The would-be slayer of Ted Cruz has seen his 2020 star fall sharply over the past four months. But like his father, he knows that sometimes it pays to be a long shot.
EL PASO, Texas—In 1998, in the closing days of the race for county judge here, Pat O’Rourke sensed a shift in the electorate. “I know we’re in the game,” he told theas he drew within 7 percentage points of the front-runner in the race for his old job. “You can feel it on the street corners.” His son felt it, too, watching his father’s commanding performance in a debate that year. He was “so thoughtful and forthright,” Beto O’Rourke told me at his home on a recent July morning.
Then Beto, too, saw his prospects fade. He is now polling at about 3 percent nationally and raised a dispiriting $3.6 million from April through June, less money in three months than he raised in the first day of his campaign in March. Beto O’Rourke’s prominence in the Democratic Party came so suddenly that he began contemplating a presidential campaign only late last year. He is still assembling an organization months after most of his competitors had apparatuses in place.
His father, Beto O’Rourke said, “just placed a priority on being with people where they were, and trying to make sure there was no interference, and it was just really him … just never met a stranger, never blew anybody off.” Where O’Rourke apologized for his past arrest for DUI, his father abstained from alcohol entirely each year from New Year’s Day to St Patrick’s Day. Then, as Uhlig put it, “he would go out and just get blitzed.”
“You know, I’d like to think that he would be proud,” O’Rourke replied. His dad, he said, “found total joy in serving others. And, to whatever degree I can emulate that and find that joy … I hope that I’m living up to the expectation that he set for me.” “I was painfully shy growing up, and it may have been a byproduct of my father’s gregariousness and the fact that he was in public life and in politics,” O’Rourke said at a small forum in El Paso in January, before he had decided to run for president. “And I can’t tell you how many election night parties, city council meetings, chamber of commerce events that [O’Rourke’s sister] Charlotte and I were dragged to. And my dad would say, ‘Hey, go say hello to Commissioner [Miguel] Solis.
Sitting on the hood of a car overlooking downtown El Paso and the U.S.-Mexico border that year, Pat O’Rourke—his hair scragglier than Beto’s, his voice as deep—described El Paso to Bill Moyers for CBS as “the natural land passage to economic opportunity.” But it could also be excruciating for a school-age child. A sample of headlines: “Sheriff calls O’Rourke a ‘jerk,’” “O’Rourke: Able administrator or rude personality?” And, of course, “Rubbergate.”
“You just don’t shoot heroin or snort heroin or smoke heroin and go to work five days, six days a week. You just can’t do it. It’s just not real world.” The two men, after several years apart, were now on a more even plane, Beto says, and he admired his father’s devotion to the city. One night, after Beto had moved back to his parents’ home from a family-owned apartment, he and his father shared leftovers and a bottle of wine in the backyard over a wide-ranging discussion “about life, what are we doing, how’s the family doing.”
Beto O’Rourke worried about the effect of a campaign on his three children, Ulysses, Molly and Henry. O’Rourke’s prolonged absences during the Senate race last year had taxed his family. At one point during, the documentary chronicling O’Rourke’s Senate campaign against Ted Cruz, his oldest son, Ulysses, who was 11 at the time, said he wished his dad was there to take him to school.
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