Up to now, the national news media have only asked Beto O’Rourke “why are you so handsome?” and “how are you so cool?” So it’s unclear if he understands the beast that’s waiting to eat him alive.
We call it the social justice movement.
O’Rourke only announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday. By the next day, the grievance troops that form the movement had already begun their work. Noting O’Rourke’s three-minute web video declaring his campaign, a New York Times article described how they “were put off by how his campaign deployed an age-old trope in American political theater — the silent, supportive wife.”
Audrey Gelman, CEO of the women-focused “The Wing,” complained about O’Rourke’s silent wife Amy on Twitter. “I am so sick of wives being forced to silently gaze!!! why even include her?” she wrote.
Liberal activist Jamira Burley tweeted, “Sooooo Beto had his wife sit next to him in a more than 3min video, only for her to hold his hand and smile for the camera.”
In the sticky sweet Vanity Fair profile that accompanied his campaign announcement, O’Rourke said he was “born” to be in the race, which, according to the Times, exposed his white privilege, as “detractors pointed out that prominent black Democrats who lost their 2018 campaigns — including Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum in Florida — are not running for president.”
This is just the beginning. A CNN poll last week showed that there was “a lot of ambivalence” among Democrat voters in Iowa about the possibility of nominating a straight white male. Almost a quarter of them said a straight white male would not be a satisfactory nominee, with another 40 percent saying they were unsure about that frightening prospect.
Sorry, Beto, but unless you can somehow become a black lesbian, this is what you’re up against.
