Unemployed former congressman and perennial angsty dad-bro Robert Francis O’Rourke has yet another sepia-hued magazine profile, this time in POLITICO Magazine. Like all Beto profiles, the piece is littered with sullen anecdotes of the politician’s past. But it provides a deep-dive into O’Rourke’s actual record only to prove it’s as malleable and vague as his image is.
Beto wants to rip down the border wall in El Paso, but he also ran for Congress criticizing Obamacare. Many on the Left have come to lionize him, yet he also flirted with Republican-style Social Security reform.
Lachlan Markay of the Daily Beast summed up the image presented of Beto well, noting “the goal, of course, is to be the next Obama: someone onto whom vastly different constituencies can project their own ideas and preferences.”
But here’s the thing: The Obama coalition didn’t just rely on constituencies but record demographic turnout. That requires more than just a laundry list of policies, and Obama knew it, that’s why his very visage became the centerpiece of his campaign.
We’re seeing the 2020 frontrunners try to hijack the Obama playbook already. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., formerly the
top cop
Harris and the rest have all attempted to charm the late-night circuit, hoping to prove that they’re still with it and down with the kids. Beto may be the worst offender, waxing on poetic to any reporter who’ll listen about his struggles to be an artist in Manhattan and his unique tragedy of being a lost 20-something living in a closet in Williamsburg. In all seriousness, name me a single journalist who has not spent at least one summer doing this.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., cracks open beers on Instagram, and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., is quick to break out his best Obama-impersonation, cadence at all, any time the camera rolls for longer than five seconds. They all want to be as hip as our nation’s first black president.
But they’re all failing, humiliatingly. That’s because charisma is not a formula. Barack Obama is a human being, not a product of a petri dish from the back of the DNC. He spent his adolescence getting high next to volcanoes in Hawaii and became actual friends with Jay-Z and Beyonce. Watching the 2020 field try to emulate him is like watching a group of middle school girls try to copy the queen bee. Except this is a group of senators, attorneys, and congressmen debasing on national television.
The reality is that the Democratic Party is more fractured today than it was a decade ago, and while having a thin, unconvincing record may land you a softball cover story on the Rolling Stone, it won’t survive a year of opposition research. Even more importantly, voters may ignore the minutiae of policy to their detriment, but they can smell a charade when they see one. Charisma is just an It Factor. Either you have it or you don’t.
Obama had the unique opportunity and ability to coalesce a diverse group of voters with a short record and personal charm. 2020 contenders don’t have either of those advantages, and they aren’t Obama, either.
