You know your press hasn’t been great when the best piece written about your campaign in some time was bylined by your ex-girlfriend. But that’s what happened to Beto O’Rourke last week. The Washington Post Magazine published a lengthy essay written by O’Rourke’s college girlfriend Sasha Watson, about their very 1990s relationship, complete with vintage pictures of the now-presidential candidate looking exactly as you’d expect at the time: holding a guitar, baggy jeans, a buzzcut, and the kind of brooding face he probably wore while listening to Pavement albums and scribbling in his journal. Nothing in the piece was outwardly critical. It was a meditation on the strange experience of growing distant from an ex and then waking up one day to realize that person is now a credible candidate for president of the United States. If critics were mining the story for evidence of scandal or retribution, they weren’t going to find it.

But worry not, Beto haters! There is plenty more on the Internet for you. Since announcing his campaign for president in mid-March, just two months ago, O’Rourke has gone from the media darling who almost beat Ted Cruz in Texas to the designated punching bag of the pundit class. Harry Siegel of the Daily Beast called Beto a “manchild” on Twitter, while sharing a lacerating piece from the columnist Margaret Carlson, who wrote about “her unscientific poll asking every woman I see” and the conclusion that O’Rourke, the married father of three who enjoys making Sunday morning pancakes for his family, reminds them of “the worst boyfriend they ever had.” Other opinion-havers dogged O’Rourke for sharing campaign video of his visit to Yosemite National Park, assuming the candidate was there just to chillax and take in the good vibes. “And the point of this is.... what? Let’s go hiking with O’Rourke?” tweeted Clyde Haberman, the former New York Times columnist. In fact, O’Rourke was there doing a routine campaign photo-op on the day he announced his $5 trillion climate plan, touring the national park with two environmentalists who chatted with him about the local impacts of climate change.

The press commentary swirling around O’Rourke has been like this for months—mockery first, re-tweets second, sober analysis third. “There’s a difference between journalism and piling on to candidates for sport/retweets, and not enough folks realize that,” tweeted William O’Malley, the son of former presidential candidate Martin O’Malley, who was routinely dismissed during the 2016 campaign as little more than a “boring white guy” despite whatever ideas he brought to the race. It’s a media mess of O’Rourke’s own doing, not just because he entered the campaign without a clear Reason Why, but also because he assumed that his seat-of-the-pants, D.I.Y.-style campaigning in Texas would translate neatly into the hothouse of a national campaign, against a different set of opponents and an always-on press corps that’s as responsive to the demands of progressives on Twitter as they are to voters in Nashua and Council Bluffs. “A presidential campaign is several universes away from a statewide campaign,” said Republican strategist Kevin Madden, a former adviser on both of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns. “It’s 10 times harder. The scrutiny is just so much greater. Your worst day on Capitol Hill or in the statehouse or on a Senate campaign is three times worse every day on a presidential campaign. You start off with a press scrum in New Hampshire, and then you make a fund-raising stop in Boston, and you spend your evening at an event in South Carolina. In each place there is an entire news cycle starting everywhere you go. You can’t escape the media. You have to have a plan to deal with them.”

O’Rourke is trying to repair the damage this week, stopping by New York greenrooms that’s he’s so far been shunning, making appearances on The Rachel Maddow Show and The View. And as he did during his Senate run, he’s also booked an appearance at a CNN town hall, a format that’s proven to be a ratings and fund-raising bonanza for candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. HBO will release a documentary about O’Rourke’s Senate campaign later this month. O’Rourke has already sat down with Oprah, conducted a Univision interview with Jorge Ramos entirely in Spanish, and talked to scads of local media in the 124 cities and 14 states he has visited on one of the busiest Democratic itineraries. But he conceded to Maddow on Monday that he must “do a better job” taking his message to a national audience, an admission that you can’t totally end-run the national media and still make it to the White House, even in the smartphone era that helped launch O’Rourke as a political phenomenon in the first place.