Beto O'Rourke

The theater kids are at it again. The Texas Democratic party is engaged in yet another performative act of resistance – one perhaps less embarrassing than the likes of Representative Greg Casar's iconic nine-hour "thirst strike," but far more damaging to Texans in the moment. The decision by more than 50 Texas representatives to flee the state for the climes of California, New York and Illinois rather than confront the realities of their political margins doesn't just act as a grandstanding method of opposition to a redistricting policy that would stand to Republicans' benefit – it also is holding up the legislative response to the recent flooding disaster, something of significant need to the damaged communities.

The New York Times and the Washington Post sent up flares last weekend: one way or another, they said, Joe Biden is on borrowed time. The last man standing who ended up the answer to Anyone But Trump turned out so inadequate for the job that Deep State media gave him a vote of no confidence and said he should go. The Times wrote a scathing summary of What Everyone Knows: that Biden at 79 is a wreck. In their words, the man "is testing the boundaries of age and the presidency." He can barely walk unassisted. He has zombie moments on stage. He is fully dependent on wife Jill to nudge him onward, redirect him, get him back on the TelePrompTer — and even then he will read anything there, including stage directions, Ron Burgundy-like. Not a pretty picture.

When we focus on the rise of the Hispanic male Republican, we overlook the emergence of his consort and counterpart, the right-wing Latina. Donald Trump made gains across the board with Hispanics in the 2020 election, but the media fixated on “multiracial whiteness” and “toxic masculinity” in the voting choices of Hispanic men. Meanwhile, Trump gained more votes between 2016 and 2020 among Hispanic women than any other sector of the electorate. The woke tell themselves that Hispanic men, with their supposed chauvinism and machismo, control the lives and voting choices of the Latina. But the opposite is the case. The Latina, with her preternatural seduction skills, holds the power in the relationship. If her curves sway to the right, the men, as they always do, will follow along.

Every politician who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is the height of inauthenticity. Fortunately for lovers of comedy, many politicians are too stupid and too full of themselves to notice this. Every election year, another squad marches hopelessly into the enfilade of the inauthenticity firing line. Think of Bush I visiting the National Grocers Association Convention in Florida back in 1992. Bush ambled towards an exhibit where a new type of checkout scanner was the hallowed attraction. The fancy device could read torn barcodes and weigh groceries.

Would the Democrats be better off losing the presidency in 2020 and winning the Senate? If you think that the economy is headed for a crash, then Democrats would prosper from having Donald Trump in office to shoulder the blame. In holding both houses of Congress, they could successfully stymie Trump and head towards impeachment. Winning the presidency but losing the Senate, by contrast, might well be an exercise in futility. The grandiose legislation that most of the Democratic candidates for the presidency, apart from former VP Joe Biden, are proposing would be snuffed out. But a trifecta would be even better, putting the Democrats in the same position that the GOP enjoyed for the first two years of the Trump presidency.

Remember Betomania? It seems an age away, yet just three months ago, Beto O’Rourke was still being hailed as the Democratic messiah. There was all that gush about how his campaign in Texas inspired the country, even though he lost. There was the mad drooling over his Medium and Instagram posts. There was that appalling, emetic Vanity Fair cover through which he revealed he was running: ‘I was born to be in it.’ There was that competing rally with Trump on the Texan border, where he stood for openness as opposed to bigotry.He was cool, he was cute, he was impeccably progressive on issues such as climate change, gun control and LGBTQ rights. But he wasn’t too dangerously threateningly left to freak out the elites.

At this point, we can relegate the admonitions and advisories to the small print reserved for the disclaimers about possible side effects on bottles of medicine and past-performance-is-no-guarantee-of-returns notices on mutual-fund prospectuses. Sure, it is possible that Donald Trump will lose the presidential election in 2020. It is also possible that he will choose not to run. Many things are possible. But as I have explained in these virtual pages — taking care to post those cautionary bulletins — it is likely that Donald Trump will run again for the presidency in 2020 and it is very likely that he will win and win by a much larger margin than his victory in 2016. I set forth my thoughts on the subject at the end of March.

Let’s be honest – the best part of primary season is seeing just how wild some of the fringe candidates are. Every election cycle throws up a few quixotic single-issue mavericks without a hope in hell of actually securing the nomination. Such campaigns are usually admirable attempts to force concessions from more viable contenders or shift the debate on some key issue or another – standard politicking. Somewhat more unorthodox is the campaign of Mike Gravel – the ex-politician who doesn’t want anyone to vote for him at all. Mike Gravel, former congressman and senator from Alaska has been politically reincarnated by David Oks, a high-school senior who is now serving as his campaign manager.

For all that progressives hate Donald Trump’s policies, his tax cuts and his travel bans, nothing has been more outrageous to them than his personality: his boorishness; his bullying; his unshakeable satisfaction with his white, male, wealthy self. That’s why Democratic candidates have approached the next presidential election with the single-minded purpose of not being Donald Trump. Their policies are not like his, but more significantly they are not like him. If he is insulting they are civil. If he is obnoxious they are respectful. If he is reactionary they are progressive. If he is uncaring they are empathetic.The problem, though, as these candidates will learn, is that you cannot just be not-Trump. You must be something else.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘charisma’ as ‘compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others’ – how fortunate then that the Democrats have been blessed with two exceptionally charismatic 2020 candidates in Beto O’Rourke and Andrew Yang. The candidacies of Beto and Yang are especially intriguing as they represent a pitch to the American people delivered from two opposing ends of the charisma spectrum. Beto is the hyper-sanitized, telegenic, photogenic, focus-group optimized old-money Texan who, as he says himself, was born to be in it. He’s also physically attractive, which counts in politics. This was true for John F.

Beto O’Rourke is many things. But he is definitely not a fighter. And that’s why it would be a huge mistake for the Democrats to nominate him to take on President Trump in 2020 for the White House. Simply put, Beto cannot beat Donald Trump. Someone else, maybe. But not Trump. It’s not Beto’s fault he’s not a fighter. After all, he’s led a very charmed, privileged life as a white male. He’s faced very little adversity. He didn’t come from nothing. He didn’t have to fight and scrape his way to the top because of his gender or race or economic circumstances. He has no experience doing battle in high-stakes business or leading tough negotiations. He hasn’t ever fought for working people in contentious situations.

Beto O’Rourke is about to launch a presidential campaign off the back of a failed Senate bid. He’s not the first to do so – Abraham Lincoln famously followed exactly that path to the White House. But nobody else is Lincoln, and Beto is hardly anyone at all: as a contender for the 2020 Democratic nomination, he’s the ‘not’ candidate. He’s not the most electable. He’s not the most left-wing. He’s not a woman or a minority. He’s not the most wonkish candidate. He’s not the most loyal to the party – that’s supposedly part of his appeal, the notion that he’ll pick up Republican votes. But obviously enough, he’s not going to be the most Republican candidate on the ballot in November 2020.

It will be a delicious irony when the 2020 Democratic nominee ends up being another rich white dude. Picture the scene in July next year, at the party’s National Convention in Milwaukee. After all the talk of a new, rich diversity, after all the noisy women candidates have canceled each other, after Cory Booker’s self-righteousness sets itself on fire, and after the superdelegates figured out another way to block Bernie Sanders, the Democrats have done the dumb thing and plumped for Beto O’Rourke. He gives a tiresome, Obama-lite oration on the need to put history back on track and rediscover a spirit of open-borderness. He gives the second half of the speech in Spanish. The media sings his praises.