And…he seems to have found a new way to campaign.
Think on it.
In 2016, Donald Trump won by reaching whatever percentage of the electorate wouldn’t have voted the straight RatPublican ticket but were drawn in by his…publicity.
Self-generated publicity.
Trump was already famous, of course.
And rich.
A reality TV-created hero/villain along the lines of popular WWE villains, only bigger.
Much bigger.
All the other candidates in both parties…except to some degree I suppose Bernie Sanders…ran “standard” campaigns in the primaries and in the election. They were part of large organizations mobilized around getting votes by the normal, historically successful DC hustle…big money media presences, expensive ads, expensive pollsters giving them what they wanted to hear, worker bees manning the phones/computers and scouring the nabes for votes, etc., etc., etc.
Trump whipped ’em all.
You’d think that the anti-Trumpsters…again, a bipartisan group, really…would have gotten the message.
But NOOOOOoooo…
Aparently not.
The Bidens, the other DNCers, the RNCers (what’s left of them after Trump got through with them, anyway…like Robot Romney), even Senators like Gillibrand, Warren (she has at least a clue) Booker, Harris et al are doing the usual exploratory committee/go to the primary states/line up the donors/get the big media to do profiles, etc. quadrennial presidential DC dance.
All except one.
Beto O’Rourke.
He is advertising his “otherness”…just as did Donald Trump only by other means and hopefully much more honestly…by not doing any of those things.
Instead?
He’s driving around the heartland alone (in a Dodge Caravan!!!), meeting real people and saying real things.
i think that this is potentially a political masterstroke if he can pull it off.
Read on for some of he things that today’s Politico article has to say about him, (Hint, hint…looks like it’s working. Honesty as an effective political weapon??? Not one sign of “public/private” shenanigans??? The only backrooms he visits are the ones where workers hang out when they have some time off??? REVOLUTIONARY!!! And brilliant.)
Read on:
Beto O’Rourke says 2020 decision could be months away
The former Texas congressman pointed to the `exhaustion’ that follows a Senate campaign.
EL PASO, Texas — Beto O’Rourke said Friday that it could take him months to decide whether to run for president, adding that he does not want to “raise expectations” about a 2020 bid.
O’Rourke told POLITICO after a speaking engagement here that he has no timetable for making a decision, which he said could “potentially” be months away.
“There are people who are smarter on this stuff and study this stuff and are following this and say you’ve got to do it this way or get in by this point or get in in this way if you were to get in,” O’Rourke said of his timing. “I think the truth is that nobody knows right now the rules on any of this stuff. I think the rules are being written in the moment.”
—snip—
I repeat:
“I think the truth is that nobody knows right now the rules on any of this stuff. I think the rules are being written in the moment.”
And, friends…he’s the one that’s writing them!!!
More:
—snip—
In response to a question from the audience, he said he has not had any contact with other potential candidates about joining a presidential ticket. If he does not run for president, O’Rourke said he is considering teaching.
O’Rourke’s demurrals come even as his former advisers speak with potential staffers and begin to rough out the shape of an organization for a 2020 campaign. A rush of presidential announcements this month is putting pressure on potential candidates to announce, as the competition for money and staff intensifies.
O’Rourke said any discussions that his former campaign advisers are having with potential operatives are not at his direction.
“No one is doing anything at my direction right now,” he said.
However, O’Rourke said, “I think there are certainly — from the `Draft Beto’ folks to people who would likely be part of a campaign who are trying to figure out how it would work if we were to run … But they’re not, again, doing it at my direction or with my input.”
Asked why he has not moved more aggressively to prepare groundwork for a campaign, O’Rourke told POLITICO, “I just am not there to do that. I just don’t want to raise expectations or commit people if I’m not committed and if I haven’t made that decision yet.”
O’Rourke said he is “very happy” in El Paso. If he joins the race, he added, it would be in response to a sense of obligation. “Being an American, living in a democracy, I also have an obligation and responsibility to do everything I can with what I have in the moment that we’re in, and that’s the question I’m trying to think through.”
“Have I satisfied my commitment to this country and our democracy? That’s the question that we’re trying to think through right now,” O’Rourke said at the speaker event. “Is there something that I can contribute beyond what I have already done that the country needs right now. Do I need to be back in the arena?”
O’Rourke’s public remarks were his first since returning home from a road trip through parts of the American Southwest — an experience, he wrote in an online journal late Thursday, that inspired him to apply the “decency and kindness” he encountered on the road to the nation’s polarizing politics.
“How do we stop seeing each other as outsiders?” O’Rourke wrote, flicking at the communitarian strands around which he would likely weave a presidential campaign. “How do we reconcile our differences, account for the injustices visited upon so many, understand the pride that each of us feels for ourselves, our families, our point of view — and respond to the urgent needs of this great democracy at its moment of truth? As the country literally begins to shut down, how can we come together to revive her?”
O’Rourke went on, “I know we can do it. I can’t prove it, but I feel it and hear it and see it in the people I meet and talk with.”
The former Texas congressman became a national sensation during his closer-than-expected loss to Republican Ted Cruz in the Texas Senate race last year, vaulting into the 2020 contest’s top tier on the strength of his inspirational campaign. After raising more than $80 million in his Senate run, O’Rourke is widely considered capable or amassing millions of dollars quickly to fund a 2020 bid.
…O’Rourke’s hesitation could put him at an organizational disadvantage in early primary states. Eight major Democrats have entered the 2020 contest — with more expected to follow — and O’Rourke’s potential rivals are already courting activists and enlisting staffers in Iowa and New Hampshire. Earlier this week, Sen. Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign told POLITICO it raised $1.5 million in its first 24 hours alone.
…O’Rourke, meanwhile, has kept a relatively low profile, spending time primarily in his hometown — where he attended a Women’s March over the weekend — and jabbing at the Trump administration on social media.
—snip—
Did you catch that buzzword above?
I did.
“Communitarian”
I don’t know if he planted that word in the writer’s mind, but there it is. “Populist” is already totally poisoned. But “Communitarian!!!???”
Yes!!!
—snip—
At the outset of his road trip this month, O’Rourke wrote that he had been “in and out of a funk lately” and wanted to “clear my head,” before chronicling his brief — but extensively covered — exploration of small-town America through parts of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico.
For a presidential contender, the dispatches were uncharacteristically personal — and, to some critics, cloying. But in his latest offering, O’Rourke wrote on Medium that after several days on the road, his mindset had changed.
“How inspiring, and funny, and strong people are,” O’Rourke wrote on Medium. “Kids and college students looking forward. Older people reflecting on where they’d been and how they got there. Over the course of the trip I’d gone from thinking about myself and how stuck I was, to being moved by the people I’d met. Forgot myself in being with others.”
—snip—
“We spent the better part of two years in a Dodge Grand Caravan,” O’Rourke replied. “It really is the best way to get around: the horsepower, the passenger capacity, your ability to travel incognito. Nobody expects somebody running for Senate to be driving a Dodge Grand Caravan.”
O’Rourke recalled that he was ticketed for speeding in the vehicle on his way to an event during the Senate campaign. He said the law enforcement officer had voted for him in the primary and, after ticketing him, came to the event O’Rourke was hosting.
A Dodge Caravan!!!
Check it out.
He’s got perfect political pitch.
He’s the Anti-Trump.
Watch.
AG