Beto O’Rourke has chosen President Barack Obama’s 2012 deputy campaign manager to lead his bid for the White House in 2020.
“We’re excited that Jen O’Malley Dillon has joined our team,” O’Rourke said in a statement Monday. “Her leadership, experience and creativity will be a great addition to a campaign that is already doing so much to bring people together to overcome the greatest set of challenges this country has ever faced.”
Dillon, 43, told the New York Times that she joined the O’Rourke campaign because he signifies “a new generation of leadership I think we need.” The veteran strategist has worked for five presidential campaigns and is a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee.
“His leadership, his energy, his belief that you don’t have to segment voters and that you can be a president for all voters,” she said. “People are searching for that.”
Becky Bond, another senior O’Rourke aide, is an avowed socialist who blasted the leftist father of community organizing Saul Alinsky as a “paternalistic” moderate who “disparaged the idea of revolutionary change.”
Dillon said she’s aiming to enhance O’Rourke’s campaign to accommodate a presidential primary race. At the same time, she said she is attempting to launch an operation “authentic to Beto and also efficient and allows us the most direct engagement with voters.”
“We have to build something that really is special and unique to him,” she said.
O’Rourke, 46, served as a congressman from El Paso from 2013 to 2019. He ran a surprisingly competitive campaign to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in the 2018 midterm elections in November, but lost by more than 2 percentage points.
Earlier this month O’Rourke announced his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and currently places fourth in a crowded field of candidates in the RealClearPolitics average of polls.
