What if we just treat Beto O’Rourke like one of those kids in the college scandal, where their parents fooled them into thinking they were really taking the ACT and getting good scores, while a professional ringer filled out the actual test papers? He already got the Annie Leibovitz photo shoot, like a pretty and famous person. Put together a little closed-circuit Truman Show for him, where you run him from one cruddy-town arena to the next—or the same arena each day, with the decor swapped out—with a crowd cheering for him as he sweats and burbles. What would the difference be? He’d never have to know.
Ted Cruz is repulsive and evil, and voters were turning out coast to coast to try to drive his party out of power, and Beto couldn’t get the job done.
If Beto were worried about sustaining any link to reality, he wouldn’t be here, right now, pre-declaring and re-pre-declaring and then finally maybe declaring his desire (“plan” seems too strong) to seek the Democratic nomination for president, in 2020. The last thing Beto did, as electoral politics, was he got whipped by Ted Cruz for a Senate seat. Sure, he almost kept the margin within 200,000 votes. And the 2016 Atlanta Falcons went to overtime in the Super Bowl. They were still clownfrauds and nobody has needed to think about them since. Ted Cruz is repulsive and evil, and voters were turning out coast to coast to try to drive his party out of power, and Beto couldn’t get the job done.
This time around, he had the chance to try to make up those (more than) 200,000 votes against John Cornyn, who is also unlikeable but lacks Cruz’s predatory cunning, and take a Senate seat for his party. It would have been less a matter of paying his dues than a matter of demonstrably accomplishing something useful, for once. Instead, what the heck, he’s a presidential candidate, because he says it’s time for him to run for president. Buy him a swim cap and drop him in the pool and he can say he’s the high school water polo captain, too.
Sure, imagine he could be the next Obama, if what mattered about Obama was having a long chin and the lowest BMI in the presidential field. Every quote that comes out of his mouth sounds like an Instagram caption. His brain sincerely might think in Instagram captions.
Why does the public have to pay attention to this goof? Watch Katie Porter, who flipped a House seat that had never been held by a Democrat, sitting in Congress doing her job, politely humiliating one financial predator after another, while unemployed former Representative Beto O’Rourke waits like a teenager for the world to bend itself to his desires. Some people have things to do besides self-actualization.
