IS BETO O'ROURKE THE WHITE OBAMA?
O’Rourke’s growing appeal to Democrats beyond Texas was confirmed once again last week when a NowThis video of him defending the N.F.L. player protests rocketed around the Internet. “I can think of nothing more American,” he said of the protests, responding to a Fort Worth voter who was clearly uncomfortable with the idea of players taking a knee. The O’Rourke clip was viewed over 44 million times across Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube as of Tuesday, according to a NowThis spokeswoman.
The clip simply captured O’Rourke speaking off the cuff at one of his town-hall meetings, all without pandering or poll-tested varnish, and it was enough to land him a re-tweet from LeBron James and a guest spot on Ellen next month. The Legend of Beto is growing bigger than Texas. He’s already a bona fide political celebrity among Democrats, and he’s just a candidate for Senate in a state that shouldn’t be competitive. It’s not a stretch to say that he’s more famous among Democrats than probably 95 U.S. senators, most of his fellow congressmen, and pretty much every sitting governor in the country. Which is exactly why he can’t be ignored in conversations about the next presidential race.
Ask yourself this question: today, looking at the likely Democratic primary field, who is the person most able to fill stadiums, command attention in both traditional and social media, sell T-shirts, suck in small-dollar donations, stir up genuine excitement among millennials, and throw a haymaker at Trump in the process? Is it a U.S. senator who occasionally sends out sternly worded e-mails about Mitch McConnell? Or is it the cool Texas guy you read about in your News Feed who used to play in a punk band and who’s now taking the fight to Ted Cruz in the deep red cradle of American conservatism? If you picked the former option, you probably watch Morning Joe too much.
Bernie Sanders is perhaps the only other name that comes to mind, but Sanders was also unable to dispatch Hillary Clinton, one of the most unpopular candidates in American campaign history, in the last presidential race. Sanders is also 76. And his fellow putative front-runners, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, will also be in their 70s if they decide to run next year. Maybe that won’t matter, but millennials are now the largest voting-age population in the country, and as Florida’s 39-year-old Democratic nominee for governor, Andrew Gillum, demonstrated this week, it’s helpful to speak the language of young, diverse voters who increasingly make up the beating heart of the Democratic Party. History also bears out an important pattern: since Vietnam, Democrats have only captured the White House by nominating youthful outsiders who offered a clean break from their predecessor. Jimmy Carter was inaugurated at 52, Bill Clintonat 46, and Obama at 47.
In little over a year, O’Rourke has built a thriving political movement in the country’s second-largest state, with a strategy built purely on hustle, grassroots organizing, and his hunch that the standard-issue campaign playbook met its final demise in 2016. O’Rourke has raised over $23 million so far, all from small donors and a lot it from out of state. But his campaign money hasn’t gone to television ads or consultants. It’s gone to online advertising (Sanders’s digital firm, to be precise) and a T-shirt vendor in Austin tasked with pumping out thousands of heather gray “Beto for Senate” shirts. He’s Spanish-fluent and hails from a border city, El Paso, in a moment when immigration has become the hottest-burning political issue in the country. And at a time when Americans view politics through their mobile screens, O’Rourke passes the ever-fetishized “authenticity” test by a mile. That’s partly because he has a habit of sharing almost every moment of his day, from his morning runs to his burrito lunches, on Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook. But it’s also because, so far, O’Rourke doesn’t appear to be performing a version of himself. Nothing feels practiced. The voters I spoke with in East Texas all said the same thing when I asked why they liked him: he seems “real.”
“O’Rourke offers not just a path to victory in Texas but an antidote to the entire stupid artifice of American politics in the Trump era,” Hamby wrote. “He’s authentic, full of energy, and stripped of consultant-driven sterility. On what planet is Beto O’Rourke not a presidential contender, even if he loses?”
Sources: vanityfair.com, marketwatch.com
O’Rourke’s growing appeal to Democrats beyond Texas was confirmed once again last week when a NowThis video of him defending the N.F.L. player protests rocketed around the Internet. “I can think of nothing more American,” he said of the protests, responding to a Fort Worth voter who was clearly uncomfortable with the idea of players taking a knee. The O’Rourke clip was viewed over 44 million times across Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube as of Tuesday, according to a NowThis spokeswoman.
The clip simply captured O’Rourke speaking off the cuff at one of his town-hall meetings, all without pandering or poll-tested varnish, and it was enough to land him a re-tweet from LeBron James and a guest spot on Ellen next month. The Legend of Beto is growing bigger than Texas. He’s already a bona fide political celebrity among Democrats, and he’s just a candidate for Senate in a state that shouldn’t be competitive. It’s not a stretch to say that he’s more famous among Democrats than probably 95 U.S. senators, most of his fellow congressmen, and pretty much every sitting governor in the country. Which is exactly why he can’t be ignored in conversations about the next presidential race.
Ask yourself this question: today, looking at the likely Democratic primary field, who is the person most able to fill stadiums, command attention in both traditional and social media, sell T-shirts, suck in small-dollar donations, stir up genuine excitement among millennials, and throw a haymaker at Trump in the process? Is it a U.S. senator who occasionally sends out sternly worded e-mails about Mitch McConnell? Or is it the cool Texas guy you read about in your News Feed who used to play in a punk band and who’s now taking the fight to Ted Cruz in the deep red cradle of American conservatism? If you picked the former option, you probably watch Morning Joe too much.
Bernie Sanders is perhaps the only other name that comes to mind, but Sanders was also unable to dispatch Hillary Clinton, one of the most unpopular candidates in American campaign history, in the last presidential race. Sanders is also 76. And his fellow putative front-runners, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, will also be in their 70s if they decide to run next year. Maybe that won’t matter, but millennials are now the largest voting-age population in the country, and as Florida’s 39-year-old Democratic nominee for governor, Andrew Gillum, demonstrated this week, it’s helpful to speak the language of young, diverse voters who increasingly make up the beating heart of the Democratic Party. History also bears out an important pattern: since Vietnam, Democrats have only captured the White House by nominating youthful outsiders who offered a clean break from their predecessor. Jimmy Carter was inaugurated at 52, Bill Clintonat 46, and Obama at 47.
In little over a year, O’Rourke has built a thriving political movement in the country’s second-largest state, with a strategy built purely on hustle, grassroots organizing, and his hunch that the standard-issue campaign playbook met its final demise in 2016. O’Rourke has raised over $23 million so far, all from small donors and a lot it from out of state. But his campaign money hasn’t gone to television ads or consultants. It’s gone to online advertising (Sanders’s digital firm, to be precise) and a T-shirt vendor in Austin tasked with pumping out thousands of heather gray “Beto for Senate” shirts. He’s Spanish-fluent and hails from a border city, El Paso, in a moment when immigration has become the hottest-burning political issue in the country. And at a time when Americans view politics through their mobile screens, O’Rourke passes the ever-fetishized “authenticity” test by a mile. That’s partly because he has a habit of sharing almost every moment of his day, from his morning runs to his burrito lunches, on Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook. But it’s also because, so far, O’Rourke doesn’t appear to be performing a version of himself. Nothing feels practiced. The voters I spoke with in East Texas all said the same thing when I asked why they liked him: he seems “real.”
“O’Rourke offers not just a path to victory in Texas but an antidote to the entire stupid artifice of American politics in the Trump era,” Hamby wrote. “He’s authentic, full of energy, and stripped of consultant-driven sterility. On what planet is Beto O’Rourke not a presidential contender, even if he loses?”
Sources: vanityfair.com, marketwatch.com
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