Among other things, the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries produced their fair share of flash-in-the-pan candidacies — some of which flamed out before a single vote could ever be cast. Beto O’Rourke, at least for a few weeks, was well on his way to becoming the next Bobby Kennedy; Kirsten Gillibrand was at one time an inevitable front-runner; Kamala Harris, meanwhile, was going to build an unstoppable juggernaut on the back of viral debate moments and televised one-liners. Much of this, of course, was just wishful thinking or bad punditry. But the whole affair nonetheless revealed something instructive about the perceived currency of celebrity in twenty-first-century Democratic politics.

Given what the final result actually was, one might think liberal strategists and consultants would wise up to the idea that said currency often has very limited practical value: a dozen or so ephemeral candidacies later and the likes of viral debate moments and glossy magazine profiles had failed to make the race anything more than a left-right contest between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. When all was said and done, ideology had a lot more weight than celebrity, and Biden — the utterly conventional and familiar former senator and vice president — beat back not only Sanders but a whole cavalcade of flashy media darlings auditioning to be the 2020 version of Barack Obama. Whatever currency celebrity may have in politics, it’s apparently separate from electoral success.

If the ambient gossip about who might succeed Biden is any indication, that lesson has clearly failed to stick. In this respect, the lengthy profile of Pete Buttigieg recently published by CNN is emblematic: more or less taking as a given the idea that a hypothetical contest between the secretary of transportation and Vice President Harris will likely decide the future of the Democratic Party. The piece shows the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, in high demand as campaigns across the country call in surrogates to stump ahead of next month’s midterms. Buttigieg, or so it seems, is now second only to President Biden himself in terms of such requests — an unusual development given his relatively junior role in cabinet and lack of elected experience beyond his stint in local government.