“It Seems Like Iowa in 2007”: Could Beto O’Rourke Be the Next Obama?
By now you’ve probably heard a lot about Beto O’Rourke and his surprisingly durable challenge against Ted Cruz in bright red Texas. You’ve heard about how he’s visited all 254 Texas counties in his Toyota Tundra. You’ve seen videos of him sweating through a button-down shirt at one of his jam-packed town halls. You’ve watched the rangy 45-year-old congressman skateboard through a Whataburger parking lot in Brownsville. And if you’re following the 2018 midterms, you know that O’Rourke only trails Cruz by a single digit while running an unabashedly progressive campaign, making Democrats around the country salivate at the prospect of a blue wave crashing everywhere from Galveston to El Paso.
That’s still a long shot. Texas is Texas, after all. But the hype emerging from the Democrat’s campaign points to something rather obvious: O’Rourke is good at this, way better than most of the Democrats sniffing around the next presidential race from the boring hallways of Capitol Hill. Whether he wins or loses his race—and yes, even if he loses—O’Rourke should be included in every conversation about the 2020 Democratic primary. That’s because, unlike most of the paint-by-numbers politicians in his party, O’Rourke actually understands how politics should be conducted in the Donald Trump era: authentic, full of energy, stripped of consultant-driven sterility, and waged at all times with a social-media-primed video screen in mind. O’Rourke is making a bet that running on his gut and giving voters a clear choice against Cruz, rather than just a mushy alternative, offers not just a path to victory in Texas but an antidote to the entire stupid artifice of American politics in the Trump era.