Bye Bye Beto

It's over.

Beto O'Rourke, once seen as the great hope for Texas Democrats, ends 2022 with a brilliant political future behind him.  The man who came so close to winning a U.S. Senate seat from Texas in 2018 lost his bid for the state's governorship to incumbent Republican Greg Abbott by eleven percentage points.  This was in spite of the infamous statewide blackout during the February 2021 cold snap, the Uvalde school shooting, and a state abortion policy that makes Florida's own severe abortion policy seem as liberal as New York's. 

Some people will blame Texas state legislature and U.S, House gerrymandering in the Republicans' favor, arguing that, despite the fact that a vote for statewide office can't be gerrymandered, the shutting out of Democrats locally discouraged Texas Democratic voters from voting even in a statewide election for the governorship or a U.S. Senate seat, on top of the state's voter restriction law.  But O'Rourke defined his positions and sharpened his rhetoric to the point where he fell out of favor with moderate Texas voters, and not only did he hold positions unpopular in Texas - like confiscating guns - he came across to many Texans as pulling tasteless political theater stunts like challenging Abbott in the middle of a gubernatorial press conference on the Uvalde shooting.  Texans just didn't like him anymore.  Many never did.  

Now the awful truth can be told.  O'Rourke was nominated for the simple fact that Texas Democrats had no one else to run a credible gubernatorial campaign against Abbott.  O'Rourke lost his own credibility as a result,, but so did Texas Democrats; even more so than Florida Democrats, they're token opposition to a state Republican juggernaut.  Beto may have captured the imagination of Texas Democrats, but so did Wendy Davis when she ran for governor in 2014.  So did Ron Kirk when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2002.  Maybe Texas Democrats should stop falling for candidates who capture their imagination and start thinking realistically about how to win.  

All that said, O'Rourke did run a better gubernatorial campaign in 2021 and 2022 than he ran a presidential campaign in 2019.  For one thing, he became more poised and less animated, and the media didn't ridicule him so much.  But the truth is that he's someone who needs to find a way to make positive change other than through elective office.  Beto O'Rourke may have been the right man to reinvigorate the Texas Democratic Party - and he's wealthy enough to help fund the future campaigns of Texas Democrats - but, as a candidate, he's been the wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Nevertheless, I don't feel sorry for O'Rourke supporters for setting themselves up for disappointment.  After all, I set myself up for disappointment - time after time after time after time - as a Martin O'Malley supporter.  (And now that O'Malley isn't running for President or anything else ever again, I'm going to have to stay away from Pop-Tarts.)  I do feel sorry for Beto, as his sister Erin recently died, and at Christmas time in the aftermath of his own political defeat on top of that.  I also feel sorry for him and the thirty million other people who call Texas home, as they have to live under a Republican legislature and  four more years of Gregory Wayne Abbott as their governor.   

As for Abbott, he just did a victory lap by sending a bus of migrants from O'Rourke's hometown of El Paso to Vice President Kamala Harris's official residence. 😠

Uvalde

Uvalde has to be the worst school shooting at least four years.

It's bad enough that 21 individuals - 19 of them children, most of them Hispanic - were shot to death by a gunman with an AR-15 assault rifle in the elementary school of this Texas town.  Even worse was that the police decided not to force their way into the classroom where the gunman did his deed because he barricaded himself in the classroom and they made the decision not refrain from storming the room per the situation at hand.  It was the wrong decision.  The gunman kept shooting, and a couple of kids inside had called 911 on their cell phones for swift action from the police that never came.  The authorities are till trying to explain away their fatal mistake, changing their stories constantly.

Texas governor Greg Abbott says he is livid about how the police acted, but he has no right to complain, since he paid lip service to improving school safety measures in Texas and has not supported and will not support sensible gun-control measures.  And I'm not sure Beto O'Rourke, Abbott's Democratic electoral opponent, wins any points for disrupting an Abbott press conference to confront the governor directly on guns, since it probably came across to many voters as a shameless stunt to get free media.  I still suspect that Abbott will be re-elected this November, if only because Texas voters care more about inflation.

U.S. Senate Republican leader has asked Texas Republican senator John Cornyn to talk with Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut about a possible deal on gun-safety measures.  But even something that modest us unlikely, given the weakened-but-still-potent National Rifle Association's hold on Republican senators.

Seen outside this weekend's National Rifle Association convention in . . . Houston.  Houston, Texas.

I've pretty much given up on this country.  How do I live with what's going on in These States?  How do I deal with it?  I can't . . . I can't. 😢 

Texas Rising?

Pinch me!

Beto O'Rourke, the former Texas congressman who seemingly destroyed his political career by running for President and not even making it to Iowa, and who may have destroyed Martin O'Malley's political career for getting his endorsement, is the Democratic nominee for the governorship of Texas and is actually locked in a dead heat with Republican incumbent Greg Abbott in a recent poll.  Abbott leads O'Rourke 42 percent to 40 percent.

Abbott is in trouble because he's outlawed abortion by signing a law that is impossible to circumvent because it deputizes citizens to enforce it.  He also fiddled while the power in Texas went out in a winter storm, he's denied climate change as the state deals with fires and floods, he's fought COVID vaccine mandates at the local level, and he's restricted voting to the point where millions of mail-in ballots have been rejected. People are fed up - so much that they're practically willing to vote for a boy wonder with Kennedy hair who's already promised to take away their AR-15s! 

O'Rourke recently scored a coup by attacking Abbott's move to inspect trucks entering the state from Mexico for possible defective taillights and tires after they'd already been inspected by federal border patrol agents to slow down imported goods and hurt the state's - and the nation's - economy.  Abbott backed down quickly.  O'Rourke plans to go after Abbott on other issues that has made Texas the second worst state to live in, after Florida.  But with those restrictive voting laws in place and with Abbott mobilizing the far right to come out in droves to the polls, O'Rourke still has his work cut out for him,  I was ready to give up O'Rourke's political career for dead, but he may yet prove me wrong.  If I could give Beto advice, it would be this: Grab onto Abbott, and don't let go.

And please, Beto, no hopping on restaurant tables this time, okay? 

O'Brother

No one is probably going to care at this point, but former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley's wife Katie, who recently retired as a judge of the Baltimore District Court, is running for the Democratic nomination for Maryland Attorney General, a position her father, J. Joseph Curran, once held.

Curran was apparently a very popular Attorney General and was well respected.  Mrs. O'Malley is clearly hoping to follow in her dad's footsteps, and by all accounts, she's qualified.  But she likely won't make it because Anthony Brown, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland who ran to succeed Mrs. O'Malley's husband as governor in 2014 only to be defeated by Larry Hogan, is also running for Maryland Attorney General and currently leads her two to one in pre-Democratic primary polls. But 2022 will likely be good year for Republicans, even in a heavily Democratic state such as Maryland, so the Democratic primaries for Attorney General and for governor are probably contests to see which corpse gets more flowers.  That's one reason why no one is going to care about Katie O'Malley.

Another reason is her husband.  I think it's safe to say that Martin O'Malley's political career is done.  Contrary to what Mark Shields once said, there is indeed another cure for presidential ambition besides embalming fluid.  The other cure is disinterest and ridicule of your very existence by a media complex that doesn't take you seriously.  After four years and change of working to help the Democratic Party and not getting any credit for appreciation for his efforts but getting flak for the sole distinction of being himself, O'Malley sat out much of 2020 - with the pandemic as a reasonable excuse for his inaction - and disbanded his political action committees while giving only tacit support to Joe Biden. The coup de grâce to O'Malley's political future came this October when President Biden announced that his choice for ambassador to the Vatican - a perfect appointment for O'Malley - would go instead to Joe Donnelly, a former one-term Democratic U.S. Senator from Indiana.  As far as I can make out, Martin O'Malley has had it with public service.  He's given up fighting in the public arena because no one (other than myself, I suppose) stood by him when things got rough.  

But I also think Marylanders are tired of all of their state's powerful Irish families and want to give more "diverse" candidates for office a chance, so being a Curran by birth and an O'Malley by marriage are hardly assets for Katie in her bid for Maryland Attorney General.  They're more like liabilities. 

And if that weren't enough, Robert Francis "Beto" O'Rourke, whom O'Malley supported for the Presidency,  is running for governor of Texas.

I guess political death by total humiliation is what he has in mind.

Let me explain.  He's running as a Democrat for an office no Democrat has a chance of winning, in state that just rigged the rules against Democrats with new voting restrictions, and he's running as a champion of immigrants in a state where the people most likely to vote hate immigrants and as a champion of women's rights in an anti-abortion state where Democratic women still have sour tastes in their mouths from the subservient role Beto's wife played in his ill-advised presidential campaign . . . and he's about to get mocked again by TV political commentators who still haven't stopped laughing over his literal table-hopping and his social-media hogging activities from that same presidential campaign.

Withdrawal from politics isn't the only reason Martin O'Malley won't be backing Beto this time.    

Cruz (Damage) Control

I don't think I've seen the sort of incompetence over the handling of the power crisis in Texas in any previous crisis, and I remember Hurricane Katrina.  Texas, still thinking it's a independent republic, has its own power grid, and the deregulation of the electricity in the state allowed the grid to remain unwinterized despite the growing evidence that climate change not only causes hotter summer s and stronger hurricanes but colder winters in the nation's midsection thanks to a greater flow of polar air form up north.  Governor Greg Abbott is blaming the failure of the electricity on wind power despite the greater reliance on fossil fuels, and others are fingering the Green New Deal, which, last I checked, hasn't been implemented.  But all of this pales in comparison to how Texas's junior U.S. Senator has handled it.

As you all know by now, Ted Cruz (above) hightailed it out of Houston and took his wife and daughters to Cancun, Mexico to escape the cold while millions of Texans were freezing in the dark with no running water - and the water crisis and the burst pipes resulting from unheated buildings have made things exponentially worse.  Cruz tried to patch things up, saying that was only going to drop off his daughters and come back (not true), the trip had been planned ahead of time (it was a last-minute decision) and that he shouldn't have taken his daughters' advice to take the family to Mexico (sure, blame the kids, especially when your kids are girls).  And then he admitted it was a "mistake."

The only reason that isn't an understatement is because Cruz tried to stop Joe Biden's election to the President during the Capitol insurrection and hasn't even admitted to that being a mistake.  Everything Cruz does is meant to further his own interests and make himself look good. Too bad for him that he won't succeed at that.  Democrats and Republicans rarely agree on anything in Washington, by Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate all agree that Cruz is the biggest schmuck in the upper house of Congress and everyone hates him.

While Cruz was trying to get away to Cancun, Beto O'Rourke was back home in Texas distributing emergency supplies to local residents and getting others to help pitch in.  In other words, exactly what Cruz is supposed to do. You'd be forgiven for thinking that O'Rourke and not Cruz had won the 2018 Senate election in Texas.  In 2024, when Cruz is up again, that outcome is very much a possibility.

New Leadership? PAH!

"New leadership."  That's what Martin O'Malley (below) promised in his 2016 presidential campaign.  It was his campaign slogan - simple, direct, and to the point.  It wasn't mealy-mouthed pablum like Hillary Clinton's "Stronger Together." 

Recently, though, it seems as if Democrats can't be bothered with new leadership.  Because they did, after all, nominate Bill Clinton's wife for President in hopes that it would stoke nineties nostalgia in the Democratic base.  Oh sure, she was a woman, and that was new, but her policies were not only the same policies her husband pursued, a lot of them were like the policies Obama pursued.  Well, what was so new about that?

Despite the fact that he'd been in Washington for a quarter century, Bernie Sanders (below) offered new leadership in 2016 in the form of policy proposals that hadn't been pursued since the mid-sixties - universal health care,  free college like they used to have in California - but you were still talking about a candidate who was hardly a new face, having toiled in the House and the Senate pushing legislation that had no chance of passage.

For 2020, the Democrats don't seem to be into new leadership so much - new faces, younger faces, a new generation.  The obvious exception is Pete Buttigieg, who is a millennial, a gay man and an American of Maltese origin - and his youth and vitality are generating excitement all over Iowa.  Too bad his patronizing attitude toward blacks is so old-school.  

He tried to identify with black voters by saying he too felt the sting of discrimination as a gay man, but he sort of forgot that white homosexuals, unlike black homosexuals, can avoid discrimination by staying in the closet, whereas blacks, straight or gay, come out as black the day they're born.  And then there's that long-ago comment Buttigieg made about black children doing poorly in school because of lack of role models.  Actually, black students have several role models.  They just don't hear about them much because of a form of structural racism that ignores black accomplishments in America . . . except during February. If this is new leadership, it's no wonder Democratic voters outside Iowa are sticking with the tried and tried again and true.   

O'Malley, by the way, found out how little Democrats are interested in new voices and new faces when he backed Beto O'Rourke's presidential campaign - you know the story; I won't repeat it.  O'Malley clearly wanted to see another repetition, that of the Kennedy story, and so found in Beto the new generation of leadership America needs.  O'Malley is undecided now that Beto's gone, and with Tim Ryan having withdrawn from the presidential campaign, there simply aren't any Irish Catholics under 50 left for him to support. And though O'Malley supported Buttigieg for the Democratic National Committee chairmanship in 2017, I wouldn't expect him to be singing Mayor Pete's praises any time soon.

Especially when they're singing a quite different song about him in South Carolina.

Not too many of the younger Democratic candidates for President have offered much in the way of new ideas, so there's, say, little romance and excitement in Cory Booker possibly becoming our first Generation X President.  And then there's Elizabeth Warren, who at 70 may be the closest the Democrats come to new leadership - she's a woman, and she has detailed plans for her ambitious progressive agenda.

But she's a little shy in explaining how much they're going to cost.

But, when you think about it, Donald Trump has been an exemplar of new leadership in the past three years.  He's completely new when it comes to presidential governance.  He's new in that he'd never held political office or military rank (because of those nasty bone spurs! :-D ) before becoming President, and because he's doing things that quite frankly have never been done before.  Like breaking every international agreement the United States has ever committed itself to.  Or trying to get the Ukrainians to interfere in the next presidential election.  And letting Melania decorate the White House as something you might find in Stephen King novel for Christmas.  New leadership cuts both ways. 

In the end, Democratic voters might just forget about new leadership entirely and stick with Joe Biden, who feels as reassuring and as warm as a comfortable old shoe.  If only he would stop putting that shoe in his mouth.  But Biden (below), would bring a sense of newness to the White House in this respect; like Sanders, he'd be the first (and only, at this point) President from the Silent Generation, those Americans too old to have been at Woodstock (unless they were one of the performers) and too young to have been at Omaha Beach.  It is that same generation Gary Hart belongs to, and he famously said in his own 1984 presidential campaign that it was time for his generation to govern the country - a new generation of leadership with new ideas.  Yes - there it is!  Biden would bring the Silent Generation approach to governing (albeit, thanks to his gaffes, without the "Silent" part), something that the White House has never had. 

And he'd be bringing it to the White House 35 years and change late.

Heck, if Hart, who turned 83 on Thanksgiving, had run this year, we'd hear about his not-so-new ideas.  Whatever they are.

Meanwhile, Steve Bullock the Montana governor who campaigned for President on the promise of new leadership in all but name, withdrew as a presidential candidate, refusing to run for the Senate and possibly hoping he gets to be someone's Interior Secretary.  So did Joe Sestak, a forgotten two-term congressman who was neither new nor much of a leader. 

Maybe Americans - even Democrats - do want new leadership in the White House, however you define it.  But maybe they're wary of anyone who comes out and promises it.  From the 1972 failure of George McGovern, whose campaign manager, Gary Hart, was a mentor to Martin O'Malley, who backed Beto O'Rourke - born the same year that McGovern was running for President - to now, this promise of new leadership is getting pretty old.   

Beto Is Spanish For "Toast"

Actually, "brindis" is Spanish for "toast," so maybe we should call him Brindis O'Rourke.

This past Friday, Robert Francis O'Rourke, who was known as Beto to his friends and whose name was mud among most Democrats, announced his withdrawal from the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.  His departure ends one of the least plausible presidential bids in recent American political history.

O'Rourke, the Texas political boy wonder who became a celebrity by coming extremely close to defeating incumbent Republican Ted Cruz for the U.S. Senate, was counting on his charisma, his youth, and his ability to reach out to minorities in general and Hispanics in particular to get him the Democratic presidential nomination.  Instead, he proved to be a cartoon Bobby Kennedy for what is increasingly becoming a cartoon republic, and he learned that being named Robert Francis simply isn't enough.  See, Bobby Kennedy had compiled a distinguished record as Senate counsel, Attorney General of the United States, and United States Senator from New York when he announced his campaign for the Presidency in 1968.  O'Rourke, on the other hand, was a former three-term congressman from El Paso whose biggest achievement in Washington was . . . well, if you give me a few months, I might be able to find it.

O'Rourke became an unperson almost as soon as he announced his candidacy for President in a video statement using gauzy, flowery inspirational language that would have made Marianne Williamson roll her eyes, with his wife Amy sitting by his side smiling and being silent like an auto show model.  Actually, auto show models - now called "product presenters" - now talk about the cars they're standing next to, so maybe that's an unfair comparison.  But the optics nauseated a lot of people and cost him half of the women's vote; he then lost the other half by flippantly commenting on how he didn't spend much time helping his wife raise their kids.  His subsequent appearance at campaign stops, where he would hop on tables to talk to crowds - crowds that got smaller with each campaign appearance to the point where they couldn't legitimately be called crowds anymore - showed an utter lack of discipline that terrified Democrats afraid of having such an undisciplined man as President.

Beto has been urged to run for the U.S. Senate in Texas again in 2020, but he has refused to do so.  For once, he made a smart move.  After he came out against tax exemptions for churches and for confiscating guns, he couldn't get elected to any office in Texas now - not even El Paso County recorder of deeds.  Had he been elected to the Senate in 2018, he might have been an asset to both Texas Democrats and to the national Democratic Party.  He may even have accomplished something.  Now he's just another also-ran.

The biggest loser of Beto's quixotic presidential campaign is probably Martin O'Malley, who foolishly eschewed a 2020 presidential run of his own and backed Beto for President even before O'Rourke announced he was running, And, despite O'Malley's insistence that he backed O'Rourke because of his stance in immigration, I have a feeling that the fact that they both have apostrophes in their surnames played a part in O'Malley's decision to endorse him.  Unlike Kamala Harris, I have a problem, guys, with identity politics, because supporting a candidate for office because you share that candidate's ethnicity is the dumbest reason to do so.  Me, I looked at Beto and realized that his Irishness was the best reason for me, an American of Irish origin, to join his campaign, which is why I didn't join it.  You're going to have to do more than just be Irish to get my support, and Beto never did.  On the other hand, maybe O'Malley is the biggest winner from Beto's failed run; now that Beto's out of the race, O'Malley has much more time to promote his new book.

Beto isn't the first golden boy to attempt a presidential bid, and he won't be the last.  I've seen them all, from Gary Hart, to Howard Dean, to John Edwards.  Like those earlier presidential canddiates who caused a great deal of buzz but didn't have the substance to back up their style ("Where's the beef?"), O'Rourke believed the hype surrounding him and continued to believe it after everyone else no longer did.  He was just another shooting star . . . and let me tell you, the Democratic Party cultivates more shooting stars than rising stars.

Abbott Is Costello

Texas Governor Greg Abbott (below) has overseen a recent loosening of gun restrictions in his state, allowing even teachers to pack a rod on the job.  And yet he had the gall to say this following the shootings on the I-20 corridor between Odessa and Midland:

"Too many Texans are in mourning.  Too many Texans have lost their lives.  The status quo is unacceptable in Texas, and action is needed."

And I can only think, "Gee . . ..  It's too bad he's not in a position to actually do anything about it."

But then, maybe this hapless fool of a governor isn't in a position to do anything about guns in his state.  Because even if he had any actual power - Texas has a weaker governorship than most states, with the legislature setting a good deal of the state's agenda - he'd find it hard to regulate guns when so many people in Texas cherish their constitutional right to bear arms.  And it's an attitude found in so-called liberal states like New Jersey, where I saw a pro-gun window decal in the rear window of a Chevrolet pickup truck.

Abbott won't even admit that the cheap, plentiful supply of high-power firearms is a problem.  Forget the Presidency, Beto O'Rourke should run for governor of Texas in 2022.  Texas ought to have a governor who's ready to use foul language to get things done when the situation calls for it.

Bad Beto Bet

Before the first Democratic presidential debate for 2020, Beto O'Rourke was reported by NBC News as being anxious, and someone I know, who hates it when the word "anxious" is used to mean "eager" and "excited," was critical of NBC News' verbiage.  It turned out that the word was properly used.

In the weeks leading up to the debate, O'Rourke, who had famously shunned the national media and got payback from the national media in the form of insults, ridicule and snark that had once been hurled at former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley during his 2016 presidential campaign, began doing interviews with the press and appeared to be a more confident candidate.  Even MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski, who supports Kamala Harris and has no tolerance for anyone else, found him impressive.  All O'Rourke had to do was look presidential in a debate.

Then the debate took place.

O'Rourke's fellow presidential candidate and fellow Texan Julián Castro clobbered him over immigration and came out of the debate so strongly, he spurred a rush of donations to his own presidential campaign, the sort of donations that Harris is now getting.  Beto O'Rourke, who seemed to have turned a corner just weeks before, has since gone back to being Beto O'Rourke.

As for O'Malley, it was bad enough that he declared his non-candidacy for President six months ago today, but even more distressing was his decision to support O'Rourke, whom he thought could offer the new leadership he couldn't.  But with each day that passes, it's become all too obvious how O'Malley misjudged his man.  O'Rourke seems completely rudderless, flailing for relevance after declaring his presidential campaign and following up his declaration with what Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch's mom would have called a big fat nothingburger.  O'Rourke is just not ready for prime time.

I may have said this before, but it's worth repeating: O'Malley didn't deserve the abuse he got from the national media, but O'Rourke brought the abuse he's gotten on himself.

As for O'Malley, he should just cut his losses and concentrate on promoting his book.      

Anyone Can Be a Senator

But not everyone can be President.

The Democrats have fewer U.S. Senate seats to defend in 2020 than Republicans - 12 versus 22 - and the only need four seats to win back control of the chamber, but as TV producer and political activist Brian Taylor Cohen recently pointed out, the most attractive Democratic prospects for the Senate are all running for President.  Most of them have no chance of winning the White House but are so fixated on Trump that they all think that they can take out Trump in a mano-a-mano match-up.  Ironically, the reason there are more then twenty Democratic presidential candidates in the first place is because they all saw Trump get elected and decided that, well, if a politically inexperienced businessman can get elected to the highest office in the land, any one of them certainly can.

No, they can't.  And right now, there's a bunch of Democratic presidential candidates who are better suited to win a Senate seat in 2020 . . . and they're all polling in the low single digits in their presidential campaigns.  As Taylor Cohen tweeted, you have Beto O'Rourke of Texas only getting two percent in the polls, John Hickenlooper of Colorado getting one percent in the polls, Steve Bullock of Montana not getting anything in the polls and having officially declared for the Presidency just yesterday, and Stacey Abrams of Georgia not even running for President yet and already having ruled out a Senate run.  All of them, Taylor Cohen noted, could defeat the Republican incumbent senators up for re-election in 2020 - John Cornyn of Texas, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Steve Daines of Montana, and David Perdue of Georgia.  And I would add that Cory Booker of New Jersey, who's already a Democrat in the Senate and is up for re-election in 2020, is concentrating on a presidential run. 

With the possible - possible - exception of O'Rourke, these candidates are unlikely to get out of the single digits in the polls.  Defeating Trump is only part of the challenge; the Democrats also have to hold the House, but it's especially important that they take back the Senate.  Because even a post-Trump Republican Party, with a Republican Senate led by Mitch McConnell, will be as obstructionist and as illiberal as the Trump-era Republican Party has been and as the pre-Trump Republican Party was.  A Republican Senate under a Democratic President will only block judicial appointments, delay Cabinet confirmations, and stymie international treaties that the rest of the world realizes are common-sense approaches to solving global problems but American industry hates because they're bad for business.  People like Bullock, Hickenlooper, and others are so focused on the big picture of the fight against Trump that they've lost the sight of the more local political competitions necessary for the Democrats to control Washington in order to govern.  It's not that they can't see the forest for the trees; they can't see the trees for the forest.

Focusing more on the Presidency than on state and local races is the reasons Democrats declined and fell from their lofty perch in 2009 when they controlled everything, and this mass rush to run for the White House is just another example of that.  The silver lining is that there's still time for these no-shot long shots to abandon their presidential ambitions when they see that they can't win - most likely you too, Beto! - and switch to a Senate run instead.  At least Cory Booker, who, to the best of my knowledge, is the only incumbent senator up for re-election in 2020 who's also running for President, is able to hedge his bets on his own political future.  The New Jersey state legislature passed - and Governor Phil Murphy signed - a law allowing Booker to run for both offices at once.

As Caitlyn Jenner once said of athletes back when her sex was still male and his forename was still Bruce, they're all good but only one can be the best. Likewise, the twenty-odd Democratic presidential candidates may all be good, but only one of them can be the presidential nominee . . . but that hasn't stopped long shots who have a better chance at running for something else from trying to win the Presidency.  It reminds me of what H.L. Mencken said to a friend of his while at the 1936 Democratic National Convention, looking at all of the politicians in attendance . . . "Every one of them thinks that he can be President of the United States."

Phony Betomania Has Bitten the Dust

Remember Beto O'Rourke?  Of course you don't.  

The Texas wunderkind who almost defeated Ted Cruz for a Senate seat started with a bang in his run for the Presidency and has already ended with a whimper.  He's not out of the race yet, but he might as well be. O'Rourke has been working hard trying to listen to what people want and need but he still hasn't formulated any concrete answers or responses to the feedback he's been getting. With the novelty of a being a winner of a Bobby Kennedy lookalike contest having worn off, he's now in sixth place in the polls, behind Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren as well as Pete Buttigieg.  And I don't think any of those candidates can win.  So how does that make O'Rourke look?

It gets worse.  O'Rourke has already had a staff shakeup in his campaign, indicating that he has no sense of direction (as if his wandering around the Southwest hadn't already made that clear), and his tax returns showed that he underpaid two years in a row because he apparently isn't good at math.  And if that weren't bad enough, O'Rourke, who recently got the endorsement of Dave Brock - not the conservative who shifted to Democratic centrism and endorsed Hillary Clinton for President in 2016, the leader of the British progressive rock band Hawkwind - undistinguished himself at the She the People convention of female minority voters when asked why such voters should consider a pale male like himself.  There are probably several reasons for women of color to vote for O'Rourke, just as I'm sure there are reasons why a sista who grew up listening to Marvin Gaye's What's Going On or Let's Get It On would like Yes' Fragile or Close To the Edge (or anything from Hawkwind, for that matter), but O'Rourke couldn't think of one.

It's a good thing no one asked him about Yes.

I know that it probably would have been a bad idea for Martin O'Malley to run for President in 2020, when he likely would have had fewer supporters than Democratic primary opponents, but endorsing O'Rourke has proven to be a bigger mistake by O'Malley than a second presidential run would have been.  I reluctantly joined an O'Rourke Facebook group, but I have since quit for obvious reasons, and I also quit a Pete Buttigieg group when I decided that he isn't going anywhere either.  (And I unsubscribed from e-mails from Cory Booker's campaign, which I don't even recall signing up for.)  The truth is, as I iterated before, that since I am an independent living in a closed-primary state that votes too late in the primary process to matter and since I do not see among any of the 2,020 Democratic presidential candidates (no typo, I think that's the actual number of candidates!) that would make me want to register as a Democrat again, I am not supporting anyone for the Democratic presidential nomination.  However, I will vote for the Democratic presidential nominee in the 2020 general election - even if (ha ha ha) it's O'Rourke.  (But not if it's Marianne Williamson.)  In the meantime, I still plan to dissect and skewer the declared candidates on this blog.  I've picked apart ten Democratic candidates so far (plus Howard Schultz), and I'm not about to stop now. 

"But, Steve,"  you say, "you have to vote for one of these people next November.  You shouldn't pick them apart!"  No, Democratic primary voters shouldn't pick them apart, though they still do, and seeing as I am both a cynic and a political independent, that's my job.  But, having said that, I do concede that any of these candidates, pathetic though they may be, are preferable to Trump.

Anyone know where those Hawkwind records went?              

There Is No Democratic Front Runner For President In 2020

There is no Democratic front runner for President in 2020.  

Let me repeat: There is no Democratic front runner for President in 2020!

I'll say it again: There is no Democratic front runner for President in 2020!!

I re-iterate: There is no Democratic front runner for President in 2020!!     

Okay, Bernie Sanders has a healthy lead among the declared Democratic presidential candidates, and his socialistic ideas are becoming widely popular among Democratic primary voters.  And, Joe Biden leads Sanders when you include him, even though he is undeclared as of now, and he represents the meat-and-potatoes Democrats who can't be bothered with Sanders' "revolution." But neither Biden nor Sanders are close to a majority.  Meanwhile, Beto O'Rourke is slowly rising by and competitive against Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg is even more competitive, placing third in some polls; he's like an Energizer bunny that doesn't slow down.  And the candidates in the single digits still have a chance to break out in Iowa or New Hampshire, as the voting is a long way away.  Everyone running so far comes to the table with different ideas and different perspectives, and Democratic primary voters have plenty of time to sort them out.  Don't believe anyone who says that Bernie Sanders is definitely going to win the nomination.

Well, he might.  It's worth noting that Sanders supporters - the Islamic State of Democratic primary voters - have so far expressed zero tolerance for an alternative, and they hope to get revenge against what the Democratic establishment did to him in 2016 by getting him the nomination.  I haven't seen any sign that he could win against Trump, though, and his supporters steadfastly refuse to consider an alternative because other candidates aren't "progressive" enough.  They wouldn't accept Martin O'Malley as an alternative in 2016 because they found his very liberal record as governor of Maryland - you know about Matthew Yglesias' article, I won't link to it again - insufficient.  Barack Obama made a note of this at a town hall in Berlin where he expressed fear that the Democrats could help Trump by fighting each other over a purity test instigated by the Bernie bros. 

You know, if Sanders supporters had been more open to O'Malley and recognized that he had a better chance to win, Hillary Clinton would have never been the nominee and O'Malley most likely would have defeated Trump,  and the rest of the 2010s would have been different.  But that was not to be, largely because Bernie bros (and their sisses) are an obnoxious, elitist bunch - more so than the Hillbots of 216.  So, again, don't believe that Sanders - or Biden, or that matter, assuming he actually runs - has the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination in the bag.  In fact, I predict a brokered convention in 2020, given the vast quantity of candidates.  So, again: There is no Democratic front runner for President in 2020!!    

I had wanted to support Martin O'Malley for President in 2020 to get revenge against those who stopped him.  I thought it was just the Hillbots who laughed him out of contention, but it's since become obvious that the Bernie bros undermined him too.  As O'Malley is not running this time, I am seriously considering with Beto, Mayor Pete or maybe California congressman Eric Swalwell - they are all O'Malley protégés, and he's a good judge of character.  Thus, I could still get my revenge against the O'Malley-haters from 2016.  But because there are so many candidates to choose from, Unn D. Sided remains my choice for now (though you can tell I've ruled Bernie out).

And if I do back an O'Malley protégé, I won't be eating Pop-Tarts in symbolic support - they're too carcinogenic. :-O

Passing the O'Mantle?

Martin O'Malley got what he wanted when Beto O'Rourke announced his presidential candidacy.  Here's what O'Malley said in an e-mail to those who supported his 2016 presidential bid:

Beto O'Rourke of Texas announced . . .  that he is running for President of the United States. I am excited to do all I can to support him, and I hope you might consider supporting him as well.

So far in this campaign, about a dozen Democratic candidates have jumped into the race - some of them I know personally, many of them I like. But as I have gotten to know Beto O’Rourke, I've come to believe that he best represents the new generation of leadership our country needs. O’Rourke has the heart, talent, and courage to unite what has been torn apart, and to lead our country forward.

And why does O'Malley think so?  He didn't say in this particular e-mail.  He hasn't been much more forthcoming in answering that question on earlier occasions, either. 

I suppose O'Malley sees a kindred spirit in O'Rourke, and he has in fact said that one reason for his support of Beto is because of Beto's similarly liberal stand on immigration. But other Democrats support liberal immigration reform, so what makes Beto different?  As far I can make out, the only other thing O'Rourke really has in common with O'Malley is a surname with an apostrophe in it.  Only Irish identity politics could explain why a governor who came up with a green energy policy long before anyone in Congress did endorse for President a Texan who took donations from folks who work for oil companies, and only Irish identity politics could explain why a guy married to a judge would endorse a guy whose wife doesn't speak in public.  The O'Malley e-mail I just referred to, incidentally, was sent out to ask for donations for O'Rourke's presidential bid.

What day did he send it?  St. Patrick's Day, of course.

Meanwhile, the Beto backlash has already begun.  Kamala Harris, in a veiled insult, said she looks forward to a substantial debate with Beto in the Democratic presidential debates, which is tantamount to saying that she looks forward to an intellectual debate with Donald Trump in the general election campaign.  Amy Klobuchar thought O'Rourke had a lot of damn gall too say he was born to run for President, suggesting that its just one more example of white male privilege - no woman or brown person, we are told, would have said that and gotten away with it, but who's to say Beto did get away with it?  

Some of the anti-Beto rhetoric is a little over the top, to be fair, like the comment that no woman running for President has gotten the sort of coverage Beto got.  Whoever said that must have been asleep when the media were fawning over Harris for much of January.  By the same token, though, some male candidates for President would love to get the sort of coverage Beto is getting, if only because they have more substantial rhetoric - Jay Inslee on climate change, for example.

I thought O'Malley's Beto-backing would make him look silly if O'Rourke had not run for President, but he looks sillier now that O'Rourke is in.  His endorsement of Beto has only renewed toxic comments from anti-O'Malley trolls on social media, and O'Rourke, despite his fine start in Iowa, risks embarrassing O'Malley even more.  Like the news that O'Rourke wrote teenage-murder fantasies in his youth.  Only Irish identity politics could, again, explain why a guy who loves Celtic folk rock and reveres a poet like William Butler Yeats could endorse a candidate whose teen literature can only be explained as having come from someone who could be described as "mentally disturbed," "hyper-nihilistic" or "listened to way too much Black Sabbath in high school."

I admitted long ago that Irish identity politics was a reason I supported O'Malley, but I have also stressed that I had better reasons to support him, like his record as governor of Maryland.  But I'm not going to support Beto just because his last name is O'Rourke, or because O'Malley supports him.  O'Malley drives a Ford Explorer, but you don't see me trading in my Golf for an SUV just because my 2016 presidential candidate has one.  

There may be another reason O'Malley supports O'Rourke - because he's so reminiscent of Bobby Kennedy, a sainted politician O'Malley is barely old enough to remember.  But until O'Rourke can come up with something more substantial and honestly say he can propose new policies rather than oppose any man - or woman - then, the only things Robert Francis O'Rourke has in common with RFK are his Christian names and his haircut.  But that's another (long) post.

Once again, Unn D. Sided is my 2020 presidential favorite.             

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.

The Ghost Of Martin O'Malley Returns

Martin O'Malley resurfaced again this past weekend, attending the South by Southwest festival in Austin to take in some policy lectures.  Apparently, he was also there to consult with and advise Beto O'Rourke, who was there not to declare his 2020 presidential candidacy but to promote a new documentary about his 2018 Senate campaign.

O'Malley remains convinced that Beto's the guy for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, but still, I have my doubts.  I still think O'Malley was. I opined a month ago that O'Malley ruled himself out of running for President again because he realized he was too white and too male to succeed in a party obsessed with "diversity."  So how do I explain his support for O'Rourke, who is also lacking in melanin and estrogen?  I don't.  Unless, perhaps, that, at a time when being a straight white male is a handicap when seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, O'Malley sees O'Rourke as the best candidate for the Presidency and sees him as being uniquely suited to overcome that handicap.

I don't know about that.  A recent poll of Iowa Democrats showed that only 38 percent of them would be happy with another straight white male presidential nominee.  If Democrats in overwhelmingly white Iowa are down on pale males, what does that portend for Democrats in states like California and O'Rourke's own state of Texas?  Also, as noted here before, O'Rourke has a dubious record on supporting bankers and oil companies, and he supported trade policies unpopular with the left.  These are positions that O'Malley would have trouble endorsing.  I think O'Malley sees in his fellow Irish homey a kindred spirit beneath his wishy-washy policy positions.  I plan to take a closer, more detailed look at O'Rourke once he's an announced candidate, which should be some time after this post gets archived.  Or when the Mueller report comes out.  Either way, a long wait.     

Perhaps being of the wrong sex and the wrong race for Democratic voters himself was not a reason O'Malley chose not to run again. O'Malley admitted recently that his fractional-percentage showing in the 2016 Iowa caucuses would have made it difficult for him to convince prospective donors to back him - long-shot presidential candidates who drop out after Iowa and New Hampshire, regardless of party, usually don't run for President a second time - and that's as good a reason as any not to run for President again.  But I think there may have been another reason . . . that ongoing rumor of an extramarital affair that produced a love child.  Though it's long since since proven to be bogus, Donald Trump would have brought it up had O'Malley been the 2016 or the 2020 Democratic nominee.  I know this because Trump did bring it up when O'Malley was only a long-shot 2016 presidential candidate. No one else took Trump's comments about O'Malley seriously - but only because no one took O'Malley seriously.              

By endorsing O'Rourke before O'Rourke has even declared that he's running for President, though, O'Malley has risked being taken even less seriously by his critics in the press, if that's even possible.  He's the political equivalent of Billy Joel, who made all of these grand albums in the late seventies and early eighties as a way of begging critics who would never see him as anything other than a lightweight to take him seriously.  (The difference?  Joel fills an arena once a month.)  O'Malley is gambling his credibility on endorsing another white guy like himself - and an Irish Catholic like himself at that - at a time when not too many Democrats are into us honky dudes.  Let's hope he doesn't roll craps. 

The Ghost Of Martin O'Malley

You knew I was going to bring Martin O'Malley up again eventually.  Because the more I consider the Democrats running for President in 2020 and the Democrats who may be running, the more I miss him.  I happen to think he made a big mistake by choosing not to run for President in 2020 after he was laughed out of the 2016 campaign with no real chance to make his case.  

So far, I haven't seen a single Democratic presidential candidate who's impressed me, at least not among the announced candidates, and I have one misgiving or another about the prospective candidates who haven't entered the campaign yet.  That includes Beto O'Rourke, whom I call Hamlet-on-the-Rio Grande.  It seems that none of them have the right mix of policies and purpose that I saw in Maryland's former governor.

I do see some of what he advocated in 2016 surfacing among Democratic members of Congress.  The Green New Deal that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) proposed sounds a lot like the economic program O'Malley ran for President on.  Point being, when it comes to promoting an environmentally sustainable economy, Ocasio-Cortez, Markey and others are spreading the word.  O'Malley's word.  And I applaud him for letting others take the credit for an idea he championed when it's an idea that must be discussed and debated.  If no one will listen to O'Malley, they'll bloody well listen to Ocasio-Cortez, one of the biggest rising stars in the Democratic Party. 

But what if no one is listening to your ideas because no one is advocating them?  Just as the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, the only thing worse than an idea that gets mentioned and rejected without discussion is an idea that doesn't get brought up at all, and that's where O'Malley's all-payer health care proposal from 2016 comes in.  I mentioned this plan before; it's a system that sets hospital fees to a global standard by having all third parties pay the same for services, which can increase the power of insurance companies to lower health care costs.  While other countries have used this system successfully, Maryland is the only U.S. state that uses it.  Unfortunately, because it's only used in Maryland, no one running for President - okay, except maybe O'Malley's fellow Marylander and fellow Irish homey John Delaney - is talking about it.  Democratic presidential candidates either champion Medicare for all - which may not work all that well - or tweaking the Affordable Care Act, although I don't know how you tweak a tweak.  All-payer sounds like a good step toward a real single-payer plan, yet there's no one out there to advocate for it. There wasn't even anyone to advocate for it in 2016; O'Malley tried to, but when he attempted  to  bring it up in a CBS Democratic presidential primary debate, moderator John Dickerson cut him off and went to a commercial break; when the commercial break was over, Dickerson moved on to another issue, and O'Malley didn't get much of a chance to bring it up in the two debates that followed before he withdrew as a presidential candidate. 

O'Malley's decision not to run for President in 2020 for what were likely trivial reasons involving his lack of pizzazz and his lack of melanin or a pair of X chromosomes still sticks in my craw, and his voice is sorely missed.  Well, I miss it.  O'Malley has become like Marley's ghost, witnessing debates he can't take part in but might have taken part in, had he chosen to walk among the likes of Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.  But maybe, just maybe, Beto O'Rourke - whom O'Malley has been encouraging to run for President - might be the antidote to those of us suffering from O'Malley withdrawal.  At a rally in his hometown of El Paso in which he corrected Donald Trump's lies about immigration and border security - lies Trump told at his own rally in El Paso that same night - O'Rourke came out as a passionate man of conviction who wants to do right by those who come to this country, and that's precisely the reason O'Malley wants him to run. Stay tuned.  Despite my doubts, Beto may be the one after all.

But if Beto doesn't run for President, I would hope that O'Malley reconsiders and reverses his decision. 

The Martin O'Malley Farewell

It's over.  

Yesterday, after being silent for a couple of weeks over the holidays, Martin O'Malley announced his plans for 2020.  Those plans exclude another presidential run.

The former governor of Maryland announced his non-candidacy in an e-mail to his supporters.  It reads as follows:

As I wish you a Happy New Year and all the best for you and your family in 2019, I also wanted to let you know that I will not be running for President in 2020.

Thanks to your support and encouragement of our leadership effort, Win Back Your State, I was able to campaign on behalf of more than 125 candidates, traveling to 30 states in special elections and in the midterms. The strong results for Democrats - and for new Democratic leaders in particular - in these midterms, has reaffirmed my faith that our best days are ahead of us.

But I have also learned that my usefulness as a candidate for President has passed. I'm proud of the substance and vision we put forward in 2016 and the record of progress from 15 years of executive experience, but - after all we have been through as a nation - America is looking for a candidacy newer than I can offer.

I made this announcement this morning through an op-ed in the Des Moines Register and other papers. I hope we can find ways in the future to work together for the country we carry in our hearts.

With deep respect and gratitude for your friendship,

Martin O'Malley

So what can I say? I'm disappointed, of course. Disgusted, even. Here was the most highly qualified and most thoughtful candidate to run for for President of the United States in my lifetime, the beneficiary of a solid Jesuit education, a distinguished former mayor of Baltimore who turned that city around (albeit temporarily), and a former governor of Maryland who compiled the sort of record Barack Obama could only wish he'd compiled as President, and the pundits and the party elders refused to take him seriously when he ran for the Presidency in 2016.  And then those same pundits and party elders continued to mock him throughout 2017 and 2018 despite the fact that everything he warned would happen if Hillary Clinton were nominated for President happened.  Though he cites the hunger in the Democratic Party for even newer leadership as a reason to forego another presidential campaign in 2020 and likely forever (a 2024 O'Malley run is possible only if Joe Biden is elected President in 2020 and voluntarily serves only one term due to age - yeah, right! - or, if Trump gets re-elected in 2020, and no one wants that!), the refusal among many to take O'Malley seriously is likely as big a reason for his decision, if not a bigger one.  

(Aside:  I had written and later this month planned to publish a sequel to my January 2018 post compiling O'Malley-bashing comments from this detractors, which had many more O'Malley-bashing comments from many more of his detractors.  Of course it was long.  I deleted it instead, because of the simple fact that O'Malley will not be a presidential candidate in 2020 and also because getting back at his critics at this point is not worth it.)    

So who am I hoping to support for President in the Democratic primaries and caucuses now?  Uh, no one yet.  Maybe not anyone at all.  Remember, I'm an independent.  Martin O'Malley was the only Democratic presidential candidate in the past quarter century other than Barack Obama that made me want to register as a Democrat just so I could vote for him in the New Jersey primary, which is closed to independents (I never actually did get to vote for O'Malley, of course), and he was the only potential 2020 candidate I could solidly get behind.  As of this moment, I see no presidential prospect that I can support unreservedly for the Democratic nomination in 2020.  More likely than not, I will remain an independent and vote only in the 2020 general election for the eventual Democratic presidential nominee.  But if that nominee is someone who was named Hillary or Oprah by her mother, don't be surprised if I vote Green again.  After all, the Democrats could nominate a ficus plant for President and still win New Jersey without my vote.     

I would be completely remiss, though, if  I did not mention O'Malley's preference for the Democratic presidential nomination - he's hoping that Beto O'Rourke runs.  I don't know . . . he's not as liberal as O'Malley, if only because he had a constituency in El Paso to consider while in the House of Representatives, and his executive experience is nil.  But I will, as O'Malley himself is fond of saying, keep an open mind.  As for O'Malley, I hope he continues his work with Win Back Your State and gets more Democrats elected to state and local offices in 2019 (there is a gubernatorial election in Kentucky this year, and Democrats have a decent shot at winning it) and 2020.   

And so my 43 months of activism on behalf of Martin Joseph O'Malley come to a close.  He might have been a great President, but now we'll never know.  He just as easily could have become President and disappointed me the way Clinton and Obama did, though, but at least I'll never know that either.

Nothing more to say . . .          

Beto Bet

I was just listening to a conversation on MSNBC about Texas Democratic Senate candidate and U.S. Representative Robert "Beto" O'Rourke (below) and how he's faring in his campaign against the insufferable Ted Cruz.  Despite raising more than $38 million for his campaign from voters all over America, he's behind Cruz by eight percentage points in the polls.

A pair of political strategists, one Republican and one Democrat, agreed that O'Rourke is impressive at inspiring people nationwide but, because Texas has not sent a Democrat to the Senate sine Lloyd Bentsen won his fourth and final term in 1988, always had an uphill battle.  The Republican strategist even said that Democrats wanted their money on a lost cause when their continuations could have gone to held imperiled Democratic Senate incumbents.  That is, Beto has more support outside Texas than in Texas.  He added that O'Rourke made a fatal mistake by nationalizing the race instead of talking about issues primarily concerning Texas, reminding Lone Star State voters that there is something worse than Ted Cruz, the least liked man in the Senate - a Democrat.

Former Democratic U.S. Representative Donna Edwards, responding to the strategists, seemed to concede that O'Rourke will lose (like O'Rourke, Edwards gave up a House seat for a quixotic quest for a Senate seat), but she did say that the enthusiasm he's generated in Texas may help Democratic House candidates there.

As for the polls . . . well, I think there's a chance that Cruz could be upset in Texas, just as his fellow Cuban-American senator Robert Menendez could be upset in New Jersey (more on that later).  The polls don't show first-time voters in their surveys, and the young people in Texas fired up by O'Rourke could end up making the difference.  But if he loses, he is likely politically dead, like so many one-time losers on the Democratic side who have come before, and coming from El Paso and having a rapport with Hispanic voters will only help Beto if a future Democratic President appoints him to a Cabinet position.