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. 😠

Our Cup Runneth Dry

The United States men's national soccer team played the Netherlands this past Saturday in the round of sixteen at the World Cup and, as expected, lost. 3-1.  As Billy Joel would have said, they had the Midas touch . . . until they met the Dutch.

This raises a lot of questions.  How come we keep getting our hopes up with these lovable losers?  Why does the women's team always have to save our honor by winning their World Cup the year after?  Why did the Yanks blow so many scoring opportunities?  Who honestly thought they could beat the Dutch anyway?  And if the Dutch national color is orange, why do they have a red, white and blue flag that's virtually indistinguishable from Luxembourg's?

I keep hearing stories about how the U.S. Men's National Team has yet to peak, and that they could be real contenders in 2026, when the World Cup is held in North America (the United States, Canada and Mexico) and play mainly on their home turf.   All they need is a better striker, a stronger midfield lineup, and yada yada yada . . .

That's as may be.  American sports fans woke up Saturday morning excited about soccer and went to bed Sunday night after watching twelve hours of NFL games. 

I Can't! I Can't! I Can't!

By the power not vested in anyone by the state of New Jersey, no gay couple can be pronounced married. The New Jersey state Senate voted down a law that would have made New Jersey the sixth state to legalize gay marriage, and with the Assembly now a moot point and incoming governor and noted reckless driver Chris Christie opposing the idea, the fight is over. At least the legislative part is. But Steven Goldstein, a gay activist and gay rights advocate, has vowed to take the issue to the courts. Good for him. I wish him and his fellow activists well, and maybe this will lead to a happier ending for the issue.

The legal path is always tricky, though, because subverting a social issue that is normally decided in state legislatures can inflame passions on both sides of the issue even more - witness Roe v. Wade and the ongoing battle over abortion that caused. But since gay marriage, unlike abortion, has hardly been shown to have any detrimental effects on anyone, and since the arguments against it are redolent of the arguments made against interracial marriage back in the 1950s, it's just inexplicable that gay marriage can't gain acceptance so easily - not even in "intellectual" New York or "laid-back" California.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's "originalist" interpretation of constitutional text comes to mind here. Scalia's "originalist" philosophy says that if a protection or right isn't spelled out constitutionally, all you have to do is pass a law. Well, so much for that idea. But, on the other hand, neither the Constitution nor the New Jersey state constitution says anything about marriage being between a man and a woman. The gay rights movement may have an opening here as a result. The legal path may be fraught with danger, but it's probably the only path available right now - in New Jersey or anywhere else.

This is an issue that Democrats, controlling every branch of the state government, were expected to win on, but it was far from clear cut. True, the vote was mainly on party lines, but six Democrats voted with the majority - without them, there would have been no majority. And it's not a case of bigoted white middle-class conservatives versus a rainbow coalition involving everyone else; though the issue was touted as one of civil rights, Senator Ronald Rice (D-Essex), who is black, voted against it. A picture in today's Star-Ledger shows a black woman cheering the outcome in a room full of mostly white gay marriage supporters.

Some gay marriage opponents still support civil unions, legal in New Jersey but not offering the full benefits of marriage - the civil union law doesn't guarantee health benefits for same-sex partners, for example. One Republican state senator, a same-sex marriage opponent, has vowed to help amend the civil union law to strengthen it. But as long as same-sex partners are denied the right of full marriage - and can only be considered "kind of" married - that's just as insulting as pre-abolition standard of making a black slave equal to three-fifths of a person.