Remember when Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke ran for president? You might not, there’s a lot of other stuff going on these days. But he did! He started strong, with a Vanity Fair cover and everything. All the people who were excited about Beto losing to Ted Cruz started getting excited about him losing to Trump.
But for months now, Beto has been trailing his younger, smarter, gayer rival Pete Buttigieg in the polls. The Under-50 White Guy lane is too crowded. Beto’s presidential aspirations have gone from “unlikely” to “very unlikely.” Things have not been going well.
And you know what that means. It’s time for a campaign reset!
Beto O’Rourke introduced himself to the country as a changed candidate on Thursday, with his presidential campaign recast as a moral crusade against President Trump in the aftermath of a mass shooting in El Paso, his hometown.
Mr. O’Rourke… said he would abandon the relatively traditional approach he has so far taken — with limited success…
Instead, Mr. O’Rourke said he would now plan his political activities around confronting Mr. Trump in direct and personal terms, and highlighting what Mr. O’Rourke views as the injustices of Mr. Trump’s administration.
If you weren’t excited about the Beto campaign before, I’ll sure bet you are now.
Here’s a clip of his speech this morning. At first I thought it was a deepfake — there’s a creepy “uncanny valley” effect, where he looks almost human but not quite — but then I remembered that Beto really does talk like this.
.@BetoORourke: “There have even been some who have suggested that I stay in Texas and run for Senate, but that would not be good enough…we must take the fight directly to the source of this problem…” pic.twitter.com/uUlSnULsJy
— CSPAN (@cspan) August 15, 2019
So… yeah. He’s gonna do all that stuff.
And why wouldn’t he blame Trump for the actions of a mass-murderer? It’s a time-honored tradition for Democrats to blame Republicans for acts of violence committed in Democrat-controlled areas.
Beto wants to be the all-white Obama, but he just doesn’t have it. Obama’s one and only talent was lying with a straight face, telling enormous whoppers smoothly enough to fool enough people enough of the time. I didn’t like him and he didn’t convince me, but he was not a complete spaz like this guy. Beto is just off-putting.
But what else is Beto going to do? This is all he’s got. He has no marketable skills and nobody really likes him. He has nothing to lose by staying in the race. He’s never going to win, so he may as well drag down as many of his rivals as possible. He’s like a Democrat version of John Kasich.
Just kidding. The Democrat version of John Kasich is John Kasich.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member