GOP won’t quit playing the Beto name game
Beto O’Rourke seemingly put this nonissue to bed nearly six months ago.
With a country-flavored radio jingle in early March, Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz had mocked O’Rourke, his Democratic opponent, as an Anglo who adopted a Hispanic-sounding nickname to pander to Latino voters.
“I remember reading stories,” the jingle proclaimed, “Liberal Robert wanted to fit in, so he changed his name to Beto and hid it with a grin.”
The underlying point was that Cruz’s challenger, born Robert Francis O’Rourke, was a phony; someone so driven by political ambition that he had appropriated a new identity to dupe Texas Latinos into believing he was one of them.
In fact, O’Rourke never has offered even the faintest suggestion that he’s a Latino. In a March interview with HBO host Bill Maher, the El Paso congressman, when asked about his heritage, said: “Pretty Irish.”
O’Rourke has said that his family gave him the nickname when he was an infant. He also posted an Instagram photo of him as a preschooler, wearing a sweater with the name “Beto” on it.
That should have been enough to sweep the nickname absurdity into the overflowing dustbin of shameless political cynicism.
But Republicans refuse to let it go.
In recent weeks, I’ve been inundated with emails from Cruz supporters pushing this attack line.
One emailer said O’Rourke’s nickname had been “recently acquired for a specific political purpose.” Another wrote, “I believe he's trying to get people to think he’s part Hispanic because he feels this will help him.”
We’ve also seen the emergence of a conservative Facebook meme, in which a photo of O’Rourke is accompanied by the acronym SPAM (Someone Posing as Mexican).
The Republican Party of Texas has fed this narrative, repeatedly firing off snarky tweets that refer to O’Rourke as “Francis” or “Robert.” That’s the way it referred to him Wednesday in a tweetstorm designed to embarrass him for his history as a punk-rock musician and his two arrests (for trespass and drunken driving) in the 1990s.
As gotcha moments go, this was pretty inept. After all, O’Rourke routinely talks, with great enthusiasm, about his punk-rock roots. And only a day before those GOP tweets, O’Rourke penned a Houston Chronicle op-ed about criminal justice reform that began with him voluntarily recounting his arrests, even if he hasn’t been forthcoming about all the details.
Attacking O’Rourke for being a punk rocker and for committing a couple of mistakes in his 20s might make for dubious messaging, but at least it’s rooted in biographical fact. Trolling him over his nickname, however, is an act of pure, pathetic deceit.
If you’re not convinced by the childhood photo of the sweater-clad O’Rourke, consider the recollections of former journalist Gary Scharrer, who worked for the El Paso Times in the 1980s.
During that time, Scharrer covered O’Rourke’s father, Pat, who served from 1978-82 as a county commissioner and from 1982-86 as county judge. Scharrer remembers a young Beto O’Rourke, then around 8 or 9 years old, tagging along with his father.
“He was introduced to me as ‘Beto.’ I knew him as ‘Beto,’ ” Scharrer said. “It’s absurd for anyone to suggest (the name) is a fabrication.”
I suppose Republicans want us to believe that O’Rourke already was plotting in elementary school for a future Senate race in which he’d need the Latino vote. I guess the same was true in 1993, when the back cover of a record by his band Foss listed him as “Beto O’Rourke.”
And what about the June 1999 note in the Business section of the El Paso Times, in which O’Rourke talks about his webdesign company and is identified as “Beto”? That was six years before he launched his first political campaign, a 2005 race for El Paso City Council.
Truth be told, if there is a candidate in this race who adopted a nickname to win himself more popularity, it’s Ted Cruz.
While O’Rourke was given his nickname by his family, Cruz decided as a teenager to shed the name his family had given him.
As Cruz recalled in his 2015 book, “A Time for Truth,” he had grown tired of being the outcast nerd and concluded that his name, Rafael (which tended to be turned into Felito), was holding him back. With his mom’s help, he settled on Ted, a nickname for Edward, his middle name.
By Cruz’s own account, his Cuban-born father hated the nickname so much he refused to call his son “Ted” for two years.
Ultimately, however, all this nickname stuff is meaningless.
If you disagree with O’Rourke’s commitment to Medicare for all, his support for criminal justice reform and his calls for the legalization of marijuana, you have a valid reason to vote against him.
But if you’re trying to justify that vote with some nonsense about him conjuring up a nickname to con the Latinos of this state, then you’re conning yourself.