This Kyle Smith takedown of Running With Beto is too good to save for next week’s Clown Car Update.
Picture you and a couple of buddies spending a long night with a couple of cases of Schlitz and some moderately strong weed, then being told the next day that it was time to watch the film somebody made of your antics. How freaked out would you be to learn that such a film even exists? How mortifying would it be to watch it?
Running with Beto–level mortifying, I think.
Shielding their gaze against the afternoon sunlight, skulls feeling like asphalt getting a light once-over from a jackhammer, Beto fanboys must be watching this HBO documentary about the ex-congressman’s doomed Senate race last fall and asking one another, “Duuuuuude. How was it smart to send $80 million of our money to a billionaire’s son-in-law? Why did we try to pitch Texas on Reality Bites Bobby Kennedy?” A better title for this doc would have been “Beto: After the Bong.”
The speediest bong-rip-to-hangover moment comes when O’Rourke is captured answering a question about the NFL’s national-anthem protesters — posed by a voter who disagrees with them — by supporting them unequivocally and even saying, “I can think of nothing more American.” We watch the Facebook meter excitedly clocking up millions of hits. Beto is viral! Ellen DeGeneres wants to meet up! So does Stephen Colbert! The Washington Post says O’Rourke has conquered the Internet! The morning after arrives with campaign chief David Wysong: “So the Cruz campaign, they’ve got their negative hit. It’s what they wanted. . . . Beto’s favorabilities have gone downward.” Maybe there are some things more American than insulting the American flag.
Campaign field director Zack Malitz, rallying legions of campaign volunteers who have that eerie Children of the Damned glow, is shown announcing that “Tuesday, November 6, is the day the world ends.” (Rrrrrrrrip!) “There is no day after that.” (Exhale.) “Elections are a matter of life and death!” (Rrrrrrip!) “This is possibly the most important thing that most of us will do with our lives.” (Exhale.)
Snip.
O’Rourke’s curious strategy for unseating Ted Cruz in the Senate combined oversharing boring stuff, which made him look vapid, and playing to liberals, which made him look liberal. He mistook Texas for California, and with his curious combination of affectless diction and random pauses, he even sounded like ur-Californian Keanu Reeves: “So thank you, for being part. Of something really. Exciting. That’s taking place in Texas right now.” Siri and Alexa have more lifelike intonations.
The Beto phenomenon was a cult of personality. But where’s the personality? The void at the center of the candidate appears to be the reason his once-substantial support has, in his even-more-Quixotic presidential bid, softened to approximately the state of butter on the El Paso sidewalk in June. Filmmaker David Modigliani enjoyed lots of access to the candidate yet leaves us knowing no more about O’Rourke than we knew coming in. He’s Very Online! He Drives Around a Lot! He Gives Speeches! He has a Wife and Three Kids! That’s . . . about it. We don’t learn much about his politics except the stalest imaginable formulations (“We’ve gotta change the direction of our country”).
Read the whole thing.