Beto as the leading AV candidate

I hear people say that Beto O’Rourke captures the charisma that defined Obama in his 2008 breakthrough. This feeling of political charisma, I argue, is an intuition about both Obama and Beto being AV candidates.

Obama’s opposition to the Iraq War and some red meat policies (like closing Gitmo and the initial public option promise) burnished his credentials as anti-establishment, someone not to blame for post-9/11 sins. At the same time, Obama’s unique upbringing detailed in Dreams From My Father showed he is a credible ambassador for an America that is a “land of opportunity,” where people like him can prosper and ascend to power.

In hindsight, Obama’s first term showed he was very comfortable with following the political establishment’s norms; his second term showed, beyond Republicans, that he wanted some kind of agenda on gun violence or U.S. race relations.

This shows an instability inherent in an AV candidate: how does a candidate maintain authority and retain their campaign persona? If you want to stay a vision candidate, you have to deal with the establishment and be seduced by their way of politics. If you want to stay an anti-establishment candidate, you have to find a popular cause that will rally supporters behind you and rattle the establishment, which would mean building a political agenda.

What makes Beto so attractive as a candidate is that he could be a counterexample to this instability. Obama was elected president, but hindsight shows he solved the instability by not being that anti-establishment; he was tapped into allies in Chicago, and his campaign novelty was building a professional, tech savvy management team.

Beto O’Rourke’s solution is that his Senate campaign is so distinct from what past models have been. A recent Politico long-form on Beto’s field operations shows how deliberately unprofessional the team was, dedicated as they were to scaling up the operation by training as many volunteers as they could. As long as Beto commits to replicating his Senate strategy, his presidential campaign has a natural inertia against capture by the consultant class; volunteers spread too quickly, and they try to raise money so quickly that the grassroots form a bulwark against the temptation of PAC money.

Beto’s ramshackle but also off-the-cuff campaign has given him a unique vision to present to voters: a man who understands common morality. The content of his viral speeches is a case in point. An even more remarkable example, to me, is when reporting late in the campaigned showed Beto tried to flee the scene of his DWI as a college student. A scandal that could drag down most politicians for weeks ended up ignored by national media (much more so than, say, the scandals reported on Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema).

It is possible right wingers were galvanized by this news, and that the media response is different in a presidential campaign. But I appeal to Occam’s razor and say this incident is a signal: people forgave Beto’s past transgressions, because he speaks plainly and has good soundbites. In contrast, they forgave Ted Cruz less because he speaks in riddles and has overtly machiavellian ambitions.

Does what Beto did seem simple? Contrast his appeal with Howard Schultz’s disastrous PR campaign to define himself as a unity candidate, or Tim Ryan’s bizarre plot to capture the “yoga mom vote,” as a sign.