Former Congressman Beto O’Rourke has not yet announced whether he will run for president, but Republican allies are already looking at ways to derail his incipient candidacy by sowing dissent among the Democratic ranks. As Politico reports, the anti-tax Club for Growth is hoping to poison the well with a two-minute attack ad, expected to begin airing in Iowa this week, that describes O’Rourke as the recipient of “white male privilege” born with a “blue blood pedigree” who married into wealth and spent his life avoiding any consequences for his actions. (Ironically, the ad uses “billionaire real-estate developer” as a term of derision for O’Rourke’s father-in-law.)

The subtext is clear. While a new Des Moines Register/CNN poll of likely Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa places Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders in the lead, with 27 percent and 25 percent, respectively, many Republicans see O’Rourke as the longer-term threat. O’Rourke, who very nearly beat Senator Ted Cruz in Texas last year, combines a positive disposition with an effortless social-media appeal that has drawn comparisons to Barack Obama. Republican strategists have been taking notes, as Vanity Fair’s David M. Drucker reported last year. “A Democrat who can carry Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or North Carolina is problematic,” said one G.O.P. insider from a critical swing state. “Someone like Beto, who can campaign on the fly, raise money, and excite young voters, could put those and other states in play.”

The O’Rourke-Obama comparison, in particular, has Republicans worried. The Club for Growth ad specifically builds up Obama as a “champion of progressive causes” who broke racial “barriers” in order to tear down O’Rourke as a misogynist who fled the scene of a drunken car crash but was able to escape punishment “as people of color languished behind bars for far less.” “With a charmed life like his, you can never really lose,” the ad concludes. “That’s why Beto’s running for president—because he can.”

The Club for Growth appears to be operating on the theory that the Democratic electorate will ultimately be divided by progressive purity tests which will pit the party’s left wing against so-called centrists like O’Rourke, Biden, or Amy Klobuchar. Although O’Rourke is viewed somewhat suspiciously by many on the far left, his refusal to be pigeonholed might also broaden his appeal. And so it behooves Republicans to undermine whatever appeal O’Rourke might have to millennials, African-Americans, and other key Democratic constituencies that are critical for success in early primary races.

Will that bald-faced ploy resonate with Democratic voters in Iowa? The Club for Growth, for one, isn’t hiding their involvement with the ad. “We watched what he did in Texas in the race against Cruz and realized his potential within the Democratic primary system is enormously larger than what people are giving him credit for right now,” the group’s president, David McIntosh, told Politico. “We realized, here is a real potential threat because if he is the nominee then Texas suddenly is in play.” The G.O.P. cutout is reportedly prepared to spend in the five-figure range to blanket the state with the two-minute spot as O’Rourke ramps up for a 2020 announcement, expected as soon as this week. “I think of it as educating voters about the choice they want to make,” McIntosh continued, “on their criteria.”

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