Saturday, March 16, 2019

Beto!

Well, well, well, well, only one day until I suggested that we might have to wait awhile for Beto O'Rourke to announce whether he's running for President, he decided to announce that he was going to . . . run for President!
Robert Francis O'Rourke is a walking set of contradictions.  He's seen by many as an exciting and progressive candidate for the Presidency and as a moderate who's the worst thing to happen to the nascent progressive movement since Obama gave us a watered-down, centrist administration.  O'Rourke has presented strong opinions on climate change and health care reform but has offered no concrete ideas or policies to deal with those issues.  He comes to the presidential campaign with the love and respect of Mexican-Americans in his hometown of El Paso and a commitment to racial justice and compassion for immigrants, yet he is seen as an egomaniacal honky who thinks he was "born" to stand for the Presidency in 2020.  He brings a record of accomplishment that is as thin as porridge - but so did Lincoln, we are told, yet we are also told that no woman or person of color with his record would be taken seriously.  On the other hand, he has more experience in government than what Donald Trump had in 2016 or what Howard Schultz has going into 2020.  He voted with the oil and banking interests.  He also supported Bernie Sanders' Medicare-for-all proposal.  He wants to work with Republicans just like Obama wanted to, but he wants to accomplish un-Republican things like abolish private prisons and legalize marijuana.
But what does Beto believe?  What one believes was a question neither Obama nor Bill Clinton - or Hillary Clinton, for that matter - could ever answer, and Beto hasn't answered it yet.  He's hit the ground running with his lofty rhetoric and his vague promises, but he needs to fill in the blanks.  Because his opponents are already doing so.  And I'm not talking about Trump or O'Rourke's Democratic opponents for the party's 2020 presidential nomination.  I'm talking about rank-and-file Democratic base voters who want to know how a guy who couldn't even defeat Ted Cruz for Senate could ever defeat Trump for the Presidency and call him a closet Republican masquerading as a progressive, a contemptible centrist jerk, a spoon-fed filthy-rich white boy benefiting from all the privilege that implies . . ..  but mostly a guy who's all style and no substance.  Perhaps the progressives in the Democratic Party have reason to be suspicious of Beto, but the nasty comments that have been hurled at him have been pretty silly.  He had his wife Amy by his side when he astutely released his announcement at 6 A.M. Eastern time,  just in time for the morning news cycle, and he got slammed because his wife was looking at him smiling without saying a word, with many people comparing her to a car show model or something like that. 
Thanks to his vagueness, however, Beto can expect more of that.  Obama ran a similar campaign of hope for the future in 2008, but his lack of substance as President led to an angry wave of right-wing populism that led to Trump.  Gary Hart waited too late to explain his "new ideas" when he ran against Walter Mondale for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984.  He learned that lesson for 1988, only to be done in by his own arrogance when he thought he could invite a "ladyfriend" to his townhouse three days before giving a speech laying out his ideas to a press corps who couldn't care less about his policies when his sex scandal had already mangled his carefully honed image.  As a Texan, O'Rourke probably knows how to deal with right-wing populism better than Obama, and he most likely doesn't have the same dubious personal life as Hart, but if he's going to take himself seriously as a presidential candidate and allow others to take him seriously, he's going to have to explain what he would do as President and how he'd do it without sounding like he's parroting threadbare Democratic talking points.
I am very interested in Beto but remain unconvinced that he's the one; I'm still considering Jay Inslee or Julián Castro, among (many) others, in fact.  Irish identity politics and Martin O'Malley's endorsement of O'Rourke aren't going to be enough for me to back him, though; without a substantial record to show me, Beto's going to have to do more to convince me that he's Lincolnesque for reasons other than his 6'4" height. But I'm willing to listen.
Unlike some people (*cough cough*, Bernie Sanders supporters, *cough cough*) I could mention.

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