Castro’s narrow path now trickier to navigate
Early Thursday, Beto O’Rourke officially announced his presidential candidacy with a 3 1⁄2-minute video promising “the greatest grassroots campaign this country has ever seen.”
Two hours later, Julián Castro released a list of 30 prominent Texas Democrats — most of them Latinos — who have endorsed his presidential campaign.
Castro was staking out his turf, on the same day a fellow Texan had seized the attention of the political world.
Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and housing secretary, had anticipated that O’Rourke, the former El Paso congressman, would enter the 2020 Democratic scrum.
After all, O’Rourke’s long tease, which began shortly after his remarkably close loss to Ted Cruz in November’s U.S. Senate election, was so clearly moving toward a presidential announcement that even his enthusiasts had begun to feel exasperation more than suspense.
In one sense, O’Rourke’s big news shouldn’t alter the campaign calculus much for Castro.
Castro remains the only Latino candidate in the crowded Democratic field, with a chance to be the first viable Mexican-American presidential hopeful in U.S. history.
Castro’s credentials and personal story don’t overlap all that much with
O’Rourke’s either.
As the former mayor of the seventh-largest city in the nation, Castro can take credit for creating a program that expanded access to high-quality pre-K.
As the former secretary of housing and urban development, he can claim subject-matter expertise on the critical issue of housing affordability.
O’Rourke served six years on El Paso’s City Council and three terms in the U.S. House, but can’t really hold himself up as an authority on any pressing policy concern, apart from the conditions along this country’s southern border, where he has lived most of his life.
Both men grew up in political families: Castro’s mother, Rosie, helped to lead the Chicano empowerment movement in this city and O’Rourke’s late father, Pat, served as an El Paso county judge.
But Castro is the overachieving, blue-collar product of San Antonio’s West Side, while O’Rourke is the prep-school rebel who rode a punk-rock, do-ityourself ethos to national celebrity.
With or without O’Rourke in the race, Castro’s path to the Democratic nomination is narrow. It depends on his ability to catch fire in Iowa and/or New Hampshire and convince grassroots Democrats that he’s a serious contender and not merely an earnest long-shot auditioning for a vice presidential nod.
Also, by launching his campaign three months ago, Castro was able to preempt O’Rourke and cop some of the greatest hits from O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate bid.
For example, O’Rourke built his Senate candidacy on a promise to visit all 254 Texas counties — a move that made little practical or logistical sense, but carried great symbolic value.
It signified that O’Rourke wanted to communicate with people in every part of the state. It quantified, in car miles, the defining assertion of O’Rourke’s 2018 crusade: “We’re taking nobody for granted. Writing nobody off.”
Four weeks ago, Castro went national with the same idea, promising to visit all 50 states. Castro explained he wanted “to send an important message: When I’m president, everyone will count.”
Castro also launched his campaign with a promise to refuse any donations from political action committees, just as O’Rourke did during his Senate run.
And while O’Rourke comes into the race with a rock-star aura, he also carries the weight of a backlash which festered during his four months of existential brooding after the loss to Cruz.
Hardcore progressives, who favor Bernie Sanders, suggested O’Rourke’s congressional votes too often aligned with Republicans.
Conservatives ridiculed him as a self-absorbed lightweight, while detractors on both ends of the political spectrum questioned whether his use of a Latino-sounding nickname (albeit one he’s had for most of his life) amounted to cultural appropriation.
O’Rourke also did himself no
favors with a January Washington Post interview in which he struggled to answer basic questions about issues sure to land on his desk as president.
For all the question marks about O’Rourke, however, his star power represents a serious impediment to the growth of Castro’s campaign.
Castro can’t match the experience of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. He can’t claim the policy chops of Elizabeth Warren. And for all his attempts to court progressive activists, he’ll never successfully outflank Bernie Sanders on the left.
Castro’s most compelling argument is the need for generational change. O’Rourke steals that argument and wraps it in a more dynamic, charismatic package. He also threatens to reduce Castro to the “other” Texan in the race.
Imagine if Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin had meticulously planned for two years to enter the 2008 presidential contest, only to have Barack Obama, his fellow Illinoisan, drop into the race with little warning.
In a field of approximately 20 candidates, Castro will have to fight for attention. O’Rourke, if anything, may end up getting too much of it for his own good.