Beto Is Ridiculous. But It Might Work

It’s hard for presidential candidates not to lapse eventually into self-parody. Beto O’Rourke is breaking the mold by actively seeking it out.

The unsuccessful and now unemployed 2018 Texas senatorial candidate has embarked upon a rambling tour of the West that he is cataloging with beatnik-like journal entries on his encounters and feelings.

If Beto runs, he’ll be the first presidential candidate to eschew a listening tour to go find himself instead; the first presidential candidate not to prep his incipient campaign with position papers but sentence-fragment jottings; the first presidential candidate to court mockery as a conscious political strategy.

As Mario Cuomo once famously said, politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Assuming he’s going to run, O’Rourke is campaigning in prose; it just happens to be the prose of Jack Kerouac.

Credit where it’s due: O’Rourke’s entries on the website Medium are evocative of the open road and the West, those most American scenes and themes.