By Jim Geraghty
Monday, November 04, 2019
Beto O’Rourke ended his presidential campaign Friday
afternoon, and perhaps you’ve forgotten him already. Over the last 22 months,
we’ve learned that O’Rourke is not that interesting as a potential national
leader. How Democrats and many members of the mainstream media reacted
to O’Rourke is much more interesting.
Almost any action by anyone in politics can be
interpreted in wildly different ways, depending upon the perspective of the
person covering it. If Rahm Emanuel were a Republican, the old stories about
him stabbing a table with a steak knife and screaming that all of his enemies
would be dead, threatening Tony Blair with profanities, and sending a dead fish
to a pollster would not be seen as wild and crazy tales about a lovable,
hard-charging competitor. If Emanuel were a Republican, he would be covered as
a rage-filled psychopath who probably needs to be committed in an institution.
If George W. Bush had been a Democrat, he would be widely described as an
inspiring recovering alcoholic who turned his life around, became a dedicated
husband and father, and a unifying leader who wisely declared, “we have a
responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.”
Last year I wrote that “the endless glowing profiles of
O’Rourke in every publication from Vanity Fair to Spin to Rolling
Stone to Town & Country represent the national media’s worsening
challenge in differentiating between what it wants to see happen and what is
actually happening.” Left-leaning writers and editors and producers across the
country desperately wanted to see a Democrat who could win in Texas and
convinced themselves that O’Rourke was that guy. To his credit, he came closer
than any other Democrat has in a generation. That is still about 215,000 votes
short.
What was striking about all of those 2018 profiles was
how . . . surface-oriented they were, regularly mentioning O’Rourke’s old punk
rock band, the skateboarding, the casual profanity which was inevitably
interpreted as some sort of authenticity, the descriptions of his sweat, the
inevitable reference to his Kennedy-esque looks and absence of any mention of
his Kennedy-esque driving record. The tone and style of the profiles of
O’Rourke weren’t all that different from the profiles of actors, musicians, and
directors in Vanity Fair, GQ, and other celebrity magazines — a
lot of personality and anecdotes and perfectly cinematic photo shoots. You
could read for pages with little mention of anything O’Rourke had done in
Congress, because as a member of the minority party, he hadn’t done much. The
one race Barack Obama ever lost in his life, a congressional bid against
Representative Bobby Rush, the incumbent dismantled the young and ambitious Obama
with one devastating question: “Just what’s he done? I mean, what’s he
done?” One could fairly put the same question to O’Rourke.
O’Rourke had charisma, along with genuinely odd behavior
like trying to trick his wife into eating baby poop. He had a general sense
that he wanted the country to have more acceptance of illegal immigrants, fewer
guns in the hands of private citizens, higher taxes on the rich, and that
churches that opposed gay marriage ought to lose their tax-exempt status. But
he had only the vaguest idea on how to get to there and little interest in
laying out a roadmap. Elizabeth Warren had a plan for everything; O’Rourke was
going to wing it.
This allergy to details led to a rather unfocused
presidential effort. The O’Rourke campaign started as centrist happy talk but,
when struggling, led to the candidate promising, “Hell yes, we’re going to take
away your AR-15!” In the June primary debate, Julian Castro demonstrated that
O’Rourke was mixing up sections of immigration law, and jabbed, “I think you
should do your homework.” His platitude-filled speeches started to sound pretty
empty. The traits that charmed visiting correspondents in Texas a year ago
started to look silly — like jumping onto tables and countertops in Iowa.
Beto O’Rourke did not lose anything between 2018 and 2019
— er, other than a Senate race. He is essentially the same man he was a year
ago. The biggest thing that changed was that now he was running against other
Democrats that some members of the media liked better. Towards the end of
summer, O’Rourke had no choice but to joke about how differently he was
perceived, compared to the Senate race. Late-night host Seth Meyers asked him,
“You ran against Ted Cruz in a Senate campaign. Do you ever miss how easy it
was to be different from Ted Cruz?” “Where is Ted Cruz when you need him?”
O’Rourke joked. (“In the Senate,” Cruz replied via Twitter.)
This year, the whole country got to see the Beto O’Rourke
that some of us have seen from the beginning. Years from now, when O’Rourke’s
name is mentioned, Democrats will wonder why they got so excited about him
once. He is the political equivalent of Reebok’s Dan and Dave competition, the
Macarena, The Blair Witch Project, and any other short-lived trend that
seems inexplicable in retrospect.
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