The Briefing Room
State Chapters => Texas => Topic started by: IsailedawayfromFR on May 10, 2019, 03:28:31 pm
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His band didn’t catch on, his alt-weekly flopped and he lost his highest-profile race. Inside the long, risk-free rise of Beto O’Rourke.
By MICHAEL KRUSE May 10, 2019
AMES, Iowa—The presidential run of Beto O’Rourke is a profoundly personality-driven exercise, his charisma and Kennedy-esque demeanor the topic of one profile after another, so it’s surprising to listen to his speeches on the stump in which he doesn’t talk a whole lot about himself. In Iowa recently, over several days in a rainy, foggy, uncertain stretch of spring, O’Rourke delivered a series of speeches and held question-and-answer sessions in which he spoke at length about unity, civility and inclusivity, and only rarely touched on his personal story. There was one notable exception: When he did offer up bits of his biography, he leaned most heavily on his run last year against Ted Cruz for a spot in the United States Senate.
He recounted for the crowds tales of the places he went and the people he met during his barnstorming, freewheeling, attention-getting campaign, coming back to two numbers: 254, the number of counties in gargantuan Texas, all of which he visited … and the percentage-point margin by which he was defeated.
“We lost by 2.6 percent,†he said in a basement music venue here at Iowa State University.
“We lost that Senate race in Texas by 2.6 percent,†he said in a downtown greasy spoon in Storm Lake.
“We came within 2.6 percentage points of defeating Ted Cruz,†he said in a community college cafeteria in Fort Dodge.
“So close,†the local party leader said in introducing O’Rourke one morning at a brewpub in Carroll. “So close.â€
The part of his past that he talked about the most, by far, was a race that he lost.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/05/10/beto-orourke-2020-president-campaign-profile-failing-up-226866 (https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/05/10/beto-orourke-2020-president-campaign-profile-failing-up-226866)
What a remarkable pedigree he proudly trumpets. Losing is an honor to him.
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It's been a rough couple of months since Beto announced his campaign, and was lauded as a formidable candidate to win the nomination. He's been overtaken in the polls by South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whose appeal is similar to O'Rourke's, but has the added benefit, in the identity-obsessed realm of Democratic politics, of being openly gay. As former Congressman Barney Frank (D., Mass.) recently observed: Beto "may be regretting that he's straight."