Beto O'Rourke Is Running for Hero
(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)
In 1960, in the pages of this magazine, the late Norman Mailer came to grips with the phenomenon of John F. Kennedy, who had just secured the Democratic presidential nomination in Los Angeles, overturning all the rotten applecarts with a savvy bunch of still-youngish World War II veterans, and a form of politics that caught all the old guard wrong-footed. Mailer saw more clearly than most that politics was being changed from the inside out-by new technologies driving new imperatives driving a new kind of candidate. Kennedy was the prototype-fueled by different fuels, fired by different fires, his rise so unconventional that it seemed touched by lightning, by alchemy, by magic.
Mailer wrote:
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.
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.
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