Last updated on September 26th, 2018 at 04:55 am
A clip of Senate candidate Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) defending protesting NFL players has gotten more views than Obama’s 2008 Democratic convention speech.
A Vanity Fair profile of O’Rourke contained this nugget, “O’Rourke’s growing appeal to Democrats beyond Texas was confirmed once again last week when a NowThis video of him defending the N.F.L. player protests rocketed around the Internet. “I can think of nothing more American,†he said of the protests, responding to a Fort Worth voter who was clearly uncomfortable with the idea of players taking a knee. The O’Rourke clip was viewed over 44 million times across Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube as of Tuesday, according to a NowThis spokeswoman.”
Former senior adviser to President Obama Dan Pfeiffer tweeted:
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To put this in perspective, Obama’s 2008 convention speech was watched by 38 million people. https://t.co/0TVQIzd4Fv
— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) August 30, 2018
An O’Rourke victory of Ted Cruz in the Senate race would be one of the biggest upsets in modern political history, given that it has been decades since Texas Democrats have been competitive in a Senate race, but O’Rourke is on to something special. It isn’t something necessarily unique to Beto, but it is something that is desperately lacking in Trump era politics.
Beto O’Rourke is authentic. One of the advantages of running in a race that you are “supposed” to lose is that the candidate doesn’t have to worry about being sterile and overfocus grouped. When a candidate isn’t supposed to win the party gurus leave them alone. Beto O’Rourke is something special because he has been given the room to do it his way.
Beto O’Rourke is real, and it may be just enough for him to pull a Texas-sized blue wave upset in November.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
