Beto O’Rourke by DonkeyHotey, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0/Original
Everyone thinks that the current mascot of the Democratic party is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While she’s definitely the new de facto head of the party, I wouldn’t say she’s the mascot. I’d say that title belongs to Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke.
Hear me out.
O’Rourke represents the Democratic party in a way that is far more complete than any other person currently in its ranks. He’s a wannabe tyrant who wasn’t so tyrannical during his days running for Senate in Texas. During Thursday night’s debate, O’Rourke made a show of declaring that he was going to take people’s AR-15’s away, when not that long ago he was saying that owning them is a good thing and that Texans should be able to keep them if they bought them.
He’s also going to “force” the rich to allow poor people to live among them, and called getting a home next to a rich neighborhood a “right.” As I explained in response to this, the “right” O’Rourke described isn’t a right at all, but it does highlight the fact that O’Rourke is willing to say anything in order to convince people to vote for him, even if it’s a blatant lie.
It’s in these two stories that we see in O’Rourke the perfect modern Democrat politician.
The intensity of O’Rourke’s views changes with the political winds, even if that means his views must venture into radical territories. His stances aren’t original, they’re just the stances taken by the most powerful people in the Democratic party at the time. If tomorrow the most powerful people in the party become moderate about everything, he will too. He’s a statist first and foremost, as any good Democrat is, but the radical wave that has swept the Democrat party has convinced O’Rourke that he needs to push his views into the realm of despots with promises to ban this and force that.
He’s not even trying to doctor his language. He’s straight-up saying he’s going to take things from Americans that they have a right to.
To boot, he embraces radical environmentalist policies and radical immigration policies. He paints his opponents on the right with extreme accusations and does so during times when he shouldn’t be playing politics. O’Rourke demonstrated that he believes even a mass shooting in his hometown is the right time to start calling Donald Trump a racist and blaming him for the wrongs in the world.
(READ: When The World Saw Death, Beto O’Rourke Saw Potential Approval Points)
He just seems more out there when you consider the fact that he seems awkwardly out of touch thanks to his live feeds of himself getting haircuts, seeing the dentist, and changing tires. He does this because he saw younger Democrats doing it, and thinks this is the way to garner approval.
So let’s recap.
O’Rourke is a hollow politician with seemingly little in the way of principles and has positions that aren’t honestly come by. He’s out of touch the with the people but makes awkward moves to try to make it seem like he’s a man of the people. He freely ventures into radical territory in order to win the approval of people he thinks will help him reach the top regardless of what kind of effect it’s going to have on everyone else. He paints his opponents as neo-Hitlers and promises things he can’t follow through with in an attempt to score cheap votes.
Not to mention the fact that he’s a white man proclaiming that white men are the problem because they have too much power while running for the highest office in the land. We can add astounding cognitive dissonance to his list of nonsense.
O’Rourke is the Democrat poster child.
Repulsive extremism has taken the Democratic party from the inside, and it’s not working for it. O’Rourke embodies this awkward, sensationalistic, statism that it’s become and it’s people like him that are driving voters away from the Democratic party and straight into the waiting arms of Donald Trump.
As Erick Erickson wrote about O’Rourke, it’s almost as if O’Rourke is a Republican plant meant to sink the Democratic party:
Now, on stage at the Democrat debates, Beto is helping Democrats be defined as radical America hating gun grabbers. He insists the nation is racist and unrepentant in its racism. He insists the Democrats are going to grab everybody’s guns and the crowd goes wild.
This just provides fuel to the GOP fire that the Democrats are too radical to be trusted with power.
Beto is, two election cycles in a row, brilliantly helping the GOP and playing to their narratives. Given how much media attention Beto has been given and how many fawning profiles the press has written about him, it will be hard for the Democrats to distance themselves from him.
This is spot on. If Democrats want to begin to step back onto the path of being taken seriously, they’ll have to push O’Rourke away.
The problem is, O’Rourke is the reflection of the modern Democratic party now. To push O’Rourke away, they’d have to push away what they’ve become. Even getting rid of O’Rourke would be fruitless as another O’Rourke would just be along shortly.
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