San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
O’Rourke could change more than Texas
A phenomenon is something unusual and interesting that can be seen and felt. How it came to be and what or who it is can’t be completely understood. The impact can be lasting — think about the influence and enduring power of the Beatles — or it can be as ephemeral as a boy band that was the world’s biggest act 15 months ago but whose name few now recall.
Any phenomenon will be the target of outsize love and disdain, even hate, by detractors.
Within the past 20 years, the four biggest political phenoms in American politics have been Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes and former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke.
O’Rourke lost his bid to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz by 2.6 points. But in his race,
O’Rourke did something that hadn’t been done since Abraham Lincoln in 1858. He became a national figure solely through a run for the U.S. Senate. (Obama in 2004 was different, because it was his keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention that propelled him.)
Lincoln lost his Senate race but was elected president two years later. O’Rourke embarked on a run for president that wasn’t as much ill-considered as he was ill-prepared.
O’Rourke has now taken his name ID, fundraising ability, organizational prowess and large network of volunteers into a run for the Democratic nomination for governor and what likely will be a race against Gov. Greg Abbott.
Wednesday, he met with the Express-News Editorial Board and spoke of wanting to be a governor who leads the state toward a “common cause with common purpose.”
O’Rourke said he’d focus on three things that “will bring us together.” Those three things are well-paying jobs, public education and Medicaid expansion,
which, as he pointed out, is gaining bipartisan support in the Texas Legislature.
“None of them radical. None of them on the fringe. None of them divisive,” O’Rourke said. “All of which have both Democrats and Republicans supporting them that would clearly make Texas a better state.”
While critical of Abbott’s photo ops and border policy, O’Rourke also criticized the Biden administration for not doing enough at the border.
In a debate in September 2019, a few weeks after a gunman murdered 23 people in a Walmart in O’Rourke’s hometown
of El Paso, he famously declared, “Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”
Asked about it during the Editorial Board meeting, he said, “I spoke with the passion that I felt in that moment.”
O’Rourke got emotional as he recounted flying home and going directly to the hospital to meet with the families of victims and not having an answer for the woman who, as her husband was being operated on, asked, “Why does anyone need a gun like that?”
O’Rourke told the Editorial Board, “It was a great question, and I didn’t have an answer for her.”
He said he knows an assault weapon ban or mandatory buyback program isn’t realistic but believes a universal background check would work.
When asked what he’d learned from his presidential run, O’Rourke smiled and asked, “Beyond, don’t run for president?”
He talked about the experience and said, “I was not a good candidate. I did not run a good campaign, and that was not a good outcome, and the only thing that was good about it was the people who supported me and volunteered for me.”
Over the course of the 90minute meeting, O’Rourke was thoughtful, passionate and pragmatic, reminding me less of the caricature of him as a perspiring liberal firebrand on the stump than of the three-term congressman with a moderate voting record.
In 2018, the journalist Matthew Yglesias wrote of
O’Rourke, “Indeed, if you blocked all thoughts of the 2020 presidential primary and asked yourself what kind of House Democrat would have a chance of winning a state-wide election in Texas, you’d say it would take a guy with a lot of charisma and probably a record that’s somewhat more conservative than your average House Democrat’s.”
If that guy, showing up in Lubbock, Midland and Sweetwater, can reach across party line, the impact of the phenomenon of 2018 will be felt beyond next November’s gubernatorial election.