Former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon told CNBC that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Beto O’Rourke stand the best chance of giving President Trump a tough fight during the 2020 election.
Bannon, who said he doesn’t expect Trump to lose in 2020, said he would put the two Democrats on a combined ticket with Harris running for president and O’Rourke for vice president. They would be “a way to mobilize their base and give it their best shot.”
“Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who narrowly lost the Georgia gubernatorial race in 2018, said she believes race may be playing a role in Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke’s rising popularity after his failed Senate run,” she told MSNBC.
“Abrams suggested that she and former Democratic Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum did not receive the same attention as the former Texas congressman, whose popularity skyrocketed after losing his 2018 Senate race.”
“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.”
Beto O’Rourke “said that he very likely would choose a female running mate if he manages to nab the Democratic presidential nomination next year,” the Dallas Morning News reports.
Said O’Rourke: “It would be very difficult not to select a woman with so many extraordinary women who are running right now. But first I would have to win and there’s– you know, this is as open as it has ever been.”
He added: “It’s presumptuous for me to think about who I would select as a vice president. Right now I’m seeking the nomination.”
“Oh, that’s the Beto line. No, I will say that, you know, I have a lot of respect for Beto. And it’s great to have some Texas in this race. But no, I wasn’t born to run for office, just because growing up in the ’70s, in the middle of the country, I don’t think many people thought a girl could be president. I wasn’t born to run. But I am running.”
— Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), in an interview on Meet the Press, when asked if she was born to run for president.
Beto O’Rourke (D) praise Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in a Vanity Fair interview saying she has “freed herself from fear.”
Said O’Rourke: “She does not seem to me to be afraid of making a mistake, or not saying it perfectly. And in the process says the most important — I think some of the most important — things anyone can be talking about right now, and she’s freed herself from fear.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer: “O’Rourke will visit Northeast Ohio on Monday to hold a rally… O’Rourke, a Democratic former Texas congressman, will visit the Buckeye State as part of a swing through the industrial Midwest, with stops planned in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as well. Exact details on the Ohio visit are still to come.”
Beto O’Rourke said he is “not proud” of fiction he wrote as teenager about murdering children, while acknowledging its surfacing could hurt his campaign, Politico reports.
Said O’Rourke: “Stuff I was part of as a teenager … not anything that I’m proud of today. And I mean, that’s the long and short of it.”
While a teenager, Beto O’Rourke belonged to the oldest group of computer hackers in U.S. history, Reuters reports.
“The hugely influential Cult of the Dead Cow, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, is notorious for releasing tools that allowed ordinary people to hack computers running Microsoft’s Windows. It’s also known for inventing the word ‘hacktivism’ to describe human-rights-driven security work.”
Beto O’Rourke floated an idea for restructuring the Supreme Court, NBC News reports.
Said O’Rourke: “What if there were five justices selected by Democrats, five Justices selected by Republicans, and those 10 then picked five more justices independent of those who chose the first 10? I think that’s an idea that we should explore.”
Politico: “In the first and earliest test of the Texas Democrat’s appeal outside of his home state, O’Rourke chewed through the news cycle, attracting crowds and a deluge of media attention that followed him from coffee shops to town halls to sidewalks in southeastern Iowa.”
“The scene delivered a sense of his potential, but also signaled the dangers ahead for his campaign. The celebrity splash that marked his first day as a presidential candidate — his visit was preceded the evening before by a Vanity Fair cover story — generated a backlash among some Democrats frustrated by the fanfare surrounding his launch, and by what they viewed as a double standard applied to O’Rourke in a field flush with women and candidates of color.”
New York Times: “On the first day of his quest for a mega-promotion, as he ferried his team in a rented minivan with Illinois plates, Mr. O’Rourke made plain his intention to transpose his Texas blueprint onto the national stage.”
Politico: “First a government shutdown re-focused public attention on President Donald Trump’s proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall — a major issue to Democratic voters and a signature concern of O’Rourke’s. Then Trump flew to El Paso to rally support for the wall, all but daring O’Rourke to confront him in his home town.”
“The result — a protest rally that drew thousands of supporters — confirmed to O’Rourke the durability of his appeal to Democrats beyond the 2018 Senate campaign. It offered the border-state politician a rationale for a campaign focused heavily on immigration. And it marked a turning point in O’Rourke’s deliberations about a run for president.”
“Privately, O’Rourke’s advisers were struck by the tenor of the crowd at his rally. The chants and placards were less about opposing Trump than encouraging to O’Rourke to run for president. And the candidate himself began to overcome concerns about the demands a campaign would place on his family.”
President Trump said that he was struck by Beto O’Rourke’s gesticulations during the former Texas congressman’s first day on the campaign trail, NBC News reports.
Said Trump: “Well, I think he’s got a lot of hand movement. I’ve never seen so much hand movement. I said, ‘Is he crazy or is that just the way he acts?’ I watched him a little while this morning, during I assume it was some kind of a news conference, and I’ve actually never seen anything quite like it.”
Trump dodged a question about whether he thought O’Rourke or Joe Biden would make for a tougher opponent.
First Read: “What made O’Rourke a star in 2018, and what gives him promise in 2020, was his ability to raise money ($80 million for a Senate candidate) and to draw big crowds. So can he come close to the nearly $6 million Bernie Sanders raked in during his first 24 hours as a 2020 candidate? Can he exceed or double the $1.5 million Kamala Harris raised in her first day?”
“As for the crowds, O’Rourke will spend the next three days in Iowa, hitting Burlington and Muscatine (today), Mount Pleasant and Cedar Rapids (on Friday) and Waterloo and Dubuque (Saturday). He’s the first major 2020 candidate to immediately head to Iowa after announcing a bid.”
“Do the crowds show up in Iowa? What about his first official rally in El Paso on March 30 – does it come close to Harris’ 20,000-plus in Oakland, or Bernie’s 10,000-plus in Brooklyn and Chicago?”
“No Democrat in the 2020 field is as boom-or-bust as Beto. He’s either going to take off, justifying the Oprah appearance and Annie Leibovitz photo spread. Or he’s going to fall flat, proving that his 2.5-point loss in Texas (compared with Hillary’s 9-point defeat there in 2016 or Obama’s 16-point loss) was lightning in a bottle.”
“Fair or not, there’s no middle ground.”
Beto O’Rourke told the El Paso Times that his presidential campaign will be headquartered in El Paso and those who want to join his team will have to move to the border city.
“But he also said he would no longer swear off hiring consultants, giving an example of a single mother in the Dallas area who was unable to join his Senate campaign because it would have required her to close her business.”
Said O’Rourke: “My preference is to find people who can move to El Paso and work on this campaign full time, but in order to get the breadth of experience and wisdom and diversity that we really need in a campaign that will look like everyone, I want to remain open to different employment situations. It doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker, but it will ensure that I get the greatest talent possible.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.