At the very least, the Beto O'Rourke candidacy for president is certain to be the inspiration for a lot of humor. Abe Greenwald of Commentary magazine already labeled him as the Seinfeld candidate and that it is a "Campaign About Nothing, Not that there's anything wrong with that."
No, nothing wrong with that as long as Beto doesn't turn into a demagogue. The good news is that Jack Shafer, the Politico senior media writer, assures us that is unlikely. The reason, Shafer asserted on Thursday, is that O'Rourke is probably what he calls a "semigogue" in "The Semigoguery of Beto O’Rourke."
If O’Rourke promised to seize all the tendrils of power, encouraged race or class war, blocked dissent or promised the impossible, we wouldn’t hesitate to call him a demagogue, which he isn’t. President O’Rourke is more likely to host the bands from the Vans Warped Tour in the Rose Garden then he is to order the 3rd Infantry Regiment to dissolve Congress at bayonet point. Think of him instead as a semigogue, a temperate politician who exploits the naiveté of the mob with his hollow yet passionate appeals to goodness, light and possibility. A demagogue traffics in fear. A semigogue peddles hope. A demagogue hoses gasoline onto a fire. A semigogue pours milk or maybe a craft brew. A demagogue bangs the table with a closed fist. A semigogue talks with fluttery hands. Because he never issues genocidal orders or establishes totalitarian regimes, the semigogue can also escape our deep scrutiny. Instead, he lulls his targets into political sleep with his eternal kindness, his overdone decency and his endless speeches.
So is just being a "semigogue" a good thing?
It wasn’t until I read transcripts of his speeches in which he made incessant references to trusting one another, listening to one another and working together that I started to doubt his rhetorical radiance. Like most pop lyrics divorced from the music, O’Rourke’s speeches—given in that weirdly hypnotic poetry-reading voice—die when read on the page.
... All O’Rourke has demonstrated so far is that his formula raises money, earns flattering notices in the press and fails to deliver enough votes. Semigoguery is a better technique, it seems, for making friends than it is for winning elections.
Hmmm... Maybe just an annoying thing.
And now we finish up on semigogue O'Rourke with this Seinfeld conclusion by Greenwald at Commentary.
The thing about Seinfeld is that Jerry and his aimless friends were ultimately revealed as despicable because they had no focus beyond themselves. That was the key to the show’s dark humor. Beto, on the other hand, gets his teeth cleaned before an audience of millions and doesn’t expect the joke to be on him. Sometimes, what appears to be an aura just turns out to be ego.
