What is it with this Beto O’Rourke phenomenon? The Lone Star rock star just shot through, from Denison to Storm Lake and on to Fort Dodge. He has “it”, they said last Saturday in his wake.

“He brought tears to my eyes,” said Linda Torres, who was working the counter at Better Day Cafe as the former Texas congressman packed the house.

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“He’s the white Obama,” marveled Diane Hamilton, who has studied every presidential candidate to come through since Jimmy Carter.

O’Rourke led with the border and closed with climate change, and held a crowd of 100 or more enrapt for over an hour, fielding questions in English and Spanish with fluency.

But is there any “there” there from this former punk rocker, who reflected on his epic Senate loss to Ted Cruz last fall by just 2.6% with a postmortem tour of the droughted western plains of Kansas and the poor indigenous people on the New Mexican mesas? He emerged from the desert with a theme of unity, embraced Oprah Winfrey and made Iowans wonder: where’s the beef? Which both humors and irritates the 46-year-old from El Paso.

O’Rourke stampeded across Iowa last week waving his arms, standing on tables and sitting for an interview with the Storm Lake Times, where he drilled down on agriculture and climate change, universal healthcare and reducing student loan debt. He wants zero emissions and zero debt for students who are willing to pitch in where needed. He is a mix of New Deal, New Frontier (a la Camelot, and no, he was not named Robert Francis after RFK) and Bill Clinton’s nuanced Third Way.

There’s plenty of “there” there, we learned.

“If you think you have a problem at the border now, if this planet continues to cook like it is then you will have a real problem at the border,” O’Rourke said, “in the tens of millions of people. Look at Yemen. Look at Syria.”

Those are not the thoughts of a meandering mind.

He connected it to agriculture. He was talking up cover crops to suck up nitrate and hold back the floods that besieged south-west Iowa especially. He wants to pay farmers more for carbon sequestration by developing a credit market. He sees ethanol as preferable to oil and as a renewable energy pathway, regrets his vote to allow drilling in the Gulf of Mexico (he was a Texas congressman, after all), and clearly knows what bugs farmers: “Everywhere I go, whether it is Texas or Iowa, I hear farmers say: ‘I just want to be able to make a profit.’ They want to do their part. We should pay farmers to do this. Farmers understand better than anyone that we are living through the worst consequences of climate change.”

That kind of talk brought O’Rourke his first applause from the crowd – and it was sustained. Climate change is identified by the Iowa Poll as the top issue of likely caucus-goers next February, along with healthcare.

He knows that the south-west Great Plains are running dry. He knows it takes twice the acreage to run a steer in Texas than it did a decade ago. He describes Euless, Texas, as pictures in the Dust Bowl museum returning to life. There was a reason he was drawn to the small town, he thought, with that mystical appeal. “There was a lesson there for me: history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes, as Mark Twain said.” He knows that the great feedlots in Kansas are sucking the huge Ogallala Aquifer dry, which will foreclose corn irrigation. How can we ease the transition as cattle slake their thirst by moving north from the region where a third of the nation’s beef is raised?

“I don’t know. I just don’t know,” he said.

Give him that. A man either smart enough, modest enough or honest enough not to tread too far. He said that’s what he learned in King county, Texas, which voted more than 90% for Donald Trump. He went there to campaign, and by listening to the local judge learned that 48 surrounding water districts could not produce potable water. The judge was frustrated that the EPA wouldn’t listen to local solutions. O’Rourke says he is learning by listening. And he got two more votes than Hillary Clinton did in King county.

“I don’t have all the answers,” he said.

He formally announced his campaign in El Paso on 30 March with a speech with a strong anti-trust flair, as if he were reading the tea leaves from Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. Farmers who just want a profit could have one if economic power were dispersed, O’Rourke said, but his great-grandad James knew that when he hit Nebraska as a poor Irishman working for the railroad.

O’Rourke’s emphasis changed in Storm Lake. It became more biographical. He talked of rural places left behind, much like El Paso, where he served on the city council. “Far from the centers of power, we were on our own and realized that we must write our own story,” he said. “In Storm Lake, I see a community thriving because of immigration … where people are called to contribute to success, like Diego at Delicias Bakery here. It is the perennial story of this country.”

Which led him into a condemnation of the Trump administration, where locking down the border is the cause célèbre. When the president came to El Paso to build the wall, O’Rourke rallied home-towners across town against it. He said El Paso was safer before the wall created fear. He wants to take on Trump on that issue, when others prefer not to fight him on that ground.

“Men, women and children are put in a cage with barbed wire, having come here on top of a train they call ‘La Bestia’ or ‘The Beast’. That’s on every single one of us,” he said. “These people are refugees, fleeing violence. I remember the 14-year-old girl who asked: ‘Why does the president not like me?’ What does that do to her head? We need to call it what it is: racism.”

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That had Linda Torres crying.

Diane Hamilton was impressed with his discussion of universal healthcare; he does not prescribe Medicare for All. “He had a lot of substance in what he said. He talked about the issues that are most important to everyday voters,” said Hamilton, who has a strong inclination towards Joe Biden as well. O’Rourke did not endorse tuition-free college, but debt-free for those who work.

“We’ve only seen half the candidates, but Beto is up there,” Hamilton said.

Alan Maldonado, a senior business and Spanish major at Buena Vista University (BVU) from Kansas City, said he has followed O’Rourke since his run against Cruz. “He seems pretty rational. He’s not extreme. Some of the others may be too far left,” he said.

His friend Val Mota, a BVU senior from Sioux City, is eligible to caucus and she is giving O’Rourke a hard look. “If you can bridge the gap in Texas, you can take that to the presidency.”