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Beto O’Rourke is running in 2020; time for more sugary, sickening media profiles

By Becket Adams

There’s something about Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, who announced Thursday he’s running for president, that reduces journalists into simpering, servile Jack Kerouac wannabes, penning overly long, overly friendly, and overly sentimental profiles detailing the former Democratic Texas congressman’s dusty, heart-searching rise to national stardom.

Indeed, not since at least 2008 has an American politician enjoyed such favorable, cloying news coverage.

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I had hoped O’Rourke’s defeat last year in the November midterm elections meant that we had seen the end of the extreme puff pieces in his honor. But his 2020 announcement this week, which was primed by a Vanity Fair exclusive, says we’re in for at least a few more months of awful writing before his drunken high-speed car wreck, and his subsequent attempt to flee the scene of the crime, chase him out of the contest in Iowa.

These profiles really are awful. The Vanity Fair report, titled “Beto O’Rourke, as He Comes to Grips with a Presidential Run: “I’m Just Born to Do This,” is easily the worst thing you’ll read all week. I apologize for excerpting the following passages:

Behind the door, in the O’Rourke living room, a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf contains a section for rock memoirs (Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, a favorite) and a stack of LPs (the Clash, Nina Simone) but also a sizable collection of presidential biographies, including Robert Caro’s work on Lyndon B. Johnson. Arranged in historical order, the biographies suggest there’s been some reflection on the gravity of the presidency. But there’s also some political poetry to it, a sense that O’Rourke might be destined for this shelf. He has an aura.

Oh, please. Then there’s this:

But unlike Trump, O’Rourke can appear almost too innocent to be a politician—too decent, too wholesome, the very reason he became popular also the same reason he could be crucified on the national stage. I tell O’Rourke that perhaps he’s simply too normal to be president. “Whether you meant it or not, I take that as a compliment,” he says.

There’s also this:

Former girlfriends describe O’Rourke as curious, wry, bookish but adventurous. He usually carried a novel in his pocket, whether Captain Corelli’s Mandolin or The Sun Also Rises. Maggie Asfahani, an El Paso native who dated O’Rourke while he was at prep school and college, said he was somewhat difficult to know. “That’s kind of the mystique of Beto, is that he seems to be accessible,” she says, “but there’s just this layer of protection. I don’t think it’s because he’s hiding anything. I think it’s because he’s keeping a part of it to himself.”

The Vanity Fair article also makes sure to hit all the obligatory cliches of the Beto O’Rourke puff piece genre. Talk about him driving around in his car? Check. Talk about his “energy”? Check. Mention that he’s fluent in Spanish? Check. Dwell on his charisma? Check. Portray the well-to-do judge’s son who also married into billionaire money as an underdog? Check.

Now that O’Rourke has announced his candidacy, we can expect to see more Vanity Fair-style articles on the former Texas congressman. We’re good for at least a dozen or so. Lucky us.

Meanwhile, let’s check in on how another potential 2020 presidential candidate, former Starbucks CEO and moderate Howard Schultz, is being covered by the press:

See? He grew up in the “nice” projects. How dare he claim to have had a hard childhood!

This is going to be the longest, most insufferable primary with the worst, most lopsided media coverage, isn’t it?

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