“A top adviser to Beto O’Rourke, Becky Bond, has split with his campaign,” BuzzFeed News reports.

“Bond, a longtime progressive activist and organizer known for her work on O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate bid against Republican Ted Cruz, left the campaign along with her deputy Zack Malitz.”

“The departures come as O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman, has sought to professionalize a campaign operation that was, in its earliest days, small and freewheeling. O’Rourke announced his run for the presidency less than a month ago.”

Politico: “O’Rourke’s cable absenteeism diverges with the omnipresence of other 2020 candidates, particularly South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whose media saturation strategy corresponds with his recent rise in polls and surprise early fundraising successes.”

Said O’Rourke: “We have held more town halls in the month and four days that we’ve been doing this than I think any other candidate, because meeting you eyeball to eyeball, to me, is so much more satisfying than being on cable TV and in a soundbite.”

He added: “At some point, I may have to give in and be on your television set, but right now I want to be with you in person.”

Wall Street Journal: “Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke and his wife, Amy, appear to have underpaid their 2013 and 2014 taxes by more than $4,000 combined because of an error in the way they reported their medical expenses.”

“They took deductions for those costs without regard to the limit that only allowed that break for medical and dental expenses above 10% of income for people their age. Had they not taken the nearly $16,000 in medical deductions, their taxable income would have been higher. In those years it would likely have been subject to the rates they were paying under the alternative minimum tax.”

Beto O’Rourke “released 10 years’ worth of tax returns Monday night, becoming the latest 2020 presidential contender to reveal information about his personal finances,” the Washington Post reports.

Politico: “Beto O’Rourke’s most distinctive policy position? To be determined. There’s no signature issue yet, no single policy proposal sparking his campaign. Convening crowds — and listening to them — is the central thrust of his early presidential bid. And one month into the race, even some of O’Rourke’s supporters are starting to worry about persistent criticism that the charismatic Texan is missing big policy ideas of his own.”

Politico: “By the time he left the state on Sunday, it was also clear that the euphoria that greeted O’Rourke’s entry into the race three weeks earlier has started to subside. The inevitable slog of competing in a packed Democratic primary is underway, and O’Rourke has not yet drawn the wave of national adulation from the left that his Senate run against Ted Cruz last year received.”

Beto O’Rourke’s campaign announced that he raised $9.4 million in the first quarter, 18 days after launching his 2020 bid.

O’Rourke raised an average of $520,000 per day, with 218,000 total donations.

Beto O’Rourke said he would require his Cabinet to hold monthly town hall meetings if he is elected president in 2020, CNN reports.

The former Texas congressman said he would sign an executive order on his first day in office requiring the town halls “to listen to you and to be accountable to you so that we deliver for you.”

Said O’Rourke: “Not a handpicked audience. Not a theatrical production. But a real, live, town hall meeting — not just to answer questions, but to be held accountable.”

First Read has some good observations from Beto O’Rourke’s campaign kickoff in El Paso over the weekend:

• He doesn’t use a Teleprompter.
• His campaign didn’t release speech excerpts.
• His campaign excels at building picturesque rally settings (also see his last stop in Austin).
• His speech covered the bases on policy (health care, education, climate change), clearly reacting to the earlier criticism that he had lacked policy specifics.
• His speech had a heavy emphasis on immigration and the border battle (“Let’s make sure that we never take another child from another mother after her most desperate and vulnerable moment”).
• And he made unity his other big theme (“Let’s agree, going forward, before we are anything else, we are Americans first”).

“Beto O’Rourke, christening his presidential campaign at a boisterous rally in his hometown, cast himself on Saturday as a crusader against moneyed interests that he said have corrupted America’s democracy and a president he accused of capitalizing on politics of “fear and division,'” Politico reports.

“In what amounted to his maiden stump speech — delivered at the first large-scale, structured event of his nascent campaign — O’Rourke’s populist progressive framing evoked similar appeals from rivals Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.”

Said O’Rourke: “This extraordinary, unprecedented concentration of wealth and power and privilege must be broken apart and opportunity must be shared with all.”

Dan Balz: “Democrats who spoke with members of O’Rourke’s team over the past few months said they found, between conversations late last year and more recently, a noticeable difference in his thinking. One Democratic strategist said that, in an early conversation, he got the sense that O’Rourke and his team were trying to decide whether they could run a presidential campaign largely as an extension of the Senate campaign.”

“By spring, such thoughts seemed to have disappeared.”

Said one Democrat: “He’s clear that this is at a totally different scale: the size and scope and intricacies. For him to be successful, he has to be the best candidate he can be, which means the most professional team around him.”

“Beto O’Rourke will hold a major rally in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday, a city thrust to the center of America’s immigration debate by President Trump and the U.S government this week,” Reuters reports.

“O’Rourke, a former congressman from El Paso, will kick off three rallies in Texas in his bid to become the Democratic nominee a day after Republican Trump threatened to close the U.S border with Mexico as soon as next week.”

“Beto O’Rourke has hired a former top aide to Barack Obama to be his campaign manager, installing a seasoned political strategist to take the helm of what has so far been a skeletal organization effectively overseen by Mr. O’Rourke himself,” the New York Times reports.

“Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, a data expert who was Mr. Obama’s deputy campaign manager in 2012, said in an interview Monday that she was going to work for the 46-year-old former Texas congressman because he represents ‘a new generation of leadership I think we need.'”

Elizabeth Spiers: “O’Rourke was a skater (sort of); he was in a punk band called Foss; he was, we learned recently, part of a hacker collective called the Cult of the Dead Cow, where he ran a bulletin board called TacoLand. You know this type: Home decor dominated by vinyl. Wore eyeliner every day for three months in the mid-’90s. Still talks about that Joseph Campbell book that really made him think. I’ve never met O’Rourke, but I wouldn’t be surprised to read next that he once considered naming a pet or a child after Stephen Malkmus, the frontman for Pavement.”

“I don’t object to this, personally. I’m a Gen Xer, too — born in December 1976 — and I’ve been imprinted with many of the standard Xer cultural markers. I know that Powell Peralta is not a law firm; that in global thermonuclear war, the only winning move is not to play; that selling out is a moral failure and not a desirable state in which customers have purchased all your inventory. I think Fugazi is a reasonable name for a cat, and if I’m being ruthless in my self-interrogation, I have to admit that high school freshman me would have probably had a crush on high school senior Beto.”

“But O’Rourke so completely — and hilariously — embodies the stereotype of a white male Xer that if someone wrote him into a dystopian fantasy about a youthful 40-something ex-punk-rocker dropped into politics (reluctantly and with some conflictedness, of course) to save America from a selfish boomer narcissist who failed upward into the presidency despite a history of corruption and incompetency, the character would be way too on the nose.”

The Republican National Committee on Sunday sent out a tweet linking Democratic 2020 presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke’s Irish heritage to his 1998 drunken-driving arrest, the Washington Post reports.

“Republicans have previously sought to focus attention on O’Rourke’s DWI arrest, but the tweet by the RNC — which came on St. Patrick’s Day and described O’Rourke as a ‘noted Irishman’ — appeared to be the first time they have raised the topic of his ancestry.”