Betomania has befallen Washington elites: Democratic pundits, political operatives and influencers are having a collective swoon over Democratic representative Beto O’Rourke. He is fresh off a failed Senate run, where he generated internet fame for his skateboarding, musicianship and sunny disposition. Now, he is Washington’s version of Elvis Presley on Ed Sullivan, only the screaming teeny-boppers are Beltway politicos: one rainmaker touted him as “Obama, but white”, a Wall Street-funded group called Third Way declared that “we are big Beto fans” and a former Obama aide penned an entire love letter touting O’Rourke 2020, without even once mentioning where the Texas congressman stands on a single legislative issue.

Beto O’Rourke frequently voted for Republican legislation, analysis reveals Read more

Perhaps the fuzziness around O’Rourke’s political positions isn’t a mistake. Maybe it is designed to obscure facts about his record that may prove to be inconvenient in a Democratic primary. After all, this is a lawmaker who abruptly backed off unequivocally supporting Medicare for All, aligned himself with the party’s Wall Street faction, voted to gut financial regulations, supported Republican-crafted tax cuts, boosted the fossil fuel industry – and then broke his own pledge to reject donations from oil and gas executives.

A liberal heartthrob who votes with Republicans

The 46-year-old O’Rourke has racked up a voting record helping Republicans ram parts of their agenda through the Congress. In an era of growing economic inequality, O’Rourke has split with the majority of his party to vote for Republican initiatives to weaken Wall Street regulations and accelerate bank mergers – and he once voted for a Republican bill that Democratic legislators said was designed to block the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s from combatting racially discriminatory lending. He also voted for a key part of Donald Trump’s so-called deportation force.

Meanwhile, despite the imminent climate catastrophe facing our planet, O’Rourke has often taken the side of carbon polluters. He has repeatedly voted to help the fossil fuel industry increase its exports. He even helped the GOP defeat a Democratic measure designed to limit the possibility of offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. (For more, click here to read a story I wrote this week about Beto’s voting record.)

The big story here is not just O’Rourke’s record – but also the unstated message of the substance-free hype surrounding his potential presidential candidacy.

Perhaps the fuzziness around O’Rourke’s political positions isn’t a mistake

In light of O’Rourke’s voting record, Betomania signals that Democratic power players are not first and foremost searching for candidates whose records prove they are committed to a set of policies that will address the emergencies facing America and the world. Instead, they are frantically seeking a new version of Barack Obama – a conflict-averse politician who proudly boasted of being “a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views”.

Why another Obama would be a tragedy

Replicating an Obama presidency would be better than what we have now. But it would still be a tragedy. That’s because the fundamental premise of Obamaism - and its predecessor, Clintonism – is that there is always a policy that can at once serve the people and the powerful. And recent history has showed that is both false and dangerous.

The fantastical mythology of a satisfactory “third way” between the corporate class and the rest of us posits that the Democratic party’s insurance industry backers can be enriched and healthcare policy can still be humane; its Wall Street sponsors can eviscerate industries and workers can still earn enough to survive; and its fossil fuel donors can keep pumping out carbon and the ecosystem can still sustain human life.

The alluring idea is that we never actually have to answer that haunting question of labor lore: “Which side are you on?” Obamaism leads us to believe that we do not need to choose, and that we can actually have it all – as long as we always make sure to line up behind policies that appease the super-wealthy.

It is, in other words, the ideology undergirding the argument recently put forward by former vice-president, Joe Biden, who insisted: “I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble … the folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”

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It is easy to understand the political utility of this third-way legend: it lets Democrats continue raising gobs of cash from satisfied corporate donors and moguls, and it at least provides voters with more palatable rhetoric than what the Republican party offers. And yet the record of third-way policies over the past few years have made painfully clear that Obamaism’s refusal to choose a side can be a nihilistic choice unto itself.

Play Video 2:52 Beto 2020? Why some think Beto O'Rourke has what it takes to become president - video profile

You can’t stand with both the 1% and 99%: you have to choose

Obamacare, for instance, posited that we do not have to choose between profits and human lives, and that no matter what, we must avoid antagonizing the healthcare industry with ideas like Medicare for All. The policy assumes that the healthcare industry can still hit paydirt in a system that also provides all Americans with decent medical care.

Eight years into the experiment, the industry has indeed been raking in record profits, and health insurance CEOs were paid more than $340m in 2017 alone. At the same time, 27 million people are uninsured, millions more are struggling to afford medical care and prescription drugs, and patients still face the threat of insurance industry death panels cutting off their benefits. The situation is now so dire that one out of every three GoFundMe campaigns are fundraising drives to pay medical bills – all while former Obama aides get hired to help the insurance industry block Medicare for All in the new Congress.

When it came to economic inequality, Obamaism similarly sought a third way between the super-rich and everyone else.

It was bailouts for bankers and support for a slightly higher minimum wage. It was an economic stimulus bill, but also a proposal to slash social security benefits. It was a few actions to strengthen workplace protections, but abandoning a drawn-out fight for laws strengthening unions. It was a modest uptick in antitrust enforcement, but doing little to systematically hinder monopolization, which has given corporate behemoths more market power to prevent wage increases. It was slapping a few fines on Wall Street firms after the financial crisis, but refusing to prosecute top financial executives – a policy enshrining de facto legal immunity for a predatory banking industry that fleeces workaday Americans.

And when it came to the environment, Obamaism presumed that we do not have to choose between ExxonMobil and a habitable ecosystem. Obama’s particular third way on energy policy was somewhat tougher emissions and efficiency standards and yet also strong support for more drilling, fracking and fossil fuel exports (Weeks after a recent scientific report warning of catastrophic climate change, Obama told an audience that he should be thanked because “suddenly America is the largest oil producer – that was me, people”.)

Heading into the 2020 presidential election, O’Rourke’s soaring speeches and charisma may suggest he would offer a better version of this dangerous form of corporate fealty – but in Congress, his votes tell a different story. His telegenic brand seems to offer the same blank screen as Obama – and his record offers the same third-way ideology.

Of course, another third-way presidency – whether in the form of O’Rourke or some other stalking horse – would save us from more Trump. But here’s the thing: it would almost certainly still be death.

More healthcare policy that coddles profiteers will mean yet more riches for insurance executives, and yet more desperation, suffering and casualties for everyone else. Another Democratic president who appeases the corporate lobby by avoiding bare-knuckled brawls over wages, union rights and monopoly power will be another four years marked by more crushing poverty that wipes out entire communities. More Obamaism intent on further increasing fossil fuel production will deliver something between a holocaust and a full-fledged mass extinction, according to climatologists.

The math and science of this reality is tough to explicitly dispute, and so as they now gear up to influence the 2020 presidential primary, the Beltway crowd has been rolling out new tactics to pursue their fever dream of an Obama clone.

The misguided idea that Democrats need a centrist to win

One such tactic is hawking their agenda of corporate appeasement as a Democratic party necessity to attract independent voters in an allegedly conservative country. To win, the party must “affirm core American beliefs in free enterprise, individual initiative and self-reliance and put strengthening markets’ ability to provide broader opportunities before government redistribution”, wrote two officials of the Progressive Policy Institute, a deceptively titled thinktank for pro-business Democrats.

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Those officials’ odes to Ayn Rand somehow didn’t mention their group’s own poll that showed a whopping three-quarters of all Americans say they want to expand social security and Medicare. Another 54% say they support Medicare for All – and that included 75% of independent voters. A new poll by Yale University found that 80% of registered voters support a Green New Deal in which the government takes strong action to fight climate change.

Amid this shift in public opinion, environmental, labor and economic justice movements now threaten to take over the Democratic party. And so another tactic of the status quo crowd has been saccharine demands for comity. This rhetorical maneuver was best summarized by a recent Boston Globe editorial deriding firebrand Senator Elizabeth Warren: the screed decried the outspoken Wall Street critic as too “divisive” for the presidency, and called instead for “a unifying voice”.

But, then, Obama provided exactly that for eight years as president – and his conflict-averse program nonetheless left us with a country that is now more oligarchy than democracy. Another blank-slate Democrat who pretends there is a unifying third way between the 99% and the 1% and who refuses to take sides in big fights against corporate power – that may excite Betomaniacs, establishment Democrats and those with stakes in the status quo, but it won’t rescue our country and it won’t save the planet.