[guest post by JVW]

One of the drawbacks of being a lazy blogger is that when I finally am inspired to spin up a post on a particular topic I oftentimes see that someone (and quite often, someone at this very site) has already covered the topic at hand and, frankly, done a far better job on it than I would have. Such is the case with the currently stalling Presidential candidacy of Robert F. O’Rourke of El Paso. After a cloying will-he-or-won’t-he dalliance that left his media bobbysoxers swooning, the former three-term Congressman and failed Senate candidate entered the race and raised a whole lot of scratch, yet remains mired in the polls behind a senile has-been who has been rattling around Washington since the Nixon era, an insane elderly socialist tragically trapped in 1962, Chief Bunkum and Hokum, the unaccomplished mayor of a small college town, and Intersectionality Bingo. Over the weekend I saw a pretty scathing piece that lefty media Queen Bee Margaret Carlson dropped over at the The Daily Beast, which takes the Man Who Would be Known as Beto to task:

You can thank, or blame, women who make up almost 58 percent of the primary electorate for Beto’s decline. Disproportionately, they don’t like him.

According to my unscientific poll asking every woman I see, Beto reminds them of the worst boyfriend they ever had: self-involved, convinced of his own charm, chronically late if he shows up at all, worth a meal or two but definitely not marriage material. When he should be home with the kids or taking out the trash, he’s jamming with his garage band or skateboarding at Whataburger. He’s “in and out of a funk” which requires long and meaningful runs to clear his head. Every thought he has is transcendent, worthy of being narrated, videotaped, and blogged. He is always out finding himself. At age 46, the man asking to run the country is currently lost.

So I decided to build a blog post around the idea of where was all of this rational discernment one year ago when the guy was the newest progressive heartthrob who would chase that nasty Ted Cruz from Washington and accelerate the process of turning Texas purple, only to find that over at National Review Online Jim Geraghty had already beaten me to it, and come up with all of the links that I would have spent some time searching for:

As far as I can tell, Carlson never wrote about O’Rourke last year. But last year, various writers at the Daily Beast labeled him a “liberal hero . . . with a penchant for going viral,” that he’s “break[ing] down the walls between candidate and constituents,”that his “fundraising operation is still proving to be a remarkable success, one that some of the top digital operatives in the Democratic Party believe could be foundational for future campaigns,” that his “supporters tout his quite liberal policy positions only after gushing about him as a person,” and they even declared that his dental visit “livestream was admirable in principle.”

Geraghty even takes the time to provide a possible statement that these newly-chastened media outlets might want to release, in order to explain why they acted like teenybopper girls at a boy band concert:

Since the 2018 Texas Senate race ended, we’ve gotten to know Beto O’Rourke better and put simply, we chose to see what we wanted to see that year. He was glib, and we convinced ourselves it was charisma. He looked young, and we told ourselves he was the voice of a new generation. We found his skateboarding and guitar-playing cool when it was kind of silly and juvenile, and we persuaded ourselves that he was an accomplished leader when we now see he was a bumbling slacker who had married up and had his political ambitions carried along by his father-in-law’s wealth and connections. We hate Ted Cruz with the passion of a thousand suns going supernova, and because of that, we talked ourselves into believing that this guy was Lone Star Jesus. We recognize that we have a worsening problem with wish-casting and have checked into a twelve-step program.

I can’t improve on that, other than to point out that O’Rourke got to play the role of pseudo-Latino when challenging the dreaded Cruz, but now that he’s up against the Harrises, Bookers, Castros, Gabbards, Yangs, Warren/Gillibrand/Klobuchars of the Democrat field, he’s back to being an entitled straight white male. And they wonder why us nasty right-wingers are so cynical on matters of intersectionality.

– JVW