On Tuesday, President Donald Trump will deliver his State of the Union address, Gov. Greg Abbott will deliver his State of the State speech, and Beto O’Rourke will reveal his current state of mind to Oprah Winfrey in an interview in New York’s Times Square.

When it airs, in the weeks that follow on the Oprah Winfrey Network (Feb. 16, 8 p.m.) and in a podcast (Feb. 27) as one of "Oprah's Super Soulful Conversations," O’Rourke's interview will be the most public appearance of the former congressman from El Paso since he somehow barreled out of a losing campaign for the U.S. Senate last November into what post-election polls indicated was the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates for 2020 alongside old-shoe septuagenarians Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.

In the interim, O’Rourke has done some solo roaming in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico. He talked to folks at bars, cafes, museums and classrooms about their lives and the future of the country, obliquely looking for an answer about whether he should run for president, but without the self-defeating clamor and crush of media that would have inevitably ensued if he had done it in more of a public way than he did.

And then, as is his wont — he does have a literature degree from Columbia University — he wrote about the travels and posted it on social media, in this case on Medium, to the mockery of some who considered his earnest quest an act of white privilege or emo self-indulgence or Kerouacian quackery. But he seemed to find what he was looking for, a reason to run for president if that's what he wanted.

"Over the course of the trip I’d gone from thinking about myself and how stuck I was, to being moved by the people I’d met," he wrote in his last dispatch from Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. "Forgot myself in being with others."

One could imagine him repeating those words to Oprah, or to the American people.

Heading into the 2020 election cycle, Beto O'Rourke is at 46, in the description of Bethany Albertson, a University of Texas political psychologist, the "lurking front-runner."

It is not an outrageous claim.

The New York Times has called him the "wild card" of the Democratic race.

"Beto O’Rourke Weighs Presidential Campaign From an Unusual Position: Front-Runner," read the headline on Wednesday's Wall Street Journal story.

The story included a telling detail: "New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, during her first swing through Iowa as a presidential candidate, told a private dinner of state lawmakers that Mr. O’Rourke was selfish for not sharing any of his 2018 fundraising haul with down-ballot Democrats, according to two people in attendance. An aide to Ms. Gillibrand disputed the characterization of the conversation."

Yesterday's flavor?

These past weeks have been treacherous ones for O'Rourke, accustomed to the adoration of Democrats everywhere during his sometimes ecstatic run against U.S. Sen. Ted. Cruz, R-Texas. As his political persona went from electric to acoustic on Nov. 6, a growing din could be heard from partisans of a gathering field of rival Democrats keen to remind party activists that before he was last year's sensation, O'Rourke was a relatively obscure middle-of-the-road congressman, who, until Donald Trump reset the bar, had no claim to being ready to be president, a threshold no one thought he needed to meet when he was challenging Cruz.

Then there was a much-cited mid-January interview with The Washington Post on his home turf, in which O'Rourke seemed to lack answers about the border — the border he waxed so eloquently about during the campaign: "When it comes to many of the biggest policy issues facing the country today, O’Rourke’s default stance is to call for a debate — even on issues related to the border and immigration, which he has heavily emphasized in videos posted to Facebook and Instagram over the past month."

A few days later, in a front-page story in The New York Times, some Texas Democrats expressed frustration with O'Rourke for not backing Gina Ortiz Jones in her razor-thin loss in November, to U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, R-Helotes, out of his friendship for Hurd, whose cross-country March 2017 road trip with O'Rourke had really been the test run for the social media acumen and post-partisan élan that defined his Senate campaign.

"Politics is about timing and showing up," said Texas political strategist Mark McKinnon, the co-creator, co-producer and one of the on-air ringmasters of "The Circus," Showtime's ongoing, real-time political documentary series. "The question for Beto is whether there is still lightning in his bottle."

"The national media and Democrats' love affair with Beto is already starting to turn," McKinnon said. "Running for president is an acid bath that makes running for the Senate seem like a soothing sauna. Beto still has a lot of juice. And so he’s got be thinking, `If I don’t use it, do I lose it?'"

In the "viciously quick" start of the 2020 nominating process, "it is stunning how quickly you can become yesterday’s flavor," observed Daron Shaw, a UT government professor.

For O'Rourke, the newfound contention around him might be a measure of his perceived potential.

"The criticism is emerging in part because he is this lurking front-runner, and he’s lurking in a very on-brand way," Albertson said. "If anybody is surprised by the way O'Rourke is approaching his decision about whether to run for president, they shouldn't be. This is completely consistent with the way he’s campaigned and the way he’s entered the public dialogue."

"On a more elemental level, the question he is going to have to face is not ‘why didn’t you give to down-ballot candidates’ or ‘why are you hanging around with Will Hurd,’" Albertson said. "The attack he is going to face is a thin legislative record."

A light résumé

Barack Obama was in the Senate less than O'Rourke's six years in the House, when he ran for president, but he had written a remarkable memoir, and he would make history as the first black president.

Julián Castro, a former mayor of San Antonio and secretary of housing and urban development in the Obama administration, who announced his candidacy for president Jan. 12 in the neighborhood where he grew up in San Antonio, also has what would historically be considered a light résumé for a presidential candidate. But O’Rourke’s — with three terms on the El Paso City Council and three terms in Congress — is a lot lighter.

"But Julián Castro isn’t half, or a fourth or a tenth of the campaigner Beto is," Albertson said.

"Is he waiting too long? I don’t know," Albertson said of O'Rourke. "I can see it working out just fine."

"He is completely fine," agreed Jeff Roe, who ran Cruz's Senate campaign and his 2016 presidential campaign.

"He doesn’t need to move until the end of the first quarter," said Roe of O'Rourke. "Every day into April that he hasn’t moved is bad. Oprah saves the first 60 days for him. Let the others punch out a bit and then assess."

March will come in with a lion for O'Rourke with the premier at South by Southwest of “Running with Beto,” a full-length documentary by Austin filmmaker David Modigliani, whose crew was embedded with O'Rourke for the last year of the campaign — a perfect segue to a sequel.

"Because he’s such a transcendent, once-in-a-generation candidate, he can come in late and be fine," said Nate Lerner, the Brooklyn political activist who, without ever having met or laid eyes on O'Rourke in person, launched Beto for President, one of two national draft efforts. "If anything, it's an advantage because he's throwing everybody for a loop by not letting them in on what he's doing. I mean, nobody has any idea what Beto's going to do."

A losing candidacy

For a losing candidacy, O'Rourke's 2.6-point loss to Cruz was a stunning success. Eschewing PAC money, he raised more money than any U.S. Senate candidate in history. He built a national following.

But there are Texas campaign professionals, both Democratic and Republican, who believe that O'Rourke missed a real opportunity to actually defeat Cruz.

He was no match for Cruz in debates. He allowed the Cruz campaign to paint him as a far-left, open borders socialist, without real rebuttal. He resisted attacking Cruz, and when he did it was halting and then amateurish. He could have had the finest ad talent in the nation and instead talked into his iPhone. Despite traveling to all 254 counties, the centerpiece of his campaign, he failed to significantly narrow the gap in rural Texas, and he didn't run the table the way he might have with Hispanic voters on the border and elsewhere.

Still, he ran on his gut and his gifts as a campaigner, and he came very close. So far, he has made no apparent moves to staff up for a national campaign.

"The honest answer is he hasn’t made up his mind whether or not he’s going to run, and I don’t think he would feel right asking people to put their lives on hold to sign up for a journey he hasn't committed to," said Bob Moore, former editor of the El Paso Times, who has observed O'Rourke's political rise.

If he runs, Moore said, one should expect a candidate and a campaign very much in the mold of his Senate run.

"I’ve come to figure that he was the first millennial. He was just way ahead of his time," Moore said. "He’s used to letting it all hang out there, warts and all. That’s just who he is. There was some of that criticism during the campaign that he was just too authentic and I wish he’d quit being himself for a while. That was the secret of his success and to expect him to back off, I don’t get where that criticism comes from. He is who he is.

"People can project onto you what they want to project," Moore said. "That was really his whole campaign. He was deliberately vague at times, in part because he didn’t have all the answers, but also because he wanted people to be free in part to sort of project their best hopes onto him, sort of what Obama did in 2007 and 2008."

Obama echoes?

The similarities between O'Rourke and Obama in their political appeal and approach are obvious.

Throughout this recent interlude, David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist and senior adviser, has kept a warm and watchful eye on O'Rourke's progress, tweeting last week: "Who knows where he will wind up on this presidential race? But it is clear that @BetoORourke is taking the same unconventional-and intriguing-approach as he did in the Texas Senate race that made him a national figure."

But for those on the left, particularly Sanders' supporters, who considered the Obama presidency a grave disappointment on policy, O'Rourke threatens to be the inheritor of Obama's political mantle.

"They see someone who can make centrist bland Democratic policies cool," Elizabeth Bruenig, a Texan who is an opinion writer for The Washington Post, said on a December edition of the Brooklyn-based left-wing podcast Chapo Trap House.

"I think it's important for the left to understand that this guy doesn't share your politics," Bruenig said.

"Beto's interesting," Shaw said. "He's not quite Obama, but he's genuinely a little different and a little orthogonal, which is I think why he scares a lot of the more conventional candidates."

Orthogonal? Sideways to the customary order.

"I think he's orthogonal to the usual left-right in the Democratic party," Shaw explained. "All of us are thinking of a Bernie-to-Biden continuum and where do you put Beto on that? That continuum is irrelevant to him."

Instead of providing a checklist of policy prescription, Shaw said that what O'Rourke is offering is, "Here's an individual we like and we trust and he tells us what politics is about now."

In manner and approach, Shaw said, O'Rourke is an especially good fit for the Iowa caucuses that begin the nominating process precisely a year from now.

"Heck, how hard is a 99-county strategy once you’ve done a 254-country strategy," Shaw said.

Bryce Smith, the 27-year-old Democratic Party chairman in Dallas County, Iowa, who watched O'Rourke's performance in the Senate race and his ability to bring out new voters, agrees.

"I would equate him to being a kind of new age campaign leader," said Smith, who owns a bowling alley in Adel, a booming Des Moines suburb. "The things he brought to his Senate campaign, I could see him bringing new twists and new ideas to a national campaign that would change the dynamics not just of the caucus or the primary but the race for president in general.

"He has a good approach," he said. "I would call it that kind of Midwestern voice of reason that can connect to everyone regardless of race or income or gender and be able to talk to them in common terms but then relate it back to politics. He is willing to find common ground."

Social media

Shannon McGregor, a University of Utah communication professor who studies the intersection of politics and social media, found that in the first year of the Trump presidency, 87 percent of Trump's tweets — mostly those that attacked the news media and other perceived enemies — generated news stories. By contrast, in the first year of his second term only 3 percent of Obama's tweets generated news stories, "even though we thought of him as the social media president."

For O'Rourke the medium was Facebook Live, and virtually every event during the Senate campaign, from town halls to folding his laundry and getting his hair cut, was livestreamed.

For the length and breadth of his campaign, O'Rourke and those around him were a constant, natural, intimate presence for a vast audience of supporters.

Even after the campaign ended, a few days after Thanksgiving, McGregor said, "it was something like a couple of hundred thousand people looked at a Facebook Live of him and his wife cooking a chicken dinner."

"Our research in this area shows that if candidates share a personal story, or family stories, or what could be more intimate than watching your family cook dinner, that it develops this sense that you know who they are, and you have a relationship with them, even though you never come in physical contact with them, and this can increase the likelihood of voting for them. And because that is on these large platforms, that is certainly scalable to a national level if he decides to run for president," she said.

For all their obvious differences, what Trump and O'Rourke share is an ability to make a direct connection with voters with barely a skeletal staff and almost none of the traditional campaign infrastructure. All Trump needed was a plane, a place to hold a rally and a cable audience. For O'Rourke, it was an SUV, a room and an iPhone.

Often, for O'Rourke during the campaign, it seemed more about the journey than the destination.

"He loves hearing people’s stories. It gives him oxygen and energy. He just absorbs it and layers it all together into really great messages," said Cari Marshall, a communications consultant in Austin, who went to see O'Rourke at a small fundraiser at the Austin Motel the day after he announced for the Senate and ended up working as a full-time volunteer for the duration.

“I love that he is doing it his own way. I encourage him to take his time," she said of his decision on a presidential run.

Whatever happens, she said, "It‘s been so nice to get back to the Medium posts and his lovely thought process."

"I know we can do it," O'Rourke wrote from Taos Pueblo. "I can’t prove it, but I feel it and hear it and see it in the people I meet and talk with. I saw it all over Texas these last two years, I see it every day in El Paso. It’s in Kansas and Oklahoma. Colorado and New Mexico too. It’s not going to be easy to take the decency and kindness we find in our lives and our communities and apply it to our politics, to all the very real challenges we face. ... But a big part of it has got to be just listening to one another, learning each other’s stories, thinking `whatever affects this person, affects me.' We’re in this together, like it or not. The alternative is to be in this apart, and that would be hell."

"I don’t know if he’ll run or not. He probably doesn’t know or not," said Tzatzil LeMair, who works at a cross-cultural advertising agency in Austin and, like Marshall, immersed herself in the Senate campaign as a volunteer and founder of Latinas for Beto.

“Personally, I think it's a no-brainer," said LeMair, who is now part of the leadership team at Draft Beto. "It's not an easy decision, but he might not get another chance. I really hope he runs."