How O’Rourke went from punk to politics
An El Paso native, Beto O’Rourke grew up in a deeply political household with a father who was a county commissioner and later the county judge. His father was a major supporter of the Rev. Jesse Jackson during the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, even becoming Texas cochair of Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign.
But tensions with his hardcharging father would push Beto O’Rourke to leave El Paso as a teenager, transferring to a private boarding school in Virginia called Woodberry Forest. O’Rourke told Vanity Fair in 2019 that he had to get away from his father’s criticism and high expectations.
“I wanted out,” he said. “I wanted out of the house. I wanted away from him and his shadow.”
After prep school, O’Rourke went to Columbia University in New York where, en route to earning a degree in English literature, he became a member of the crew team and played bass guitar in various punk rock bands.
After graduating in 1995, O’Rourke took a series of odd jobs in New York before returning to El Paso at 25. It was then O’Rourke created a web-design company called Stanton Street Technology Group that he helped run for 15 years before selling it.
O’Rourke said before that he wasn’t very engaged in the community. But after the inevitable Rotary meetings and Chamber of Commerce meetings, he came to see El Paso in a much broader way.
“I began to think about what more I could do for the community and that’s when I began to think about running for city council,” he said.
O’Rourke said he’s not sure he ever would have jumped into politics if not for the team building his business.
It was in that council race that O’Rourke first employed the frantic, go-everywhere approach to political campaigning that has become his trademark.
In that race, he and his eventual wife Amy knocked on thousands of doors, ultimately beating the incumbent city council member he faced.