"Beto O’Rourke on Long, Hard Road" in Time Magazine, 5--23
Beto O’Rourke Is on
a Long, Hard Road
By Nash
Jenkins for TIME Magazine, Benjamin Rasmussen,
photographer,May 22, 2018
On a dusty road in southwestern
Texas, Beto O’Rourke leans out the window of the Ford Expedition he’s driving and
mutters, “You gonna let me pass you, state police?” He speeds ahead of the
cruiser while chewing an empanada.
In the past seven days, the
45-year-old Democratic Congressman has clocked nearly a thousand miles across
the state. Tonight, after a town hall in Uvalde, an hour away, he gets to go
home.
Small towns have been
O’Rourke’s favored terrain since he launched a bid to unseat Republican Ted
Cruz as the Lone Star State’s junior Senator nearly 14 months ago.
History says O’Rourke is an underdog in November:
Texas chose President
Trump by nearly 10 percentage points in 2016 and hasn’t sent a
Democrat to statewide office since Ann Richards was elected governor in 1990.
But O’Rourke, a former punk-rock bassist who has spent three terms in the U.S.
House, talks more about the future.
The town hall meeting.
Benjamin Rasmussen for TIME
“The country had come to
this cross-roads,” he says. “We were going to be either a country of walls and
Muslim bans and the press as the enemy of the people—all this mean sh-t, all
this pettiness and paranoia trying to make us afraid of one another—or we were
going to be something better.”
Cruz is a dogmatic
conservative who once battled the party establishment, then embraced the
President after finishing second to him in the 2016 GOP primary. O’Rourke is an
Irish American with a Hispanic nickname (Beto, a diminutive for his first name,
Robert, is a child-hood sobriquet that stuck) who spends several hours a week
practicing his Spanish. He calls for a single-payer health care system and
legalized marijuana
He has certainly
galvanized the grassroots left. In the first quarter of 2018, O’Rourke raked in
$6.7 million, more than twice the haul of the Cruz campaign and his allied
super PACs, which is a fund-raising force in its own right.
(Cruz pulled in $143 million
to his campaign and allied super PACs in 2016, and the two candidates have
roughly the same amount of cash on hand.) A mid-April Quinnipiac
University poll found the race to be a near dead heat, though independent
analysts call the Democrat a long shot.
O’Rourke is betting that it
runs through the hinterlands. He has spent more time than any other Democrat in
recent memory visiting towns across Texas, including all 254 counties. He says
he sees two currents of disaffection that work in his favor: Democrats
are eager for new leadership.
And some Republicans don’t like
the GOP’s direction under Trump. “I mostly vote Republican in national
elections, but I’m so disgusted with what’s taking place,” a 72-year-old cattle
rancher and self–identified conservative named Bill Martin said after
O’Rourke’s town hall in Carrizo Springs. “The body politic is kind of like the
human body.
The liberal faction represents
the heart, the conservative faction represents the mind, and the body needs
both to stay alive.” Martin said he was leaning toward voting for the Democrat.
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