On Feb. 19, 2008, Barack Obama launched his Texas primary campaign with an afternoon town hall on San Antonio’s West Side, at Guadalupe Plaza.

By that point in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama had vaulted past initial front-runner Hillary Clinton and was on the verge of taking a commanding delegate lead.

At the same time, his surprising success had intensified media and voter scrutiny over his relative youth (46 at the time) and inexperience (a mere three years in the U.S. Senate).

Political observers knew Obama radiated charisma and could, on command, deliver a stem-winder. But they wondered if he was ready to assume the leadership of the free world.

Obama addressed that question in San Antonio, recounting how the experts all believed that 2008 was too soon for him, that he needed to wait and get some legislative seasoning.

“People want to boil all the hope out of me and then maybe I’ll be ready in 30 years,” Obama sneered.

That quip spoke to Obama’s instinctive understanding that the political window for any presidential hopeful opens unexpectedly — often at inconvenient times — and it can close in the blink of a Super PAC donor’s eye.

That brings us to Beto O’Rourke, the lame-duck congressman from El Paso, who just might be the pre-eminent political star in the Democratic constellation, less than two weeks after dropping a remarkably close (2.6 percent) race to U.S. Sen Ted Cruz and recording more votes (in excess of 4 million) than any Democrat in Texas history.

For O’Rourke’s passionate loyalists, the heartbreak over his loss was softened by an already swelling chorus of calls for him to launch a 2020 presidential run.

By this reckoning, a close loss to Cruz constituted more than a moral victory; it was actually the preferred outcome, because it freed up O’Rourke to immediately go presidential without having to treat the Senate like a bus stop and without sacrificing his image as a political phenom.

One hitch is that O’Rourke has never indicated that he wants to be president. In fact, he told the Express-News back in May that if he lost to Cruz, the Senate bid would be his final political campaign.

“We’re putting all the chips on 2018,” he said.

Late in the Senate campaign, as his national profile grew, he repeatedly said he would not be a candidate for president in 2020.

Only O’Rourke can decide if he wants to put himself and his family through another punishing political obstacle course so soon after the last one. Only he knows whether the presidency holds any appeal for him.

This much, however, is clear: If he wants to be president, the time is now. He’ll never get a better opportunity than this one.

If Obama had taken the “sensible” course and stayed out in 2008, Hillary Clinton would have cruised to the Democratic nomination and almost certainly defeated John McCain in the general election. Obama would have been sidelined at least eight years, and it’s hard to know how his message would have played as a first-time presidential candidate in 2016.

O’Rourke has the eyes of the political world on him right now. By 2024 or 2028, he could be a faint memory. (Just ask President Bobby Jindal.)

A Morning Consult/Politico poll released last week had O’Rourke third among 20 prospective Democratic candidates, at 8 percent; ahead of prominent hopefuls such as Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker. He trailed only Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, both of whom will be pushing 80 in 2020 and neither of whom is a certainty to run.

Granted, any poll this early in the presidential preseason means very little. But it does suggest that O’Rourke would enter the race with a tangible base of support.

Once he enters the race (if he enters the race), his retail political skills and fundraising prowess will instantly elevate him above most of the Democratic field.

“The fervent following he has nationally, no one compares to him on their side, no one does,” said Jeff Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager, on the night that his candidate escaped with a narrow victory over O’Rourke.

“He is in a league of his own in the Democratic Party, and if he doesn’t use that to run for president, then I don’t know what you do with it.”

It’s possible, even likely, that O’Rourke himself doesn’t know what to do with it. Even as he recovers from campaign exhaustion, however, he has hinted that he might be re-evaluating his 2018-or-bust pledge on the campaign trail.

In an emotional Nov. 11 email to his followers, O’Rourke said he already missed the energy of the Senate campaign and added that he wanted “to be part of the best way forward for this country.”

Four days later, he blogged about a morning run in the D.C. snow, with impressionistic turns of phrase and this coy conclusion: “The sleet stinging my face, I wondered if the winds had changed too.”

Plenty of political watchers are wondering the same thing.

Gilbert Garcia is a columnist covering the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | ggarcia@express-news.net | Twitter: @gilgamesh470