Tag Archives: Beto O’Rourke

After 19 Dead Fourth-Graders It’s Time to Apply “Muscular Bravado.”

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Like everything else, reaction to Beto O’Rourke’s crashing of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s post Uvalde press conference immediately split into two separate camps. Tribe A was indignant that anyone, much less Abbott’s rival, would “exploit a tragedy” for “political gain”. Tapes of the incident include voices from the stage around Abbott calling O’Rourke a “son of a bitch” and ordering him thrown out of the building.

The other camp, of which I’m a part, applauded O’Rourke for having the chutzpah, the cojones, the level of proportionate moral indignation to get in the face of a cynically self-serving cast of gun-slaughter enablers, right then and there with all cameras rolling. And this was before we learned how much of what Abbott and other “leaders” of Texas’ law enforcement community was saying at that presser was pretty much utter bullshit.

The O’Rourke Incident instantly recalled an interview with Atlantic writer, Anne Applebaum, that I was listening to driving back from up north this past Tuesday, almost simultaneous with the murder of 19 kids and two adults at yet another America school. Applebaum was the guest on New York Times columnist Ezra Klein’s podcast and the topic was her new introduction to the classic book by Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

Klein is an interviewer with an exemplary talent for drilling down to the most salient issues of whatever topic he’s covering. And soon the discussion was moving into the “why” of people’s response to often crude, authoritarian leaders and their flagrantly obvious perfidies. I encourage you to listen to the entire episode for all that Klein and Applebaum get in to.

But at one point Applebaum used the phrase “muscular bravado” to explain the appeal of characters like Donald Trump.

Rogues like Trump present themselves as unfettered-by-common-rules-of-decorum warriors defending what large masses of people want defended. Or at least as “fighters” antagonizing the same people large masses want antagonized. The responses are not entirely rational. But it often translates to “heroic” in the eyes of people, as Applebaum and Arendt say, isolated by their ignorance and fearful of what they don’t understand.

A salient point here being that in 2022 USA this kind of bravado is entirely in the possession of Trumpist Republicans, and this explains much of the imbalance of energy and enthusiasm between Republicans and Democrats.

The takeaway is that politics/leadership is a profoundly emotional game. Barack Obama swung millions his way in 2008 through charisma and the belief that he had the strength and bravery/star-power to make change happen. More to the point, liberals, Democrats and the millions rightfully repulsed and horrified by the complicity of Republicans in America’s gun slaughter, erosion of Constitutional rights, degradation of our court system, indifference to climate change, wildly out of balance tax system, etc. have no real choice but to accept the power and importance of “muscular bravado” in rallying voters.

Liberals may accept this in theory, but are often embarrassed by it in reality. Bravado of a sort that appeals to largely non-ideological, non-partisan voters strikes the average policy-intense liberal as corny and suspicious, and beneath the dignity of a serious leader.

The dilemma for liberals, is that bravado works, on swing voters if not them. And in our current moment, as we reel from yet another grade school slaughter, genuinely indignant bravado could be a very effective emotional trigger for voters.

O’Rourke isn’t a newby to gun reform. He’s favored a flat-out ban on assault rifles for a while now. So I’m accepting his indignation as genuine. He’s demonstrated he’ll take the political risk that comes with his position on the issue. Just as with his “stunt” at Abbott’s press conference he’s demonstrated he’s prepared to take the blowback for getting right up in the grilles of the ghouls (Ted Cruz was standing behind Abbott) and accuse them for their complicity.

Liberals are notoriously not single-issue voters. Get a Democrat or a Democratic politician going on what needs to be done to set the country right and you invariably get a list longer than a Cheesecake Factory menu.

But 19 more dead fourth-graders presents as unequivocal a single-minded life-or-death issue as any imaginable, and O’Rourke is correctly calculating that no matter how short our attention spans, the outrage over gun-mutilated grade schoolers is something that carries deep, long-lasting moral outrage. Horror-struck outrage of a kind that can — and should — be resurrected repeatedly, with muscular bravado, for months until November and years beyond that until the cynics are driven back under their rocks.

The final point being, Republicans have no good faith response to their role in our gun insanity. With an unabashed siege on their corruption and reckless disregard for … children! … Democrats have an issue that like Joe Pesci in some Marty Scorsese mob movie they can hold Republicans’ faces to the burner with.

They need to do it.

Beto the Celebrity Man-Child v. The Women

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By my estimation, less than two hours elapsed between the time Beto O’Rourke announced he was running for POTUS and the moment he took  fire for being straight, white and male. Welcome to the big show, Mr. ex-Congressman!

I have no preferred horse in the race at this moment. (There are several Democrats I wish would just shut up and go away.) But the immediate, visceral reaction to O’Rourke — who announced simultaneous with a full-on giga-as-Gaga celebrity Vanity Fair cover — is going to be not just one of but maybe the critical factor in terms of who liberals/progressives choose to run against Trump.

In case you haven’t noticed, the ladies have had enough of the straight white male thing.

For The Cut Kimberly Truong says, “… as charismatic as O’Rourke may be, his candidacy already seems to be drawing anxieties and misgivings from women, for multiple reasons. One of those has to do with the announcement video itself, in which his wife, Amy, sits beside him on a couch, doing not much more than simply gazing at him in a show of support. … That is of course, not to mention the stark contrast between the ways the media has presented O’Rourke’s persona as charming and magnetic and the ways some of those same outlets have covered Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, which often focus on doubts about her ‘likability’.”

For Vox, Laura McGann wrote, “Beto O’Rourke jumped into the Democratic presidential primary on Thursday sounding like he hasn’t heard much about the big debate in recent years over how we judge male and female leaders. Just before he announced his run, O’Rourke boasted to Vanity Fair that ‘I want to be in it. Man, I’m just born to be in it’. NBC reporter Kasie Hunt spotted the inherent double standard the comment represents: Men are rewarded in politics for showing ambition, while women are punished.”

And here’s Jessica Heslam in the Boston Herald and Pete Kasperowicz from the (conservative) Washington Examiner.

The counter-balance though to millions of activated women disgusted with Trump (and Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz and Rush Limbaugh and their loudmouth, overbearing brothers-in-law) is everyone else who just wants to win. To sweep Trump and his enablers out of power. The latter crowd — still the majority is my guess — is less concerned with gender and policy than the ability to lead another wave election. A wave large enough to immediately reverse catastrophic neglect and corruption fostered by Republican rule.

Who knows if O’Rourke has the chops to pull that off? Critics point out that he raised $70 million and nearly beat Ted Cruz in [bleeping] Texas because … well, because he was running against Ted Cruz, one of the most loathsome trolls ever dropped into a Senate office, (which is really saying something.) The obvious and immediate counter to that one is … “WTF! Trump is worse!”, something no one can dispute.

Establishment conservatives like George Will (a “never Trumper”) mock O’Rourke, calling him a “skateboarding man-child”. But Republicans are truly afraid of him. Uber-progressives meanwhile are complaining he lacks sufficient policy gravitas, which again is also true. Right now O’Rourke is a lot like Barack Obama in 2007 in that he’s this neon-bordered celebrity idol-like white board on which anyone can imagine anything.

But here’s the bummer for both activated, pissed-off women and uber-progressives … that celebrity-vague [bleep] works. At least if the goal is winning an election in the most sweeping and convincing manner possible.

At this moment my betting money is still on Kamala Harris. She seems, well, wily, without being devious. To mis-paraphrase Lou Grant, “I like wily.” I’ve never thought Bernie Sanders is wily enough. Harris also seems truly comfortable up close in the retail game, and she too has a lot of celebrity vibe going for her. Not as much as straight, white and male O’Rourke, but plenty enough to work with.

O’Rourke ran a remarkably error-free campaign against Cruz. He displayed abundant energy and he speaks effortlessly and naturally in a contemporary, pop culture-laced language familiar and therefore appealing to voters who are not policy wonks, but who know enough by now to understand that Trump is both a fool and a criminal.

So that was Day #1 in Beto 2020.

Let the circus proceed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Handicapping the Democrats 18 Months Out

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[Correction included]. Even if his name is not mentioned directly, every Democratic candidate entering the 2020 race is being measured and labeled on how much of a response they are to Donald Trump, or “Trumpism”. Which is to say, what degree of repudiation are they offering? Total? A bit here and there? Whatever they can get from “across the aisle”?

As of this morning Bernie Sanders, now 77 years old and grumpy as ever, is back in the hunt. Say what you will about The Bern, he isn’t shy about calling it as he (and most of us see it). Trump is a career low-life and criminal (laundering money for Russian gangsters to sustain his “brand” being the least of it), and establishment Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are guilty as sin for greasing the skids for every absurd-to-vile thing Trump has promoted.

Personally, I don’t feel the need to throw myself on any bandwagon (or funeral pyre) this early in the circus performance. But I am telling myself to keep the radar up for what people like Yuval Harari think of as a fundamental breakdown of traditional politics. In other words, we could be seeing a large-scale disruption on the left in response to the disruption of the chaos and criminality of Trump and enabling Republicans on the right.

Put another way, it may be a feeling among comparatively well-informed and rational people who believe “the old way” is too timid and under-powered for the threats against decency and logic presented by Trumpism.

I can’t say how real it all is at the moment. But to mangle Gertrude Stein, there’s definitely some kind of there … there.

The wag-nerds on Nate Silver’s 538 podcast have broken down the Democratic field (as of last week) into a small handful of “lanes”. For example, our gal, Amy Klobuchar, and Kirsten Gillibrand are described as running in “the beer lane”, trumpeting mostly unexciting, traditional values that have satisfied collegial Democrats for decades. By contrast, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, are described as contenders in “the wine lane”, riling up the passions of mostly well-educated (and female) voters. That crowd can also be described as upscale, (in terms of smarts if not money) and extraordinarily upset with the numbskull, mysogynistic antics of the right as any specific policy position.

But then, by way of fine-parsing, 538 suggests a possible candidate like Beto O’Rourke, defies both of those appeals by splitting the difference with a “craft beer lane”. You know, lots of traditional stuff — blue jeans, rock’ n roll, drive through hamburgers, rural Texas, pickup trucks — all whipped together with a thick, rich hipster sauce of “stop the [bleeping] madness!”

As I say, I have no specific favorite in the hunt here 18 months or whatever before the next election. But I’ll do a bit of my own lane handicapping anyway.

In the “Forget About It” lane. Tulsi Gabbard. Too much conspicuous opportunism. Do four years of serious reading and get back to us.

The “Been There, Done That” lane. Joe Biden and Bernie. The Bud Light crowd loves you in Scranton, Joe. I get that. But the game has changed since you were in your prime, and that was 20 years ago. And Bernie: love ya too, man. But 77 is way past the “serve by” date in modern politics. Your job this time around is to keep goosing the actual contenders to keep the fire and faith.

The “A Little Too Cool for School” lane. Cory Booker. Kind of like what I say about people who want to be cops; the fact they want it so bad is the main reason to disqualify them. No human, much less any successful politician from New Jersey, can possibly be as immaculate as Booker purports to be.

The “No, Just No” lane. Kirsten Gillibrand. The creepy bane of the #MeToo movement. Way too many of the obnoxious “beliefs” she needed to play upstate have done a miraculously 180 since elevating to the Senate. Also, for so many reasons too obvious to mention: Michael Bloomberg.

The “If This Was 1956, Then Maybe” lane. Klobuchar. Being a darling of George Will, Republican colleagues and the Wall Street Journal editorial page doesn’t make my pissed-off little heart go pitter-patter. When you can’t quite say you’re in full favor of a medicare access for all on Obamacare I get an even worse case of morbid eye-roll. [*]

The “I Like What Yer Sayin’, Dude. But Yer Style Needs Some Work” lane. Sherrod Brown. Otherwise known as The Most Rumpled Man in the Senate. Unlike Amy delivering Minnesota’s 10 whopping electoral votes, Brown pulling in Ohio would be serious numbers in 2020. Wonk liberals know the guy and like what they hear. But it’s very hard to imagine any dispassionate independent spending 90 seconds listening to him.

The “You’re Checking My Boxes, Now Sell It” lane. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke. Harris has the feel of the front-runner, based on a near perfectly staged roll-out, and she’s got an interesting mix of prosecutorial dagger and pop-culture crede. Warren, while on the cusp of aging-out at 69, has demonstrated the mix of righteous indignation and legislative bona fides that play like sweet music to liberal ears. And O’Rourke has demonstrated a level of energy and charisma above and beyond anyone else out there.

But he’s got to, A: Decide, and B: Convince a whole lot of women like my friend at a dinner party the other night who announced to the crowd, “I’m never voting for another man!”

[*] The early version of this post suggested Klobuchar wasn’t on board with at least a public option into Obamacare, which she is. My mistake. (To many minds “public option” and “medicare access for all” are very nearly the same thing. But she’s being very careful here.)

 

 

 

 

Amy Klobuchar for Attorney General 2020

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Take it from George Will, Amy Klobuchar is what Democrats need now. As reverse barometers go, George is at least a couple ticks up from Alex Jones. But still … .

I have no great special insight into the honorable senior senator from Minnesota beyond living in the county for which she was chief prosecutor for a while, the state she represents and spending a couple days a few years back kicking around the Iron Range for a magazine profile on her. And, shocking full disclosure here, I’ve voted for her twice and would again if she gets the Democrats’ nod for President … against any Republican.

That said, I’ve always had my issues with her. Call them quibbles, if you like. Not the least of which is that I am not at all certain her (very) old school Humphrey/Mondale “Let’s All Reach Across the Aisle and Have a Bake Sale Together” approach is exactly the most appropriate or effective message right now. And that comes attached to the other quibble that Ms. Klobuchar has made a reputation for herself of never sticking her head up too high in the crossfire of our culture trench warfare.

Well-cossetted conservative institutionalists like Mr. Will see that behavior as a demonstration of wisdom. But — funny thing — I see the same behavior and think, “Expedient calculation.”

To his credit, Mr. Will, (with whom I’ve had lunch a couple times on his book tours) has been virulently anti-Trump from the get-go and is the rare conservative intellectual who can both spell correctly and regularly produce 15 paragraphs of coherent thinking.

The problem is that his thinking is invariably focused on reproducing more of the white, male, bow-tied status quo that has A: Generally ruled the country since Dwight Eisenhower, and B: Allowed his Republican party to devolve into a clown show led by charlatans and fools like Rush Limbaugh (the true intellectual leader of modern conservatism) and Donald Trump. Put another way, Will very much prefers a Democratic opponent the Republican party knows how to define and campaign against. As in: all tradition and nothing revolutionary.

There’s no question that Klobuchar is smart and hard-working. She’s also very good at retail politics, whether chatting up locals at diners in Bemidji or small town bankers and business owners in Grand Rapids. She’s got game. (And unlike, say, Mark Dayton, she seems to genuinely enjoy human interaction.)

But I’d feel (a lot) more enthusiastic about her if only once I’d her express heartfelt indignation over the on-going Trumpist travesty — which began welling up in earnest with the Tea Party revolt back in ’09 and ’10. (There’s also the little nagging question in the back of my head when I read that Klobuchar has the worst rate of staff turnover of any of the 100 US Senators. What is that all about?)

Reading Will’s column — picked up by the Strib — it’s readily apparent who among the possible Democratic field he fears most.

As George begins his column lauding Klobuchar, “Surely the silliest aspirant for the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination is already known: ‘Beto’, aka Robert Francis, O’Rourke is a skateboarding man-child whose fascination with himself caused him to livestream a recent dental appointment for — open-wide, please — teeth cleaning.

“O’Rourke’s journal about his post-election recuperation-through-road-trip-to-nowhere-in-particular is so without wit or interesting observations that it merits Truman Capote’s description of “On the Road” author Jack Kerouac’s work: That’s not writing, that’s typing.

“When Democrats are done flirting with such insipidity, their wandering attentions can flit to a contrastingly serious candidacy, coming soon from Minnesota.”

Characters like O’Rourke and the (fresh and invigorating) flavor-of-the-moment, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (i.e. “AOC”) have to deeply unsettle traditional thinkers like George Will. Why? Because they are working off a far different playbook they can’t be quantified as easily as someone like Klobuchar who reliably hopscotches within the chalk lines of the traditional game. Ms. Klobuchar is never a threat to rile — as Ned Beatty said in “Network” — “the primal forces of nature.”

Never mind the polar vortex. Hell itself would have to freeze over before Amy Klobuchar ever got in the face of a Howard Schultz, Michael Bloomberg or Silicon Valley tycoon with calls for a return to a 70% tax rate on billionaires.

The Democrats have an interesting array of talent queuing up for the Big Job. But I look at some of them not as Presidents — someone with populist charisma delivering a persistent, uncluttered message affirming the primacy of empirical reason in science, social services and foreign affairs — but as cabinet officers restoring lawfulness to the various agencies.

In that context: Amy Klobuchar for Attorney General 2020.

 

Dear Lord, Spare Us Another “Pure” and “Principled” Third Party Alternative

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That Coffee Shop Billionaire for President thing isn’t going too well, is it? It seems the “extremists” on the far left aren’t too keen on yet another hopeless vanity candidacy like, you know, Ralph Nader and Jill Stein.

On “60 Minutes” Sunday night Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced his interest in an independent run for president. By Monday, at a book event in New York City, a guy in the audience was yelling “egotistical billionaire a**hole”” at him. And that was about the nicest thing anyone had to say.

Schultz of course has no chance of winning. Only spoiling.

As vain and deluded billionaires go he’s a bland stiff, with no appetite for the kind of buffoonish, hyperbolic demagoguery that got Donald Trump elected, (thanks to the Russians and the electoral college.) But, as we’ve seen twice in the past two decades, vanity candidates have peeled away just enough votes from “flawed” Democrats (I’m still waiting for the first “pure” candidate) to hand the country over to two wholly incompetent characters — George W. and Trump.

In case you’ve forgotten, those squandered Nader-Stein votes have saddled us with a multi-trillion dollar war we didn’t need to fight, staggering levels of new debt, a ransacking of environmental and consumer protection regulations and a cratering of our reputation as a country that while pretty damned screwed in many respects, was at least more reliable about science and democratic allies than, you know Turkey or Honduras.

The psychology of chronic “righteous” voters, people who routinely pull the trigger for characters like Nader and Stein is less interesting than it is dismaying. The irony, in my experience, is that such people rationalize their vote in terms of “principle”. Namely, that nothing will change unless people like them — unusually moral and uniquely informed — don’t “vote their conscience.”

And obviously, through one lens, they’re right. They voted for Nader and Stein and we got lots of change. In addition to all that spendy war and economic mayhem stuff, were the “principled” Nader votes of 2000 switched over to dull, ponderous, compromised-by-Clinton Al Gore we would have had 19 years more years to do something about climate change. (Maybe we could have invested the trillions that weren’t borrowed from the Chinese to chase Saddam Hussein around Iraq.)

The 2020 campaign has begun and there are already more Democrats waving their hands than I can count. Most, like the messianic Mr. Schultz have no chance. But the top tier of current and likely Democrats is interesting.

Elizabeth Warren is, IMHO, too old, but a valuable factor in pushing the debate. Kamala Harris is getting gushy reviews for her launch, and she has my attention. Never mind if she once canoodled with Willie Brown. She impresses me as someone with the skill set for this moment — a moment where not just Trump but the entire ethos of the “movement conservative Republican party” has to be not merely defeated, but obliterated. As in: lopped off at the knees, bayoneted, burned, buried and covered with salt. The whole crowd, from Trump to Stephen Miller to the Freedom Caucus to Rush Limbaugh and FoxNews is that bad.

I don’t get that same essential vanquish-the-barbarians vibe from Julian Castro, the honorable congress lady from Hawaii, Kirsten (#YouToo Al Franken) Gillibrand — or waiting in the wings — Sherrod Brown, Amy Klobuchar, Corey Booker or Joe Biden.

Here’s the thing. Democrats have to put up a populist candidate.

Translated: Someone who understands what the dimwits who thought Trump was a better option than Hillary Clinton are thinking and (extremely important factor here) can talk their language. An educated variation on what Trump does with his MAGA rallies and with his racist moron whispering. The Democrats’ days of tossing up a wonky career bureaucrat who sounds like he/she has never smoked a joint, gone to a rock concert, eaten fast food because it tastes good or had an impure thought are over.

“The people” want someone who not just “shares their values” but has plainly “experienced their values”, including the ones they enjoy the most.

Invested liberals, like me and maybe you, don’t need TeenBeat populist charisma in our elected leaders. But the sad, undeniable fact is that in our celebrity-saturated culture, where millions of voters pay little-to-no attention to who is actually, truly doing something for them, people vote based on the “feel” they get from candidates. The feeling that he/she is “just like me”, as so many sad goobers said about cartoonish frauds like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump.

Maybe Beto O’Rourke has the full toolbox of talents. All we know about him at the moment is that he ran as an unapologetic progressive in (bleeping) Texas, that he poured incredible energy into it without a serious screw up, talked at the retail level like a guy who once played in a goofy rock band and ascended to the level of a pop idol by the time he lost by 3% … in (bleeping) Texas.

That’s what the Democrats need, in someone else, if not him.

Nevertheless, being a hopeless skeptic, I have little faith that the “righteously principled” who saw Nader and Jill “Here I am in Russia dining with Putin and Michael Flynn” Stein as the best option for our times are scanning the horizon for the next “pure” independent who will bring us all real change … again.