O’Rourke to bypass typical locations in presidential race
WASHINGTON — Beto O’Rourke is returning to the campaign trail, but you won’t find him in Iowa with the rest of the Democratic pack.
Moved by the mass shooting at a Walmart in his hometown of El Paso to “take the fight directly to the source of this problem,” O’Rourke said Thursday that he will be heading to places where he says President Donald Trump has been “terrorizing and terrifying our fellow Americans.”
“Anyone this president puts down, we are going to do our best to lift up,” O’Rourke said in a speech in El Paso.
The address was meant to jump-start and refocus the former congressman’s presidential campaign. The El Paso massacre, in which 22 people died, has also prompted Julián Castro, the other Texan in the race, to go after Trump more aggressively.
Both candidates have targeted the president’s rhetoric on immigration, which was echoed in an online manifesto that authorities say the suspect in the El Paso shooting wrote. In it, he railed against “the Hispanic invasion” of Texas.
Republicans have dismissed the Democrats’ criticism of Trump as a desperate move to breathe life into their sputtering campaigns. O’Rourke in particular drew national attention after the shooting, when he used an expletive in answering a question about whether he considered Trump a racist.
With the renewed attention have come calls for O’Rourke to leave the presidential race and run for the U.S. Senate.
He batted down that idea Thursday, saying: “That would not be good enough for this community. That would not be good enough for El Paso. That would not be good enough for this country.
“We must take the fight directly to the source of this problem — that person who has caused this pain and placed this country in this moment of peril. And that is Donald Trump,” O’Rourke said.
He outlined plans to retool his campaign and skip the normal path of a presidential race through the early primary states, including Iowa and Nevada, where he and the rest of the crowded Democratic field have so far spent much of their time.
“I can’t go back to that,” O’Rourke said, dismissing the “corn dogs and Ferris wheels” of the Iowa State Fair, where Democrats spent the weekend while O’Rourke was in El Paso.
“Every single day of this campaign, I will take the courage and the kindness, the warmth, the strength, resolve of this community with me, and I will share it with the rest of this country,” O’Rourke said. “We in El Paso — and I hope that we as Americans — still believe that though we have not realized the idea of America for everyone, it is still within our grasp.”
“We, the people of the border, can lead the way,” he said.
O’Rourke’s first stop is Mississippi, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials arrested hundreds of undocumented workers this month. O’Rourke said he wants “to be with those families who have lost a loved one … because of the hostility of this administration to immigrants.”
“I see more clearly now than I ever have before that immigrants in this community, in this state, in this country will continue to be attacked — not just killed as they were in the Walmart, but terrorized as we saw just last week in Mississippi,” he said. “Six hundred people who came to this country for the privilege of working the toughest … jobs that no one else here would allow their children to work.”
O’Rourke also called for a ban on assault weapons and for the federal government to buy guns back.
But his main target was Trump, whom he called a demagogue and a threat to the nation.
“When we allow this country to be defined along lines of race and ethnicity and religion and we allow a commander in chief to not only welcome that, but the violence that follows — to defy our laws, our institutions and any ethical or moral boundaries — the end of that road is the end of this idea of America, the end of an America where every single one of us could belong and have a future,” O’Rourke said. “I’m confident that if, at this moment, we do not wake up to this threat, then we as a country will die in our sleep.”