One of the more epic romances of the past couple of years seems to have come to an end. No official statement has been released, but the signs are everywhere. The mainstream media seems to have moved on from its 2018 heartthrob, one Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke.
O’Rourke himself doesn’t seem to be aware of it yet, but the signs that the MSM have found another are everywhere:
TIME's new cover: Mayor Pete Buttigieg's unlikely, untested, unprecedented presidential campaign https://t.co/kMRow7D4sM pic.twitter.com/xmrZaAW7y4
— TIME (@TIME) May 2, 2019
In his futile bid to unseat Ted Cruz last year, O’Rourke couldn’t so much as sneeze without fifteen members of the press getting weak in the knees and writing a thousand words about how his sneezes were just so different and dreamy.
When O’Rourke launched his presidential campaign earlier this year we were forced to endure forty eight hours of nonstop media coverage/celebration of every inane thing Beto did as he hit the trail.
There’s always a lot of inanity accompanying Beto:
Beto from the countertop at the Beancounter in Burlington, Iowa. pic.twitter.com/oyxKDPvU0B
— Matt Viser (@mviser) March 14, 2019
The honeymoon looked as if it might go on forever.
Somewhere along the way, however, the media began to notice what the rest of us did last year: there isn’t a lot of “there” there when it comes to Beto O’Rourke.
It’s easy for the liberal media to swoon over any Democrat running for office in Texas because the MSM hates Republicans and hates that Texas is so full of them. When they decide to love a Democrat they aren’t looking for depth in the relationship. These are, after all, the same people who spent eight years uncritically dotting their “i”s with hearts while breathlessly covering the empty suit that is Barack Obama.
On our Thursday Live Blog, PJ Media Managing Editor Paula Bolyard noted some particularly choice responses to an article written by Margaret Carlson at The Daily Beast.
Carlson belatedly notices Beto’s lack of “there”:
But he’s way short on how he would govern, issuing his first big policy proposal this week on climate change. It’s a clip and paste job, something borrowed, something less than purely green, with a hole big enough for his home state oil barons to build a mile-wide offshore drill on. Weighing in at $5 trillion, it gauzily promises to “meet this moment,” a line in almost every speech. It all makes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s half-baked Green New Deal look like the Manhattan Project.
A couple of days before Carlson’s op-ed, The Washington Post offered up a litany of excuses for why the Beto juggernaut isn’t so juggernaut-y.
What’s missing in most of the MSM Beto laments are their role in creating him. Like Wendy Davis before him, Beto was merely a temporary manifestation of the Democratic Media Complex’s ongoing “Turn Texas Blue” fever dream.
The things that the media is noticing now — that O’Rourke is self-absorbed, a policy lightweight, and not all that politically accomplished — have been present all along. They simply chose to overlook them while Beto was the plucky underdog battling the Ted Cruz Death Star.
O’Rourke got into the race because his narcissism allowed him to believe all of the glowing nonsense that was written about him last year. There couldn’t have been that many powerful big-money Democratic donors urging him to run.
What Beto didn’t grasp is that the MSM is a cruel lover that quickly bores and has no qualms about taking on multiple partners in a short period of time.
Mayor Pete has captured their eyes at the moment, and he’s probably feeling like Beto did last year. This too, will not last.
At some point, Democrat media machine will either have to resign itself to Biden or Bernie, or decide that it needs to go all-in on the Diversity Sweepstakes.
There they will find Kamala Harris patiently waiting and ready for her turn on the dance floor.
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