The liberal media have gone from boosterism to bust on Beto O'Rourke. The national hero running against Ted Cruz is getting dismissed as yesterday's news, at least by some. Washington Post TV critic Hank Stuever let Beto have it in a review of the admiring new HBO documentary Running With Beto. He began: "Quick, before his presidential ambitions vaporize completely, let’s rewind to a happier point in the ascension story of Beto O’Rourke."
The film shows a moment when "the universe loosens and the hoped-for mojo bursts through. The crowds get larger; an excitement takes hold; the national media develops a crush."
But sadly, he wrote, "the film can’t help but feel outdated and already archival. Whatever passion the 46-year-old stirred in his home state (and beyond) has since morphed this spring into a series of missteps on the national stage as O’Rourke, rejuvenated by solo road trips and the privilege to soul-search, became one of many, many Democratic hopefuls for president."
Everything in 2019 has apparently been a thud:
The Vanity Fair magazine profile of him in the April issue — with its Annie Leibovitz photographs and an uncomfortably self-aggrandizing cover quote (“Man, I’m just born to be in it”) — landed with a thud. O’Rourke’s habit of standing on diner counters to rouse Iowa voters seemed more ill-mannered than casually cool. The poll numbers turned south.
Political commentators and cultural critics have already seized on this rare occurrence of Gen-X hubris in action, recognizing the great sin of any Fugazi-loving, progressive bro who used to be in his own failed rock band: Without taking a dime of PAC money or corporate campaign contributions, O’Rourke has been recast as a sellout, a poser, a trustafarian trying to relate to the common folk. All those surprise pitfalls into which he unwittingly pitfell, simply by trying too hard, believing in himself, reading too deeply and empathizing too conspicuously. Shame on him!
Stuever confesses that turning on poor Beto this way isn't fair.
How is this possibly fair? It isn't, but it remains a flawed trait of O'Rourke's (and my) generation — to crap on one another's hopes and dreams the moment we sense a calculated move, a phony marketing plan or the stench of true politics. And so it happens that Gen X's political legacy will instead belong to the likes of former House speaker Paul D. Ryan and his love of self-determined capitalism above all else, or to newly sworn Supreme Court justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett Kavanagh, champing at the bit to roll back much of the social progress that once stirred hope in people rather than fill them with reactionary zeal. It's so messed up.
Anyone who has followed the last three years of nuclear-winter-negative coverage of Donald Trump has to be amazed when they start discussing how Trump’s potential presidential opponents are unfairly getting a bad press. It’s like complaining someone took ten percent of the sugar off the Sugar Frosted Flakes.
