Good Monday Austin:

Today is the 12th day of Beto O'Rourke's presidential campaign and it appears, from his schedule, the first day of rest since it began and a good moment to pause and evaluate how it's going.

On Sunday, the 11th day of his frenetic start, O'Rourke, who routinely climbed atop a chair, a bar or a countertop to address the consistently large throngs that greeted him as he made his way across America and back, reached new heights as he leapt atop his minivan in a single bound - well almost - to speak to a crowd of those who overflowed the coffee shop in Las Vegas, Nevada, the last stop on his first extended road trip that took him from Iowa, across the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, to New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

A great day to be outside. Thank you, Las Vegas.pic.twitter.com/7YdvRnMFkL

— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke)March 24, 2019

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It is a dramatic, heroic pose that says much about the ambitions of a candidate and a campaign that exuded more sustained energy out of the gate - and raised more money in the first 24 hours - than any of the other Democratic presidential campaigns to come before, but also made him the object of an intense, even punishing scrutiny and even mockery that he had not faced before.

'2020' added to Beto O'Rourke mural in East Austinhttps://t.co/UZzF4NbEM8 (Photo courtesy: Chris Rogers)pic.twitter.com/DS5qHgLHa2

— CBS Austin (@cbsaustin)February 15, 2019

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From Esquire's Charles Pierce: Beto O'Rourke Has One Setting: Loud and Earnest

He's still a bit short of the Obama '08 inside straight. But he had the crowd here cheering.

COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA—On Friday, I took in the Beto O'Rourke Experience for the first time, at an outdoor rally on the campus of the University of South Carolina. O'Rourke was making his first swing through this state, about which more anon. He bounced onto the stage in a USC ballcap, led the crowd in the traditional "Game! Cocks!" call-and-response chant. And then delivered a speech that, I believe, consisted of one single 40-minute sentence.

It took in a smattering of Spanish, a paean to the 1966 NCAA Champion Texas Western Miners, the civil rights struggle both within and without O'Rourke's native El Paso, the climate crisis, the cost of prescription drugs, student loans, and every other conceivable issue that might arise during the 2020 campaign. He spoke with the same level of passion about all of them. O'Rourke has one rhetorical setting—loud and earnest. But the most interesting part of his appearance on campus Friday was the Q-and-A session that ended it. For the first time, somebody got O'Rourke simply...to...slow...down.

He handled the bogus controversy about how much money his late Senate campaign got from people in the oil and gas industry by pointing out that most of it came in small amounts from the grunts in the industry.

"As you can imagine in Texas, there are a lot of people—they may be out in the field. They may be engineers. They may be welders. They may be truck drivers. They may be secretaries, working for oil and gas companies. We were one of the top recipients of oil and gas money—ten bucks, twenty bucks, a hundred bucks at a time. At the same time, we were also the top recipient of hairdresser money, and pharmacist money, and doctors and schoolchildren, and just about every profession. The people in Texas—and some of you in South Carolina—stepped up and made sure that Texas, a state so reliably red that no Democrat ever competed or feared to tread, made sure that, if we banded together, which every one of the 254 counties banded together and did no let oil and gas corporation, any special interest to purchase access or corrupt, or give the appearance of corruption, we might just win."

By the end of the answer, he had them cheering. His crowd was young, as might be expected, and it was overwhelmingly white, which may be significant. South Carolina is going to be the first real test of the ability of the Democratic field to connect with African American voters, a vital constituency for any Democratic presidential candidate. If O'Rourke is going for the Obama '08 inside straight, he's still a little bit short of it, which isn't that big a problem considering the primary is a year away. But he's going to have to put some meat on the superheated grill of his rhetoric. Enthusiasm isn't enough.

Jamie Lovegrove, a political reporter for the Post and Courier in Charleston and a a former reporter for The Dallas Morning News and the Texas Tribune, was among the reporters trailing O'Rourke in South Carolina.

I’ve covered just about every presidential candidate that’s come through South Carolina so far. There has never been a reception quite like this one awaiting@BetoORourke at@AmeliesBakery right now at 8:30 in the morning.#scpolpic.twitter.com/dYgY3KGAPg

— Jamie Lovegrove (@jslovegrove)March 22, 2019

My friend@Charlietweeets made this awesome video for@BetoORourke because he came to visit@UofSC today! Beto, if you’re reading this, please give this man a jobpic.twitter.com/sJQX1BsEyU

— Emerson Odagis (@emerson_odagis)March 23, 2019

Final stop for@BetoORourke’s first day in South Carolina coming up at@TradesmanBrew in Charleston. Cars lining a mile down the road after the parking lot filled up long ago.#SC2020pic.twitter.com/fhUB4kXRBU

— Jamie Lovegrove (@jslovegrove)March 22, 2019

.@BetoORourke arrives in Charlestonpic.twitter.com/SQaP7prTZf

— Jamie Lovegrove (@jslovegrove)March 22, 2019

A week earlier, on March 14, Pierce had written about O'Rourke's entry into the race.

Beto O'Rourke is running for hero:https://t.co/jKql1tlVH6pic.twitter.com/sVLm6UMQDE

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce)March 14, 2019

The Texan has announced, quite candidly, that he is seeking the mystical energy of John F. Kennedy. It's a big gamble.

In 1960, in the pages of this magazine, the late Norman Mailer came to grips with the phenomenon of John F. Kennedy, who had just secured the Democratic presidential nomination in Los Angeles, overturning all the rotten applecarts with a savvy bunch of still-youngish World War II veterans, and a form of politics that caught all the old guard wrong-footed. Mailer saw more clearly than most that politics was being changed from the inside out—by new technologies driving new imperatives driving a new kind of candidate. Kennedy was the prototype—fueled by different fuels, fired by different fires, his rise so unconventional that it seemed touched by lightning, by alchemy, by magic.

Mailer wrote:

"Yes, this candidate for all his record; his good, sound, conventional liberal record has a patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz."

It is not idle musing to conclude that every subsequent Democratic presidential candidate has taken up the quest to find a suitable variation of that murmur of jazz that Kennedy heard. The technology changed. The imperatives changed. The candidates changed. But somewhere in all of them was a vision of their own private new frontier. In my lifetime, Barack Obama came the closest to finding one.

Comes now Beto O'Rourke, finally deciding to run for president after spending a few months as the Jack Kerouac of Instagram, and off to Keokuk to make his first stop as an actual candidate. Nobody—not even Obama—was so clearly and so obviously looking for whatever that new frontier looks like in 2019. Nobody—not even Obama—was so clearly and so obviously trying to tap into whatever the energy stream is today into which that old energy that Mailer felt long ago flowed.

In the Vanity Fair profile that kicked things off for him, O'Rourke made it as plain as it possibly could be.

⚡️ Beto O’Rourke Talks 2020 and More on the Cover of Vanity Fair:https://t.co/qnO77uulZL

— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair)March 13, 2019

"Settling into an armchair in his living room, he tries to make sense of his rise. “I honestly don’t know how much of it was me,” he says. “But there is something abnormal, super-normal, or I don’t know what the hell to call it, that we both experience when we’re out on the campaign trail.”

"O’Rourke and his wife, Amy, an educator nine years his junior, both describe the moment they first witnessed the power of O’Rourke’s gift. It was in Houston, the third stop on O’Rourke’s two-year Senate campaign against Ted Cruz. “Every seat was taken, every wall, every space in the room was filled with probably a thousand people,” recalls Amy O’Rourke. `You could feel the floor moving almost. It was not totally clear that Beto was what everybody was looking for, but just like that people were so ready for something. So that was totally shocking. I mean, like, took-my-breath-away shocking.''

For O’Rourke, what followed was a near-mystical experience. “I don’t ever prepare a speech,” he says. “I don’t write out what I’m going to say. I remember driving to that, I was, like, ‘What do I say? Maybe I’ll just introduce myself. I’ll take questions.’ I got in there, and I don’t know if it’s a speech or not, but it felt amazing. Because every word was pulled out of me. Like, by some greater force, which was just the people there. Everything that I said, I was, like, watching myself, being like, How am I saying this stuff? Where is this coming from?

This is more than slightly astonishing. JFK's bone-deep sense of irony and detachment kept him from saying anything like this, and he'd have laughed out of the room anyone who'd dared suggest that the frenzied reaction of young voters to him was a manifestation of some invisible power. Obama reckoned with it, but he generally gave credit to his audiences for the power that moved him. What O'Rourke is talking about here is more akin to some revelation in the wilderness, like a wandering prophet in the Sinai coming to terms with the mystic. Beto O'Rourke is the candidate of the desert, of the redemptive power of heat and thirst. No wonder he wants everyone to move to El Paso.

It is a big gamble. It requires a surefooted sense of who you are and who you are not. If O'Rourke is able to do this, then this is now a very different campaign. As Mailer observed:

" ...America was also the country in which the dynamic myth of the Renaissance—that every man was potentially extraordinary—knew its most passionate persistence. Simply, America was the land where people still believed in heroes: George Washington; Billy the Kid; Lincoln, Jefferson; Mark Twain, Jack London, Hemingway; Joe Louis, Dempsey, Gentleman Jim; America believed in athletes, rum-runners, aviators; even lovers, by the time Valentino died. It was a country which had grown by the leap of one hero past another—is there a county in all of our ground which does not have its legendary figure?"

Suddenly, somebody's running for hero. Somebody had to, I guess.

This is, of course, all a bit much

His first Sunday in the race, the New York Times' Maureen Dowd wrote:

WASHINGTON — The heavens part. The light shines down. The rise in the oceans begins to slow. The world is once more bathed in the mystical glow of a messiah. Our redemption from Donald Trump is at hand.

We have The One again, a New One — another lanky, bookish, handsome man with an attractive young family, a thin résumé, an exotic name, a hip affect, a rock star aura, an enticing smile, a liberal press corps ready to fluff his pillows and a frothing Fox News.

Let Elizabeth Warren knock herself out with policy proposals. Let Kamala Harris be the adult in the room. Let Bernie Sanders bellow away.

The magical man-boy, Beto O’Rourke, has come back from his 40 days in the desert — vlogging, contemplating, floating in and out of a funk — to share his gifts.

He has given us the blessed news: “Man, I’m just born to be in it.” He told Vanity Fair that his words at a Texas campaign stop when he was trying to unseat Ted Cruz were pulled out of him “by some greater force,” musing: “Everything that I said, I was, like, watching myself, being like, How am I saying this stuff? Where is this coming from.”

Annie Leibovitz advised Beto to wear a blue button-down shirt for her Vanity Fair cover shoot if he was going to run. And now we can hear, as Hillary Clinton noted sardonically about Barack Obama in 2008, “celestial choirs.”

On Thursday, Peggy Noonan, picked up the thread in the Wall Street Journal.

I look at Beto O’Rourke and see a handsome, glistening creature who is obviously eccentric and probably shallow. He once wrote a short story about murdering children. Ben Terris of the Washington Post had a striking piece this week in which he reports Mr. O’Rourke ate dirt for its “regenerative powers” after losing to Ted Cruz, has pranked his wife with “Psycho”-style scenes in the shower, and once placed his child’s feces in a bowl and told his wife it was an avocado. (Neither would confirm the stories but Mr. O’Rourke told Mr. Terris it sounded like him.)

And yet he raised a hearty $6 million in the 24 hours after his announcement for the presidency, and draws adoring crowds.

As the grandfather said at the end of “Moonstruck,” “I’m confused.”

It is confusing.

The fiction a 15-year-old O'Rourke posted under the pseudonym "Psychedelic Warlord," comes from this Reuters story, which was released the day after he entered the race.

Inside Beto O’Rourke’s previously unreported stint as a fledgling hacker with notorious group Cult of the Dead Cow:https://t.co/RqjALRImzS via@josephmennpic.twitter.com/e3xa2xnkzQ

— Reuters Top News (@Reuters)March 15, 2019

Here is the Ben Terris Washington Post story, which I cited in my Sunday column:

The Washington Post ran a story Tuesday about Beto and Amy O’Rourke’s marriage that included the scoop that during his solo road trip in January to clear his head as he decided whether to run for president, Beto ate some dirt in New Mexico for its reputed regenerative powers.

The conservative Washington Examiner tweeted Tuesday, following the Post’s revelation, that after losing to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, O’Rourke ate dirt, “actual dirt, as in tiny pieces of soil.”

“Words escape me,” retweeted Cruz.

I was aware of “earth eating” — it is called geophagy — because I covered former U.S. Rep. Bill Jefferson, D-New Orleans, who wrote about it in his memoir of growing up in Lake Providence, a small, poor, mostly black town in rural northeastern Louisiana. In the Deep South it is a remnant of a practice still common in West Africa. It’s especially popular with pregnant women.

I’m not sure about Southwestern geophagy, but I suppose Cruz might say that in eating New Mexican dirt, O’Rourke was engaging in cultural appropriation, like calling himself Beto.

I subsequently heard from a a reader who placed O'Rourke's dirt-eating in far better cultural context.

Here is what Terris wrote about the O'Rourkes coping with losing to Cruz:

Whatever post-defeat sadness Amy felt, she was able to kick quickly; she’s always been the stable one. Beto, on the other hand, more prone to higher highs and lower lows, was in a “funk.” In January, Beto hit the road, much as his father had done before him, and drew energy from the people he met, and — on one stop in New Mexico he didn’t write about in his blog — by eating New Mexican dirt said to have regenerative powers. (He brought some home for the family to eat, too.)

Beto got dinged in the press for seeming rootless and self-indulgent.

What my reader pointed out is that in his Jan 25 Medium post on his visit to Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, O'Rourke wrote, I left the Pueblo heading south toward Chimayo, aiming to be back in El Paso by bedtime.

Chimayo is home to El Santuario de Chimayó.

From Irene S. Levine in the Washington Post on April 10, 2014

Whether you’re a believer or not, there’s something about the serenity of small churches that makes them inviting. Add an unusual history or legend, and the attraction doubles.

So it is with El Santuario de Chimayo, a small church in Chimayo, N.M., between Taos and Santa Fe. Founded in 1816 by Bernardo Abeyta and other residents of the then-separate village of El Portero, it was purchased by the Spanish Colonial Arts Society in 1929 and donated to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe.

With its thick adobe walls, two bell towers and six-foot crucifix, the church is considered a prime example of Spanish Colonial architecture. But it’s probably best known for the supposedly curative powers of the “holy dirt” that’s found in its sacristy.

Each year, more than 300,000 Native Americans, Hispanics and people of other cultures visit the church. Some come in faith, some out of curiosity, but most come hoping to find miracle cures for their physical or emotional pains, illnesses or disabilities. It has been reported that during Holy Week, pilgrims walk the 30 miles from Santa Fe to the sanctuary; some even walk from as far as Albuquerque, about 90 miles away.

I stepped inside to get a glimpse of el pocito. I hadn’t come to get some dirt, but on an impulse, I decided to take some with me in case my achy knee worsened during the last days of our visit to New Mexico. But I worried that if I knelt down to reach the well, I’d have trouble getting back up.

A few minutes later, a couple joined me. They’d brought along an empty pill vial as a container and began digging up some of the soil to take home — the husband wanted it for his own knee injury. They were quite friendly, and the husband offered to collect some of the dirt for me. I handed him the only receptacle I could find in my purse, a small plastic sandwich bag, which he filled with the soil.

Back at home, I did some research on the holy dirt to learn more about its properties. The first thing I learned is that el pocito isn’t a bottomless pit. It has to be refilled each day by church workers who collect the dirt from the nearby hillsides in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Visitors haul away an estimated 25 to 30 tons each year.

The church has been compared to Lourdes, and the National Park Service has called it “one of the most important Catholic pilgrimage centers in the United States.” In 1970, it became a National Historic Landmark.

Returning to Santa Fe from the High Road Art Tour in September, my husband and I took a short detour off State Road 76 (the High Road) to see the sanctuary. Visitors were few, so we were able to take our time admiring the church with its colorful decorations and wooden devotional paintings, called retables.

A door at the left of the nave opens to a small prayer room, with an amazing number of discarded crutches lining the walls. Above them, the walls are covered with photos and letters from people testifying to the healing power of the holy dirt, which is found in an even smaller adjoining room. The size of a walk-in closet, this room houses a tiny well, called el pocito, dug into the ground and holding the fine soil.

A handout I’d picked up in the sanctuary offered clear instructions on applying the soil: “The Holy dirt is not to be eaten or to be drunk,” it read. It suggested some silent prayers to say as you rub the dirt over the part of your body in need of healing while invoking the name of Jesus.

Some visitors, however, apparently do decide to ingest the soil, sprinkling it on their food or in a beverage. And some people claim to feel its effects merely from having it in their possession.

A TV show called “Miracle Detectives” analyzed the soil a couple of years ago and found that even the high levels of calcium carbonate (which might have a beneficial effect on heartburn) can’t explain the apparently extraordinary healing properties of the holy dirt of Chimayo. More likely, the skeptical detectives concluded, the curative effects — although hard to document — can be explained by the placebo effect, or the “power of positive thinking.”

My knee, knock wood, hasn’t given me any trouble since my visit. I have the baggie of holy dirt in my night table just in case. But maybe it has already worked its magic.

So, Beto O'Rourke, while contemplating running for president, made a quiet visit to a Catholic pilgrimage site (he is Catholic) and, perhaps not sure where exactly in this circumstance to rub the "holy dirt," he got a little carried away and had a taste. I mean he's running for president. It couldn't hurt. And he did raise more money in his first 24 hoursas a presidential candidate than Bernie Sanders, who probably hasn't eaten holy dirt. (Note: On my honeymoon in Portugal ,my wife and I visited Fátima, a Catholic pilgrimage site where three children saw the Virgin Mary in 1917, and were so stunned by the scene, we stayed a second day - and I'm Jewish.)

Meanwhile, as I wrote in my column, after spending four days in Iowa and Wisconsin following O'Rourke:

That night I flew home and, in the approach to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, over a 2-acre earth art likeness of O’Rourke — “BETO 2020,” it says — that was unveiled Sunday.

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On Tuesday I went out to talk to Stan Herd, the Kansas artist who created it at Carson Creek Ranch, which is also home to Levitation Fest, formerly known as Austin Psych Fest.

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As it happens, while I was interviewing Herd, he got a call from As it Happens, the terrific Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio show (they interviewed me in September when Cruz warned, in his humorous way, that if elected, Beto would ban barbecue).

Here is Herd's conversation with Carol Off, the show's host, after being introduced by co-host Jeff Douglas.

JD: If you happen to be flying into or out of Austin sometime soon, you'll be treated to a curious sight. It's a portrait of the Democratic Party presidential hopeful, Beto O'Rourke. It's made of mulch and gravel and it's the size of two football fields. Stan Herd is the artist behind the likeness. We reached him near Oklahoma City.

CO: Stan, what kind of reaction are you getting to your Beto crop circle?

STAN HERD: Well, it's really kind of stunned us all. You know I've been at this for 46 years creating earthworks. And I've had some successes and some failures. And this has kind of been unprecedented really. We were on the Seth Meyers TV show last night. And we're getting calls from you know from Canada. So we're a bit amazed by it all. We're not quite sure why? Our smartest guys think that it's because of Beto's popularity, and the fact that this is kind of a positive story in that it's a feel good community comes together around the candidate type thing.

CO: Can you describe what it looks like?

SH: It's this out of a shortgrass prairie that's a mix of grass and clover and different things that have grown up in this prairie along the Colorado River just north of the airport. You know I didn't have a lot to work with quite frankly. And the palette became very favourable to me because I could only take this material down to the bare ground, although the rich red earth there is very much skin colour. And then we added a few organic materials on the top of it, so it was very minimalist.

CO: For people who haven't seen it, it looks… well some have said it looks like Abe Lincoln on the penny. But it's profile of Beto O'Rourke in the middle of a circle, and the bottom says Beto 2020, is that right?

SH: Right. It does look coin-like. And my brother called from New Mexico, and he says you know most presidents that are on coins are no longer around. Is this a good idea? So we've been teasing about you know the bitcoin and now we've got the Betocoin. So we'll see what the candidate thinks about that.

CO: How big is this profile?

SH: The image is on two acres. Obviously if you're going to take the time to create something in a field, you want to get as much attention as you can. And we have planes and helicopters and all types of folks flying over all day.

CO: Now, of course, people who know your work know that you have been doing this kind of art for a long time. I think Dan Rather called you the father of crop art to at some point. But why did you want to do Beto O'Rourke in a field in Texas?

SH: You know I've been a lifelong Democrat. My family grew up in southwest Kansas, which is a pretty conservative part of the state. The Great Plains states are more conservative rural agriculture people. My people were also that: seven generations of farmers and agriculture people. But we've been lifelong Democrats, and we've supported Democratic candidates for the long haul. And as somebody who's quite interested in what's going on nationally with what I see as the kind of vitriolic feeling in the country right now, there's a lot of animosity and a lot of enmity, quite frankly. And I just feel like that that Beto O'Rourke has a calming voice. He's got a populist appeal. He's compassionate. He has all of the things that my parents and my teachers and my preachers and my brothers and my family said that you should look for in a leader. You know there's so many good candidates out there, Kamala Harris, and Joe Biden, and just so many wonderful people and so many wonderful women coming to power in the Democratic Party right now. My original intention was to do portraits of six of the new Congresswomen. But when I got to Austin, I kind of got the Beto fever, and I just fell in love with the guy. So I decided to do a throwdown. And we did not you know we didn't get any money from the campaign, we didn't get any money from anybody, we just did it on our own.

CO: But he's also well he's a controversial person in Texas, isn't he? I mean there are people who oppose what he represents in terms of health care, immigration. So why was it important for you to not just have this image in Texas, but well so close to the airport where you know people are going to be seeing it? What did you want to provoke by doing that?

SH: You know historically, I've learned that every other project I try to do something that speaks to my heart as an artist or you know whether it's political or some other issue. I've been creating images of young indigenous women around the world just back two years from China, creating a giant permanent two acre work. So I think art has the power. And art seen and talked about, and quite frankly interviewed you know from Canada about, has resonance. It becomes you know part of a discourse of what's going on out there. You know the story that I'm trying to tell is that you know the country needs to move back in a better direction. I've met Mr. Trump. I've been in his office twice. I created an image on his property years ago. And I think he's the wrong leader for our country right now, quite frankly. And we need somebody who's is more compassionate, and can reach out to two sides. And I believe Beto reaches to a lot of moderates. I believe he's bringing out a new demographic of women, minority people, and moderate Democrats. And you know certainly you're not going to win the favour of everybody — nobody ever has. You know we've been getting a few a few nasty emails and comments. but compared to the support we're getting. You know it's 100 to 1.

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CO: But some Texans are not happy with your crop circle. What are they saying to you?

SH: Well, I think somebody said you know I'm going to bring my dog out to the field, so he can you know have some fun I won't say what they say. You know haters will be haters. You know that's part of the nature if when you stand on stage and sing, you know not everybody is going to applaud. But it shouldn't dissuade you from saying what you need to say. That's what democracy is about.

Apparently Michael Bloomberg doesn't get his news from crop circles.

From Alex Griswold of the Washington Free Beacon on Bloomberg's remarks at the Bermuda Executive Forum on Friday:

"Joe Biden went out and apologized for being male, over fifty, white," Bloomberg said, to audience laughter.

"He apologized for the one piece of legislation which is actually a pretty good anti-crime bill, which if the liberals ever read it, most of the things they like would be—is in that bill. They should have loved that, but they never even bothered to read it. You're anti-crime, you must be anti-populist," Bloomberg added.

"Beto, whatever his name is, he's apologized for being born," he added to uproarious laughter. "I don't mean to be unkind. A lot of people love him and say he's a smart guy, and someday if he wins I'd certainly support him."

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Then there is this:

Superb demolition of US candidate O'Rourke, 'a wild, scrawny, noisy, incoherent nincompoop', who seems to be 'arriving at the guillotine before the executioner,' by an eviscerating Conrad Black:https://t.co/20KeFhG8jF

— Andrew Deakin (@andrewl5059)March 23, 2019

Stick a Fork in O’Rourke by Conrad Black:

(From Wikipedia: Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour, KCSG is a Canadian-born British former newspaper publisher, author, and convicted felon. In 2007, Black was convicted on four counts of fraud in U.S. District Court in Chicago.)

The boutique candidate will quickly get eaten up by the media

If, as I wrote last week here, Joe Biden may save the Democratic party from a horrible debacle at the polls next year, Beto O’Rourke may be doing the whole process a good turn now. Biden, despite his efforts to masquerade as the vanguard of what is now called progressivism, is politically sane and, if nominated, might hold his shaggy legions back from holus-bolus embrace of the many suicide potions being offered to the Democratic contestants. To date, the most lethal intoxicants that have been extolled by some of the candidates are legalized infanticide, open borders, reparations to African and other minority Americans, nationalized health care, a fascistic and Luddite green policy, and top personal-tax rates above 70 per cent. So far, this cocktail, which is such an assault on the sanity of an electorate that it could reduce the Democrats to splinters, has scared off Michael Bloomberg, Sherrod Brown, and Hillary Clinton (though she is probably contemplating her legal future with some well-founded consternation too).

But another candidate-benefactor is also in sight, and so hyperactive and in his way irresistible that it is hard to get him out of your sight. Beto O’Rourke is stoking up one the great bonfires of modern political history; he is a phenomenon of these strange times so unique that no one could have imagined him. Even the Trump-hating media, desperate to find a Democrat who can win, in despair at the collapse of the impeachment bubble, demoralized and hung over from pelagic overconsumption of sour Kool Aid, are taking a break from their sacred mission to destroy Trump. They are not turning their swords into ploughshares, but some sort of quasi-Biblical grace of change is occurring.

All of the Democratic candidates and the entire political process are being taken over and occupied by the invasion of the whole public space by Robert Francis O’Rourke. No one has ever heard or seen anything like this candidate: a hyperactive limb-flailing imbecile, babbling compulsively in a torrent of extremist nonsense barely couched in comprehensible syntax. No idea is too stupid to be endorsed in terms of absolute finality: “If we do not abolish all fossil fuels within twelve years, everything on the planet will be dead. The scientists are 100 percent united on this. Just as Americans of the past had to fight at Normandy, we have to fight this now, and save our planet.”

xxxxxx

Beto has asked, screamed and flailed, gesticulated, run long distances, and jumped through hoops for the attention he is about to get. Anyone who launches his campaign in Vanity Fair, the most vulgar magazine in the western world, has arrived at the gallows voluntarily ahead of the executioner. In a month, there will be nothing left of him but a few feathers floating in the spring air. And now for the emollient and curative aspect of the Beto moment. The national political media are a savage beast, and they are now an extremely vicious beast because they have been beaten badly by President Trump. They are going to have to cover his implicit exoneration and the intense questioning and in some cases indictments of those who manipulated them. The famished devouring of this delicious self-proffered victim will not sate their antagonisms or slake their blood-lust, but it will be a tasty sorbet, a textbook candidate demolition to show they can still do it when they get the target right. And there is nothing like a good clean public execution to calm everyone down.

With Beto under their belts, they will have the chance to deescalate with dignity, if not honor, as they prepare themselves for the president’s likely reelection.

But, on the ground, this is not the O'Rourke that Democrats in droves turned out to see since he announced.

Seems like a good time for a story about how Twitter cynicism about Beto’s campaign is very far away from the earnest reception he got in Iowa this weekendhttps://t.co/k4PQKvICWa

— Molly Hensley-Clancy (@mollyhc)March 18, 2019

From Molly Hensley-Clancy's BuzzFeed News story from Iowa:

O’Rourke’s entrance into the presidential race unleashed a wave of cynicism and hard-boiled skepticism on insider Twitter and cable news — the rough opposite of what his run against Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas elicited from the media last fall. There were groans on Twitter for everything from O’Rourke’s habit of jumping up on counters to his campaign website’s merchandise to a Vanity Fair cover story published the day before O’Rourke announced his run — summed up by a CJR reporter with, “why is he running this is so dumb.”

Across a breathtaking succession of stops throughout Iowa, from three different countertops, one podcast studio, and one truck bed, the first three days of O’Rourke’s campaign unfolded a world away. It wasn’t that Iowans hadn’t seen the skepticism about O’Rourke. It was that many of them didn’t much care. They saw an O’Rourke much closer to the one stormed across Texas, coming within a narrow margin of defeating Cruz.

They were entranced, they said, by his charisma, his oratory, and his particular style of campaigning — down-to-earth, personal, and relentlessly positive. Though few were willing to commit to voting for him, as is common this early in Iowa, many said they were convinced that he could deliver on the promise of unity that he offered at every campaign stop.

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He stopped in 15 Iowa towns in the space of three days, a breakneck schedule for any candidate, and spent time in smaller, redder towns and counties that are rarely the first pick of presidential hopefuls. He often drove himself, instead of handing the wheel off to an aide. And after his stops in Iowa, instead of flying out of the Cedar Rapids airport and back to Washington — he no longer has a job as a representative there — O’Rourke drove himself east, to campaign in Wisconsin and Michigan.

O’Rourke has also responded to some early criticism with transparency atypical for a presidential campaign. On his second day of campaigning, he admitted that a throwaway joke about his wife raising their children was “flip” and said it would not be repeated.

Reporting from New Hampshire, Todd Gillman had a very good piece for the Dallas Morning News.

A snag in@BetoORourke's pitch to end divisiveness: voters only want a unifier from their own sidehttps://t.co/j0dJHMFYn5

— Todd J. Gillman (@toddgillman)March 23, 2019

KEENE, N.H. — Beto O’Rourke has positioned himself as a voice of reason and healing in a time of rage and rancor. And among the students and local Democrats waiting to see him the other night at Keene State College in New Hampshire, hunger ran deep for precisely that sort of message.

“I don't want somebody who’s wishy-washy in the middle — la-la-la let's unite the country. But I want somebody who's not tearing us apart,” said Roshan Swope, 52, a kindergarten teacher from nearby Harrisville. “I'm looking for somebody whose personality and integrity can make some people in the middle, on either side, pause and give them a second glance.”

That is the niche that O’Rourke, a former three-term congressman from El Paso, is striving to fill.

In a large and growing Democratic field, he’s not the most hard-driving ideological champion, nor the wonkiest or most creative on policy. His pitch, to paraphrase, is that he’s a consensus-seeker.

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There is a definite market for this in the Democratic primary. Voters on the left ache for an end to the incivility of the Trump era. Many put a higher premium on consensus-seeking than on vehemence on particular issues.

Still, it’s a rare primary candidate in either party who manages to set the pace in fundraising, and maintain such buzz, by preaching harmony and collaboration.

“It's hard to get elected in a 50-50 split country if you're not willing to give on some things,” said Swope. “I don't know that anybody can unite the country right now. But I'm looking for somebody that has some kind of — I don't want to say charm because that sounds so superficial — but somebody who captivates people and then has some solid ideas and ideals, without being completely polarizing.”

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But it’s often the case that when voters and politicians say they want unity, what they really mean is they wish the other side would come around to their way of thinking.

This was the central premise and tension of O'Rourke's Senate campaign. His approach and rhetoric as a candidate for president is precisely the same as what he did in his Senate campaign. Many voters want to hear a candidate who offers a promise of healing and listening and mutual respect and civility and consensus-building, even if it is unlikely to prove persuasive to very many people on the other side of the political aisle. O'Rourke's 254-county strategy yielded little in the way of tangible results in the scores of rural counties that were its ostensible target, but it succeeded in crafting a very appealing persona for O'Rourke as a candidate that helped him come within 2.6 points of defeating Cruz.

What we have learned from the first dozen days of his presidential campaign is that O'Rourke is intending to run a national campaign identical in its message and its go-everywhere strategy to his Senate campaign, even in a much more treacherous and hostile Democratic primary and media environment and in a country that, it turns out, is even bigger than Texas.

So far, he has proved that he is game, that he's got game, emerging from his road trip with his voice hoarse but intact, and without slipping or falling from any of the perches to which he has ascended.

With no day job, the Beto O'Rourke's breakneck pace of campaign stops is driving some of his competitors nutshttps://t.co/cEggrYJE3P

— POLITICO (@politico)March 20, 2019

From Siders:

Still, it is so early in the year that O’Rourke almost certainly cannot maintain the constant crush of media attention that has accompanied his first week. Sitting lawmakers running for president can — and do — drive coverage by introducing bills, and debates starting this summer will offer abundant break-out opportunities. Biden, who is widely expected to run, will likely draw significant attention from O’Rourke following any announcement of a campaign.

Asked if he could maintain his own pace, O’Rourke said, “We’ll see. It is extraordinarily energizing to be doing this … It’s thrilling to me.”

For Jeff Roe, who was Cruz’s chief strategist, O’Rourke’s early run is familiar. He said that if O’Rourke remains tied to the road, it will prevent him from advancing any public storyline other than that he is a road warrior — a narrative that will eventually grow old.

“Coming out of the gate, for the first couple weeks, it’s probably OK,” Roe said. “But this is all he has … he’s in a constant sprint to find himself.”

But this is the central conceit of O'Rourke's Odyssey: That his campaign is a journey in search of himself, in search of America, and in search of how, through what he learns and communicates along the way, he can be successfully elected and successfully serve as president of the United States.

O'Rourke will bring his campaign to Austin for a Saturday night rally on Congress Avenue below the state Capitol that will follow a morning "kickoff" rally in his hometown of El Paso and a 5 p.m. rally in Houston.