National Review editor Rich Lowry asked recently, “Is Beto Doing OK?” It’s a fair question. Beto is Robert O’Rourke, the Texan and former congressman who ran unsuccessfully to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz last year.
O’Rourke is planning to run for president in 2020. Last week, I wrote about his unfortunate oversharing habit. He’d just given his Instagram followers a look inside his gaping mouth on a recent trip to the dentist. It turns out he may have been trying to give America’s voters a view into his soul.
The oversharing will continue until morale improves.
O’Rourke, 46, has taken to blogging as a sort of ersatz LiveJournal. The prose is mostly sullen, brief, jilted sentences reminiscent of theater stage directions. O’Rourke’s blog has given rise to a Twitter parody, which was probably inevitable.
But it’s hard to parody O’Rourke liveblogging his midlife crisis. He is a self-parody, what with his skateboard and desperate cool. See if you can tell which of the following three passages is from the parody account and which is authentic Sour Beto:
“I walked over to the north wall and read Lincoln’s second inaugural address. My body warm, blood flowing through me, moving my legs as I read, the words so present in a way that I can’t describe or explain except that I’m so much more alive in the middle of a run, and so are the words I was reading.”
“My wife’s best friend/personal trainer Gio came over for dinner. Stepped out to pick up gelato for us all and ended up discussing a green new deal with a group of foreign exchange students for two hours. Came back to learn they left to see ‘A Star Is Born’ for the third time. Fantastic film.”
“Stopped by La Barbecue for ribs. Will my grandchildren eat meat? It brings people together. What would I give to unite America? Driving outside of town I nodded to the cows. Thank you. We all have our role to play.”
It’s close, right?
It’s easy to get so used to a status quo that you think the past is further behind than it is, but this age of oversharing among politicians is new. Former President Barack Obama so meticulously managed his image and his story that he used “composites” of characters in his memoir, which is to say that he made them up from bits and pieces of real people. Mitt Romney, the last pre-Trump GOP nominee, practically stepped right off the set of “The Brady Bunch.”
There was much to dislike about America’s reliance on presidents as father figures. But it’s surely an overcorrection to seek overgrown teenagers who sulk in public and think they’re emo songwriters. Politicians should probably try to be relatable to those old enough to vote.
Oh, and by the way, the real O’Rourke blog post was the first one.
