Beto O’Rourke ended his two-week break from campaigning following the El Paso shooting with a forceful speech laying out a shift in his campaign focus to combating President Trump, anti-immigrant sentiments and racism while rejecting some aspects of traditional campaigning.
“We have a racism in America that is as old as America itself. An intolerance towards those who do not look like or pray like or love like or speak like the majority in this country,” the former Texas congressman and presidential hopeful said in a speech in El Paso on Thursday. “But we have always tried, until now, to change that … If we don’t wake up to this threat, we as a country will die in our sleep.
O’Rourke condemned Trump’s rhetoric, connecting the president’s comments about immigrants “invading” the U.S. to the El Paso shooter’s anti-immigrant manifesto. He warned that institutions like Congress, the press, and social media have “failed us.”
No longer will O’Rourke embrace cliché campaign traditions like riding Ferris wheels and eating corn dogs at the Iowa State Fair. “I can’t go back for that, but I also can’t go back to that,” O’Rourke said of considering whether he would travel to the fair in the aftermath of the shooting.
As his campaign becomes a vehicle to aggressively face, O’Rourke will next head to Mississippi to talk to families impacted by immigration raids at chicken processing plants.
“Six hundred people who came to this country for the privilege of working the toughest shittiest jobs that nobody else here would allow their children to work, in chicken processing plants, in picking cotton and working in the gin, working two or three shifts maybe making a minimum wage if they’re lucky,” O’Rourke said of those arrested in the raids.
O’Rourke indicated that he plans to focus his message on his view of immigration: that immigrants not only benefit from coming to the United States, but the United States benefits from welcoming them.
O’Rourke also proposed a federal assault weapons buyback program.
“Not only do we need universal background checks, not only do we need red flag laws, not only do we need to end the sale of assault weapons, but we must as a country buy those weapons and take them off our streets,” he said.
Though he is polling at from two to five percent, the former Texas congressman also threw water on calls for him to challenge Republican Sen. John Cornyn rather than continue his presidential bid. O’Rourke unsuccessfully challenged Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018, despite nationwide interest in his campaign.
“Some have suggested that I stay in Texas and run for Senate. But that would not be good enough for this community, that would not be good enough for El Paso, that would not be good enough for this country,” O’Rourke said. “We must take the fight directly to the source of this problem, that person who has caused this pain, and placed this country in this moment of peril, and that is Donald Trump.”
O’Rourke faces a challenge, though, in differentiating himself tom front-runners like former vice president Joe Biden who have also centered their campaign message on combating Trump and condemning his rhetoric.
