They're Saying Beto Wants To Be The Next JFK? Why Settle For That?

They're saying that Beto O'Rourke is trying to cast himself as the JFK for this generation,  the estimable Charles Pierce, starting with a Norman Mailer quote says:

"Yes, this candidate for all his record; his good, sound, conventional liberal record has a patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz."

It is not idle musing to conclude that every subsequent Democratic presidential candidate has taken up the quest to find a suitable variation of that murmur of jazz that Kennedy heard. The technology changed. The imperatives changed. The candidates changed. But somewhere in all of them was a vision of their own private new frontier. In my lifetime, Barack Obama came the closest to finding one.

Comes now Beto O'Rourke, finally deciding to run for president after spending a few months as the Jack Kerouac of Instagram, and off to Keokuk to make his first stop as an actual candidate. Nobody—not even Obama—was so clearly and so obviously looking for whatever that new frontier looks like in 2019. Nobody—not even Obama—was so clearly and so obviously trying to tap into whatever the energy stream is today into which that old energy that Mailer felt long ago flowed.

Oh, dear.  The first thing that springs to mind is that when someone asked Jackie Kennedy what the president's favorite music was, she gave one of the greatest quotes, ever,  from any First Lady,  "Hail To The Chief."  Norman Mailer's jazz background was all in his head, not Kennedy's nor in Barack Obama's who likely shared JFK's taste.   I don't see that he aspired to anything higher than merely achieving the title. 

And as to liberalism, I will never, ever, ever fail to point out that the president with the greatest achievement in striving towards egalitarian democracy of all wasn't the fabled Kennedys, it was the man they despised and suspected, Lyndon Johnson.  If the Harvard holdovers hadn't worked with Republicans to sucker Johnson into expanding the Vietnam involvement, he would be, hands down, the greatest figure in the history of American egalitarian democracy.  I'd rather have Beto turn out to be another LBJ, albeit one who learned the real lessons of Vietnam and Cambodia and Iraq and Afghanistan and . . . 

Until I read Pierce's piece I wasn't actually uneasy about the prospect of Beto running, though the last two dynamic, young(ish) Democratic, campaigner-talented presidents have given me, perhaps not an allergy but a sensitivity to dynamic young, still wet-behind-the-ears charismatic Democratic men, especially those who are running against women of far greater experience.  

The next to the last thing the Democratic Party needs is another Obama presidency or another Bill Clinton presidency.  And Beto, with his delusional talk about reaching out to Republicans - exactly the thing that comprised the self-sandbagging of both Clinton and Obama - is making me ever more nervous in that regard.  

And the rest of Pierce's piece doesn't make me feel any more reassured.  It, frankly, disturbs me.  I'm not sure that Beto is any less ego-maniacally motivated than Bernie Sanders 2020 is.  

In the Vanity Fair profile that kicked things off for him, O'Rourke made it as plain as it possibly could be.

Settling into an armchair in his living room, he tries to make sense of his rise. “I honestly don’t know how much of it was me,” he says. “But there is something abnormal, super-normal, or I don’t know what the hell to call it, that we both experience when we’re out on the campaign trail.”

O’Rourke and his wife, Amy, an educator nine years his junior, both describe the moment they first witnessed the power of O’Rourke’s gift. It was in Houston, the third stop on O’Rourke’s two-year Senate campaign against Ted Cruz. “Every seat was taken, every wall, every space in the room was filled with probably a thousand people,” recalls Amy O’Rourke. “You could feel the floor moving almost. It was not totally clear that Beto was what everybody was looking for, but just like that people were so ready for something. So that was totally shocking. I mean, like, took-my-breath-away shocking.”

For O’Rourke, what followed was a near-mystical experience. “I don’t ever prepare a speech,” he says. “I don’t write out what I’m going to say. I remember driving to that, I was, like, ‘What do I say? Maybe I’ll just introduce myself. I’ll take questions.’ I got in there, and I don’t know if it’s a speech or not, but it felt amazing. Because every word was pulled out of me. Like, by some greater force, which was just the people there. Everything that I said, I was, like, watching myself, being like, How am I saying this stuff? Where is this coming from?

This is more than slightly astonishing. JFK's bone-deep sense of irony and detachment kept him from saying anything like this, and he'd have laughed out of the room anyone who'd dared suggest that the frenzied reaction of young voters to him was a manifestation of some invisible power. Obama reckoned with it, but he generally gave credit to his audiences for the power that moved him. What O'Rourke is talking about here is more akin to some revelation in the wilderness, like a wandering prophet in the Sinai coming to terms with the mystic. Beto O'Rourke is the candidate of the desert, of the redemptive power of heat and thirst. No wonder he wants everyone to move to El Paso.

It is a big gamble. It requires a surefooted sense of who you are and who you are not. If O'Rourke is able to do this, then this is now a very different campaign. As Mailer observed:

...America was also the country in which the dynamic myth of the Renaissance—that every man was potentially extraordinary—knew its most passionate persistence. Simply, America was the land where people still believed in heroes: George Washington; Billy the Kid; Lincoln, Jefferson; Mark Twain, Jack London, Hemingway; Joe Louis, Dempsey, Gentleman Jim; America believed in athletes, rum-runners, aviators; even lovers, by the time Valentino died. It was a country which had grown by the leap of one hero past another—is there a county in all of our ground which does not have its legendary figure?

Suddenly, somebody's running for hero. Somebody had to, I guess.

I have had several recent examples  of actual heroism forced in front of me in the past several months, the real thing,  and it isn't running for president.  I will not dishonor the utter selflessness of the real thing by calling a presidential candidacy an act of heroism. 

That kind of liability to cult of personality is one of the worst aspects of the American presidency, the American presidential system of government which is so prone to producing the string of everything from mediocrity to florid criminality and corruption and, in Trump fascism as the history of the American presidency, as told in truths instead of sanitized Encyclopedia articles and PR bull shit.  

I would, of course, vote for Beto if he got the nomination because the alternative is so terrible a prospect but I would no more expect the kind of greatness from him than the ersatz stuff we got from Obama.   I remember, sometime in about 2010, while sitting with my mother as she watched the MSNBC liberal ghetto lineup that they started playing that old inspirational TV spot that had Obama's voice over.  They played it for only enough time to recognize what it was, then took it off, I assumed because it sounded so hollow, so inappropriate for the utter failure of Obama to make the best hand a Democrat had been handed in many decades work any better than he did.  I don't want another handsome, charismatic, tall, lean, youngish Democrat who is going to blow another opportunity like that and if this is who Beto is, I think he will be that kind of president.   

I hope Beto takes a good hard look at the achievements of Kennedy as opposed to LBJ because LBJ's presidency has a lot more to teach a Democratic president, both in terms of greatness and terms of failure by the kind of president who has the potential of greatness*.  That is clearly something which neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama had and which JFK, frankly, didn't show he that much potential for.  Between him and Bobby, there was too much proto-Clintonesque triangulation.   LBJ not only dared to do what was truly great, he had the decades of experience to carry it off.  If a smart, handsome, charismatic, youngish man could do that, I've got my doubts, though I hope he does. 

*  Getting led astray by the neo-cons, the billionaires and the Harvard boys of today(some of whom went to other schools) is a huge lesson any Democrat who wants to succeed should learn.   I will point out that one thing Beto could do to prove to me, at least, that he's got something to him is to say he will never appoint a Secretary of Education who is not a product, from K through PhD of public schools and public universities.   That position should only ever be filled by someone whose family has a stake in the public system.  It's a smallish thing but an important one.