Alex Seitz-Wald has written a column for NBC News, and she appears to be in love. Robert Francis O'Rourke (that's Beto) is running for a seat in the Senate against Republican Ted Cruz. A national effort is being made to portray him as a valid candidate. He has collected over 61 million dollars for his campaign and, in true socialist fashion, has refused to share it with other candidates who might be able to get elected.

Seitz-Wald quotes "comedian" Bill Maher: "It's like when the Beatles came to America." Alex believes that "Betomania, as the phenomenon has been dubbed, is sweeping the nation." "Celebrities and sports stars from LeBron James to Ellen DeGeneres to Tony Dungy to Stephen King have expressed their Beto-love." He quotes the women's magazine Elle reporting on a video of O'Rourke petting a chubby bunny: "Why does he look so perfect doing even the most simple things?" "Beto's like your energetic, young math teacher who got you very hot and bothered about fractions."

Because of the sensitivity about his nickname, Beto, possibly being an appeal to Hispanics, Seitz-Wald's article emphasizes Beto's "authenticity." Jim Messina, who ran Obama's re-election campaign, is quoted as claiming that O'Rourke has "a rare combination" of "inspiration, aspiration and authenticity." Messina posted an email saying, "He is authentic, and luckily, authentically cool." Jesse Lehrich, a veteran of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, claims, "Authenticity is intoxicating, and now more than ever." Claude Taylor, a Democratic strategist, stated, "Beto is the new RFK. He's a natural. You can't train that, you can't focus group it, it either is or it isn't. He's more of a natural than Barack Obama was." He quotes Britt Daniel, the lead singer for the band Spoon and political pundit, saying O'Rourke is "someone who has a future for the party, a future in politics, or maybe they're just genuinely inspired by him."

Francis Wilkinson over at Bloomberg continues the hagiography: "There's a good deal of Barack Obama in O'Rourke. He expresses a similar desire to rise above pettiness, bridge division, foster unity." Francis uses this opportunity to bash the president and his supporters. "Trump took his supporters' anxiety over race and culture and sexual politics and channeled it into hatred and a lust for dominance." O'Rourke "has best harnessed the anxiety and rage generated by Trumpism's assaults on democratic values and transformed them into willful, defiant optimism." He is the antidote to "the GOP's wholesale capitulation to cruelty, incompetence, racism, sexism, corruption."

O'Rourke has adopted policies that are not exactly popular in his native Texas, or, as Francis Wilkinson calls it, "the land of gun nuttery." He not only is in favor of firearms regulation, but defends the NFL players' right to kneel. He supports them because "black men, unarmed, black teenagers, unarmed, and black children, unarmed, are being killed at a frightening level right now."

When asked if he was willing to share some of the 38 million dollars he raised in the third quarter with candidates involved in tighter races, he replied, "No." O'Rourke claims that "[m]ost of our contributions have come from Texas." However, he has traveled to Los Angeles at least twice in order to collect contributions from the Hollywood elite.

O'Rourke's history has not received the amount of attention given public figures like Brett Kavanaugh and Judge Roy Moore. He is a former punk rocker who was arrested for DWI and reportedly attempting to flee the scene of an accident. He completed a court-approved diversion program and had the charges dismissed. Of course, this sentence had nothing to do with the fact that he was the son of an El Paso County judge.

John Dietrich is a freelance writer and the author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (Algora Publishing). He has a Master of Arts degree in international relations from St. Mary's University. He is retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.

Image credit: Beto for Congress Committee via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.