Kill yourself, and kill everyone around you.” Democrats won the popular vote that night by roughly 10 million votes and gained 40 House seats, installing several Democrats who support tuition-free college, a Green New Deal, and Medicare for all. There is no hope in the modern party system. Just nominate Chris Dodd and be done.”Ĭhristman, it should be noted, is the Chapo guy who got ripshit drunk on their Election Night show and ranted, “Democrats suck ass. “Because the policies sure as shit aren’t going to excite anybody. “It’s all they have,” said co-host Matt Christman. Declaring O’Rourke a “white Obama,” the hosts complained that establishment Dems are just “slapping a cool coat” on wimpy centrism. The hosts of Chapo Trap House-the choice podcast for denizens of the Bernie-verse and ironic men who dress like roadies for Modest Mouse-recently devoted an episode to Beto-bashing. I don’t see that in O’Rourke.” She labeled O’Rourke “progressive-ish,” pointing to his “thin” statements on energy regulation and his membership in the New Democrat Coalition, “a centrist caucus with Clintonian views on health care, education, and trade.” “I think the times both call for and allow for a left-populist candidate with uncompromising progressive principles. “I’m not sure we need another Obama, or another of any Democrat we’ve had recently,” Elizabeth Bruenig recently wrote in The Washington Post, urging caution before Democrats rush to O’Rourke’s corner. The lines, then, are quickly being drawn: Beto is just a Davos Democrat on a skateboard.
What especially chafes Sanders-style progressives is that Obama cloaked a centrist neoliberal agenda in a soaring, feel-good rhetoric that charmed voters and made them forget about all the bad stuff. But to many on the left, Obama’s sins are plentiful: he bailed out Wall Street, half-assed the stimulus package and health-care reform, deported more undocumented immigrants than any president, and prosecuted drone warfare that left piles of civilian casualties across the Middle East. I think they are suspicious of Beto because he has taken oil and gas money, he’s becoming the darling of big donors, and Obama likes him.”īeing liked by Obama, who won two presidential elections and left office with an 90 percent favorable rating among Democrats, might not seem like a disadvantage in a Democratic primary. “They think the Establishment is always looking for someone to go against Bernie-to run against progressives in the party and stop them from being ascendant. “People on the left that identify as Democratic socialist, the left that supports Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for them, Bernie got robbed in 2016,” said Michael Kazin, the Georgetown University historian and co-editor of Dissent. As James Reston once said, power creates its own resistance. The biggest thing that has changed in the Democratic discourse since November is that O’Rourke, sitting at home in El Paso, is accumulating power. Democrats across the country started to pay attention, and many of them want more. But he also found an authentic way to marshal support in non-traditional ways, leveraging social media to command attention, raise gobs of cash, and cut through Trump’s cultural saturation by presenting himself as a new kind of politician. The pro-Beto arguments are as much about process as about policy: yes, O’Rourke talked passionately about the issues that excite today’s Democratic Party-expanding Medicaid, banning high-capacity rifles, passing a DREAM Act. He’s quietly meeting with prominent Democrats, including Barack Obama, and he’s filtering through an avalanche of texts and e-mails from operatives and activists begging him to run. O’Rourke is currently the biggest variable looming over the 2020 race, potentially the next-generation inspirational outsider that Democrats need to beat Donald Trump. The polls bear this out: A recent Des Moines Register survey of Iowa placed him third among possible Democratic candidates, behind known commodities Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. What has changed is that O’Rourke, having built an $80 million grassroots political movement from scratch, is now seen as one of the top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination. O’Rourke inspired many, but still lost his Senate race, and he’s now winding down his time in the House. Not much of substance actually changed in that time, of course. Somewhere between Election Day and your 500th gulp of holiday-party red wine, Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke went from being the new darling of the left to its leading bête noire. If you blinked, you might have missed it.
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