Languishing near the bottom of what is arguably the third tier of the Democratic race, Beto O’Rourke has come out swinging at the king. “You cannot go back to the end of the Obama administration and think that that’s good enough,” he announced Thursday on Morning Joe, taking an impassioned swipe at both Joe Biden’s candidacy and Obama’s legacy. “As much of a horror show as Trump has been—his racism, the disaster of his foreign policy, his punishment of farmers and workers here in this country,” he continued, “we had real problems before Donald Trump became president.” When asked whether the ex-V.P. represented a “return to the past,” O’Rourke responded with an emphatic “he is.”

O’Rourke didn’t mean it as a compliment. “Look, you’ve got to ask yourself where Joe Biden is on the issues that are most important to you,” he said to a startled-sounding Mika Brzezinski. “Did he support the war in Iraq that forever destabilized the Middle East? Does he really believe that women of lower income should be able to make their own decisions about their own body and be able to afford health care in order to do that? . . . On China, he says China is no threat—nothing to worry about. And now seems to be changing his message on that. So I’m not exactly sure what he believes.”

The barrage may have caught the Morning Joe hosts off guard, but as a strategy, it made perfect sense. Biden has a roughly 30-point lead over O’Rourke, and in most polls he leads the Democratic pack by comfortable double digits. His front-runner status makes him easy bait for the rest of the field, which can win airtime by picking fights with him, and stand out from the crowd by opposing his positions. When Biden fumbled a question on the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortion services, O’Rourke took the opening, calling Biden’s position “absolutely wrong.” Incidentally so did Elizabeth Warren, who went out of her way to contrast her own position on abortion funding—and specifically abortion funding for low-income women—with Biden’s.

O’Rourke has wilted in the polls since his announcement, tying himself in knots apologizing for his campaign’s rollout, and attempting to patch up the damage with cable hits. He’s moved to squelch criticism of his lack of concrete positions with a budget-busting climate plan and, more recently, a policy cementing protections for LGBTQ people. Launching a fusillade at the current front-runner is a quick and dirty way to highlight both, and to differentiate himself from the centrist Biden while stopping short of a full-on embrace of policies endorsed by Warren and Bernie Sanders.

It’s no accident, either, that O’Rourke’s target audience was Morning Joe, a program aimed at moderates, establishment liberals, and Washington elites. In theory these people are natural Biden voters. And in theory O’Rourke might stand a chance of coaxing them into his camp too. If the hosts’ reaction is any guide, there may yet be hope. Joe Scarborough seemed visibly pumped, comparing O’Rourke to a 2007 John McCain, whose campaign struggled in its first few months. “You’re very much still in this race, and congratulations on fighting through a tough launch,” he glowed. “And you’ve even inspired Mika, who now is rolling up her sleeves to be part of the Beto brigade.”

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