID, Buttigieg has a chance to expand upon his generational change idea. In doing so, he can lay down a critique of the baby boom generation of politicians that includes most of his competitors.

First is financial corruption, a vulnerability for President Trump but also for Democratic politicians who have done very little when they were in office. “No,” he should remind us, is a complete sentence. That means for those in public office no gifts, no emoluments, no business holdings, no active investments (i.e. everything in a blind trust), no secret meetings with lobbyists, no nepotism, no conflicts of interest and no lobbyist jobs for five years after office.

Second, Buttigieg’s most memorable line was “I was born to make myself useful.” We are all, or should be. He’s the perfect figure to push for a voluntary national service plan akin to ROTC. The country pays for your college; you pay it back in domestic service. If ever we needed places to foster national purpose and break down geographic, racial and socioeconomic barriers, now’s the time.

Third, remarkably no one in the field has picked up on the elite college scandal. It’s time to cajole elite universities into diversifying their admissions so that 60 percent of the kids aren’t from the top 1 percent. It’s time institutions sitting on billions in endowments get pushed them to cut or drastically reduce tuition or lose their tax-exempt status. Meanwhile, employers who require a college diploma for jobs that clearly don’t need one, thereby disproportionately hurting nonwhites (i.e. constitute discrimination under an adverse impact theory), should face legal consequences under Title VII’s anti-discrimination provisions. In short, expand college for those who want it; remove where possible college as a barrier to employment.