Beto O’Rourke, the Kennedyesque Texan who promised to confiscate every privately owned assault weapon in the country and wage legal war on Christians who disapprove of sodomy, has dropped out of the race to become the Democrat nominee for president.
O’Rourke, whose real name is Robert Francis, was polling abysmally in the Real Clear Politics average, and finally admitted yesterday that his campaign was a fast train to nowhere.
Though O’Rourke ran well in his losing effort to unseat incumbent GOP Senator Ted Cruz in 2018, his popularity among the far-left wasn’t enough to put him ahead of (relatively speaking) more “centrist” candidates in the party.
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Medium Announcement
O’Rourke announced his departure from the race Friday on Medium.com.
“Our campaign has been about seeing clearly, speaking honestly and acting decisively in the best interests of America,” he began. “Though it is difficult to accept, it is clear to me now that this campaign does not have the means to move forward successfully. My service to the country will not be as a candidate or as the nominee. Acknowledging this now is in the best interests of those in the campaign; it is in the best interests of this party as we seek to unify around a nominee; and it is in the best interests of the country.”
After that, O’Rourke went through the usual litany of leftist complaints, not least that the country is “divided” and must coalesce “to confront the greatest set of challenges we’ve ever faced…. The most fundamental of them is fear — the fear that Donald Trump wants us to feel about one another; the very real fear that too many in this country live under; and the fear we sometimes feel when it comes to doing the right thing, especially when it runs counter to what is politically convenient or popular.”
O’Rourke wrote that he was proud of his campaign and that he “called out Donald Trump for his white supremacy and the violence that he’s encouraged against communities that don’t look like, pray like or love like the majority in this country.”
O’Rourke called out, all right. And few listened. His latest number in the RCP average was 2, and he laid a goose egg in the USA Today/Suffolk poll of October 23-26.
That’s why his campaign is over.
His Platform
A failed burglar with a drunk-driving record who wrote bizarre, scatalogical poetry and fantasized about murdering children, O’Rourke’s would have gutted the First and Second Amendments to promote “tolerance” and stop “gun violence.”
At October’s CNN town hall for homosexuals and transgenders, O’Rourke told homosexual host Don Lemon that he would end tax exemptions for churches that refuse to perform nuptials for homosexuals.
“There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us,” O’Rourke averred. “And so as president, we’re going to make that a priority and we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.”
So there went the First Amendment.
But O’Rourke had already promised war on the Second.
“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” O’Rourke warned gun owners at the Democratic debate on September 12. “We’re not going to allow them to be used against fellow Americans anymore.”
Image vs. Reality
The coverage of O’Rourke was in at least one case much like the coverage of JFK, the man he supposedly resembled; inaccurate, and a little too adoring. The media mostly ignored records from the Federal Election Commission that showedO’Rourke’s campaigns paid a company owned by him or his wife more than $100,000. And Project Veritas caught O’Rourke’s Senate campaign expending funds to help illegal aliens disappear into the country, another story that went nowhere.
On the other hand, coverage went overboard to make the candidate appear Hispanic. “O’Rourke also spoke at length in his native Spanish, eliciting loud and sustained cheers,” the Associated Press falsely reported.
Well, O’Rourke, fourth-generation Irish, is not Hispanic.
And now he’s not a presidential candidate.
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a longtime contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
