Write no one off, count no one out, take no one for granted.
This is a familiar refrain in Beto’s speeches to anyone who has followed him for a while, but the words took on new meaning this week when Beto returned to the campaign trail after taking 10 day off to grieve and coordinate with his community following the August 3rd shooting in El Paso, the largest terrorist act against the Latinx community in US history.
As Beto indicated in a speech on August 15, he would not be returning to a conventional campaign focusing primarily on Iowa and NH but would put his energy instead into those communities terrorized by the current occupant of the White House:
In the space of five days he went to Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri in a tour compared to Bobby Kennedy’s 1967/68 poverty tour – hence the picture of RFK at the top of this diary. The resemblance between the two men is not just physical but ideological, as Will Bunch writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
To watch [Beto] march in El Paso funeral processions or hugging devastated Latinx immigrant spouses in Morton, Mississippi, Robert Francis O’Rourke is evoking — maybe consciously, maybe not — the last truly great American presidential campaign, the tragically brief 1968 effort of Robert Francis Kennedy.
Fifty-one years ago, RFK ran arguably the last major campaign that was driven not by focus groups or consultants but […] instinct and emotion. That meant wading into thick crowds in Los Angeles’ forgotten barrios and courageously announcing Martin Luther King’s assassination to a black crowd in Indianapolis that could have turned hostile but was instead awed. And it meant defying his advisers at a key juncture in the race to visit the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.
[…]
What Beto O’Rourke is doing right now is a response to both the existential horror of Trumpism but also the […] idea that you can […] pretend not to notice the world is on fire. People are mad as hell and Beto is the one who’s chugging from the steel flask of truth and putting it all out there right at the moment we need to hear it.
Whether visiting the families of the 700 chicken plant workers in Mississippi detained in a raid by ICE or the memorial to the victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that saw 100-300 African Americans killed and over 10,000 homes and businesses destroyed in what can only be described as an American pogrom, Beto has been fearless in denouncing not only America’s white supremacist origins but also its continued racism.
This is not new. Injustice and especially racial injustice have been central themes of Beto’s campaign from the start. But what has changed – or better yet, what’s being noticed more – is his willingness to say that the principal instigator of racial violence in the US is the man sitting in the White House:
So how do we combat this crisis with a President fanning the flames of hate for his own political survival and a press corps still too timid to do much more than label his remarks “unprecedented”? This is where the quote at the top of the diary comes into play.
Write no one off, count no one out, take no one for granted.
Beto’s gone to traditionally red states and even to the reddest venues in those states, like a gun show in Canton, Arkansas to talk about gun control. Will he win many converts to his proposal for banning assault weapons and implementing a mandatory buy-back program at these stops? Probably not. But he will win some hearts and minds for mandatory background checks and possibly enough to make an agricultural district or state suffering under Trump’s trade war competitive in 2020.
More importantly, being there, showing up communicates something all but forgotten in contemporary politics: that someone you disagree with – even vehemently – does not have to be your mortal enemy. McConnell’s take-no-prisoners approach has been so destructive to political discourse in the US because it has made vanquishing one’s political opponents (with a fistful of rubles, if need be) more important than maintaining some sense of common purpose (like protecting our election system from foreign invasion).
This brings me to my final point. Beto is a storyteller. I will confess to having been skeptical about this tendency. In an interview with The Atlantic’s Edward Isaac-Dovere, he explains that the details of proposals – of which he has many – don’t necessarily resonate with voters:
“I talk about a $500 billion permanent education fund and $20 to $25 billion that spins off every year that’s invested in addressing the gap in equity funding for majority-minority schools. Does that connect with you? I don’t know—maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.”
Beto has at this point issued an impressive roster of proposals on everything from immigration, climate change, voting rights and LGBTQ rights to small business investment, veteran’s affairs, education, gun control, healthcare, and social security benefits. On Thursday, he published a lengthy policy statement “21st Century Labor Contract” that has received rave reviews from labor activists and policy experts on what it means for improving wages, ensuring equality, and enshrining collective bargaining rights, even in right-to-work states. On Friday he issued a proposal on how to combat domestic terrorism.
He still, however, places a high premium on stories, which he sees as crucial to expanding both America’s collective memory and consciousness. That approach seems to be striking a chord. Following his visit to the Greenwood District in Tulsa known as Black Wall Street, where hundreds of African Americans were slaughtered, Beto wrote up a summary of his visit and and of the stories he heard. Here is how Nehemiah D. Frank responded to Beto’s post in a remarkable op ed in The Black Wall Street Times entitled “Beto O’Rourke Is the Anti-Racist Presidential Candidate”:
During political campaigning-season, most politicians will come to your city, town, or community and give a little speech. Many give off the impression that they care about your community as much as you do…What usually happens is: Once they leave your town, believing they’ve secured your vote, that candidate is headed towards the next municipality to implement that same strategic plan they performed on you methodically…For 2020 Presidential aspirant Beto O’Rourke, Black Wall Street wasn’t just an afterthought…Mr. O’Rourke’s actions in the taking of time to write his findings of our narratives, of pain and resilience, illustrate to me that not only is he a thoughtful and considerate presidential candidate but that the delivered accounts from some of my community’s leaders unquestionably had a strong impression upon him.
I’m far too cynical to think that stories can heal old wounds or mend our fractured republic but I do believe in the power of words to convince those that are still of an open mind that if we continue down this path of demonization of the other we are all doomed.
Take the time to read up on Beto’s proposals and donate to or volunteer for his campaign. His stories from the campaign trail on Medium are also worth a look.
I’ll close with another iconic picture of Bobby Kennedy. Uncanny resemblance, no?