O’Rourke made no attempt to disguise his extremism during the campaign.
Like his funding, his ideas seemed to come straight from La-La-Land. He said he was open to the idea of abolishing ICE. He supports Medicare for All. He talked up gun control while opposing armed security officers in schools, an idea that enjoys 87 percent support in Texas. He praised NFL players who knelt during the national anthem. He openly called for impeaching President Trump, a position so tactically deranged that even Nancy Pelosi shies away from it. If he had simply pretended to swing right on such matters these past few months, he might have done what Barack Obama did: won over lots of moderates while liberals remained certain he was one of them. If you find yourself trying to win an election in Texas while swerving well left of Nancy Pelosi, you’ve become high on your own supply.
That’s the Democrats’ problem: They get so giddy about the next JFK that they don’t see the reality. Why should they? They live in enclaves where everyone is liberal. They get their information from media outlets in which illegal aliens are simply “migrants.” Within the bubble, everyone thought O’Rourke was a great candidate. The magazine profiles! The money pouring in from starstruck admirers! The shredding on a skateboard! The shredding on a guitar! By mid-October O’Rourke had raised an insane $70 million–plus and was outspending Cruz by two to one. Yet as a Politico pre-postmortem put it last weekend, “Democratic minds will want to know, what did he do with that $70 million? Why wasn’t he barraging persuadable Republicans with mail and phone calls and door knocks? . . . Did he consciously avoid playing on their issues, determining it was more profitable for his political future to lose as a liberal than compete as a moderate?”
Well, possibly. Could the Democrats really think they would fool the voters by repeating their 2006 pose as right-leaning moderates only to become Nancy Pelosi’s crash-test dummies?