In the 2020 primaries, Donald Trump said that Mayo Pete looks like Alfred E. Neuman (which is devastatingly accurate), and Pete countered that he'd never heard of Alfred E. Neuman and it "must be an old person thing." That was incredibly weird to me, because I'm younger than Pete Buttigieg and I know who Alfred E. Neuman is.
It seems like there's three possibilities: One is that Pete does know who Alfred E. Neuman is, and his retort was simply try-hard and pathetic. Another possibility is that Pete does not know who Alfred E. Neuman is because he's been such a careerist psycho his whole life that he knows nothing but the most basic of pop culture references and whatever his staffers tell him about. The third possibility is that I'm unusual in my age cohort for knowing Alfred E. Neuman. My friends and I read Mag Magazine as kids, but we were nerds, and it may have been well past the heyday when Mad was a universal cultural touchstone for kids.
i'm two years older than that pod person and i totally know. i think mad magazine was something kids who went to convenience stores in the late 80s/early 90s unsupervised would know about. pete seems like his entire existence before the age of 20 was some kind of daily stage-managed romp through political career incubators and society tutelage before retiring to a special bath where a silent old woman would bath him in buttermilk for 45 minutes and then lay out cheese cubes for him to snack on while watching taped interviews with Henry Kissenger.
i don't think pete knows what anything is, except as it can be handed to him on an index card by a bodyman.