I like Beto O’Rourke. He seems energetic, articulate, smart, and idealistic, and a person who marches to the beat of a somewhat different drummer. He has charismatic energy and charm. What’s not to like?
Beto has been a poet, a short story writer, a punk music bass player and drummer, a proofreader, and a computer entrepreneur. At Columbia College, he co-captained the rowing crew and majored in English literature.
In 1988, a few years after graduating, he returned to his home town of El Paso, Texas, where he founded an internet services and software company and became involved in any number of civic organizations and nonprofit groups, including the Rotary Club, the United Way, the Center Against Sexual and Family Violence, the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the Institute for Policy and Economic Development.
He ran for a seat on the El Paso City Council in 2005 and served for six years. In 2012, he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas’s 16th Congressional District, and served three terms. In 2018, he ran a memorable grassroots campaign for the U.S. Senate from the Lone Star State against Ted Cruz, and almost won a race that many considered unwinnable. He came up short, but that contest made Beto O’Rourke a semi-household name.
His 2020 presidential run, it seems, is off to an auspicious start, as well. Money is still the mother’s milk of politics and Beto’s small donor formula is filling his coffers — $9.4 million from 218,000 contributors during the first 18 days of his campaign.
Some pundits have compared O’Rourke’s appeal as a presidential candidate to John Kennedy’s. And indeed, Beto shares some characteristics with JFK, primarily his presenting as a generational change-agent appealing to our better angels. But that comparison goes only so far.
Both O’Rourke and Kennedy served three terms in the House of Representatives. But Kennedy also had served eight years in the U.S. Senate and had commanded PT boats in the Pacific theater during World War II. That service imbued in him a skepticism of the military, an important perspective when generals urged him to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Prior to running for president, Kennedy also wrote two significant books, “Profiles in Courage” and “Why England Slept.”
Beto has also been compared to Barack Obama who, like Beto, graduated from Columbia and then returned to his hometown. Obama became a community organizer, and then a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
He wrote “Dreams of My Father” (in 1995) and “The Audacity of Hope” (in 2006), and he served three terms in the Illinois Senate before he ran for the U.S. Senate, where he served for two years before announcing his candidacy for the presidency. Beto’s resume is thinner than Obama’s. (Right, Trump had no qualifications, but that’s beside the point.)
On domestic policy, Beto portrays himself as a progressive — pro-LBGBT rights, anti-death penalty, pro-immigration reform. At the same time, being vague on some important policy issues, he’s not fully behind Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. He is not a self-described progressive, but his instincts seem righteous and his fuzziness on issues, of necessity, will be clarified (hopefully for the better).
As for his foreign policy chops, in Congress he served on both the Armed Services Committee and the Veterans Affairs Committee. He properly denounced the move of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem; decried Trump’s groveling before Putin in Helsinki; and has called for increased investment in the Northern Triangle in Central America as part of addressing immigration.
Foreign policy may not matter much in this election, depending in part on whether an international crisis occurs between now and then. A disturbing incident would raise the so-called 3 a.m. question: if President O’Rourke were awakened in the middle of the night with a report of incoming missiles from Russia or North Korea, do you feel comfortable with Beto deciding what to do?
A young candidate like Beto is appealing, and Beto (age 46 now) makes him older than Kennedy when he took the oath of office (at age 42) and just a tad older than Obama (47 when he was sworn in).
Beto’s candidacy, unfortunately for him, could engender many views of and comparisons with the 1988 vice presidential debate. There in response to the Republican candidate Dan Quayle’s claim that he had as much relevant experience as John Kennedy when he ran for president, Lloyd Bentsen, the Democratic candidate, responded, “I knew Jack Kennedy” and “served with Jack Kennedy” and “Jack Kennedy was my friend.” Then to thunderous applause Bentsen memorably added, “You, Senator (Quayle), are no Jack Kennedy.”
At this point, I haven’t completely ruled Beto out as a possibility to support. But I’m also far away from signing up. He’s not an empty suit — what I’ve seen does not support that narrative — but for me Beto would present as a far more qualified candidate and make a far better president if he were to serve, say, eight years as vice president in a Kamala Harris administration.
Now there’s a thought. And maybe a formidable ticket. Maybe.
Bill Newman is a Northampton-based civil rights lawyer, the host of the Bill Newman Radio Show on WHMP and the author, most recently, of “Life on The Co-op Plan.”