Beto O’Rourke returned to endorse Joe Biden on Super Tuesday eve.
“We need somebody who can bring us together and heal us. We need somebody who can restore the moral authority of the United States,” the former Texas congressman said at a Biden rally in Dallas. “We need Joe Biden.”
The failed 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and El Paso native, 47, tweaked his old stump speech to mention delegate-rich Texas’s issues with healthcare coverage and its recent spate of gun violence, saying Biden was the man to help the state tackle them. He also reiterated that President Trump posed “an existential threat to the country” before Texas Democrats weigh in on the primary on Tuesday, along with 13 other states and the U.S. territory of American Samoa.
On a lighter note, O’Rourke, who dropped out of the Democratic race for the White House last November, told the crowd he was going to show the visitors some Texas hospitality.
“I am going to treat Joe and Jill right. We’re going to take them to a world-class meal tonight. There’s a Whataburger less than a half-mile from here,” he said, referring to Joe Biden’s wife Jill Biden.
On a day littered with endorsements, Biden was joined in Dallas by Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota senator who bowed out of presidential contention earlier Monday.
Klobuchar, 59, called on Democrats to “join hands instead of pointing fingers” as factions coalesce behind Biden or socialist Bernie Sanders. She interlaced her appeal for unity with praise for the two-term vice president, touting his “decency” and “dignity.”
“We are never going to out-divide the divider in chief. We have to be better than that because if we spend the next four months dividing our party,” she said, “we’ll spend the next four years watching Donald Trump tear apart this country.”
Klobuchar, one of a slew of Democrats to stand behind Biden in an effort to deny the Vermont senator the nomination, joked it was nice to be on a stage with Biden when it wasn’t a debate.
Biden, 78, responded later in the event, “Thank you for your endorsement, and, folks, I wasn’t joking. She won all the debates,” alluding to his many struggles in the format.
Sanders, 78, stands a chance of nabbing a large number of delegates on Super Tuesday but won’t reach the 1,991 delegates needed to become the next Democratic standard-bearer.
