Democrats across the country should be grateful for what Republicans are about to do: rid them of a nagging disease known as Betoism.
Beto O’Rourke, the erstwhile congressman from El Paso, Texas, who has far more glossy national magazine profiles than winning campaigns, is about to go down to defeat in his attempt to unseat centrist conservative Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott is a popular governor and quite capable in his own right of popping wheelies over most Democrats. But Beto has approached his run with all of his usual nationally tested talking points recycled from his idiotic presidential crusade, designed to go viral on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and via the T-shirt worn by your daughter’s boyfriend who is still trying to find himself after sophomore year.
O’Rourke is depicted in these profiles in a way typically confined to the pages of poorly written romance novels originally conceived by housewives who had youthful fantasies about Bobby Kennedy ravaging them tastefully in Peter Lawford’s beach house, albeit after a good day of beefing ollies in the Whataburger parking lot.
The Beto “swoonery,” as Jack Shafer called it, has proven to be the most enduring aspect of his brand, as if designed by NBC writers as a follow-on to Martin Sheen on The West Wing. He even had the high intellects and moral exemplars of “Pod Save America,” Obama veterans Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor, bet big on his potential. And it was all for naught.
O’Rourke was first elected to federal office in 2012, and he has been running ever since with the same Kennedyesque dedication he employed while fleeing the scene of a DWI. In all, over the past decade, according to the calculations of Texas politicos, his campaigns have cost $194,185,526 — and it will be more by the time the final report comes in. The idea that close to a quarter billion dollars will be spent trying to make Beto O’Rourke something more than a mediocre Democratic congressman from a seat so lopsided that Republicans sometimes don’t even bother to nominate a candidate is pretty amazing.
Yet that’s what today’s Democratic Party has become: if you nationalize your message, go viral often enough, and enlist journalists to praise the way you sweat through your shirts — so sexily, as opposed to Ted Cruz — you too can suck massive amounts of cash out of the pockets of idiot donors who are too busy feeling good about their rightness to analyze what kind of Democrat would actually win in Texas.
Democrats should be grateful for what Greg Abbott is about to do to Beto O’Rourke. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be nice. But it will be necessary for a political party that needs to wrestle with the truth about what they’re doing wrong. Maybe this time, they’ll learn from the pain.
