Is Beto the Front-Runner or Already a Flop?
In between the road trips and the Facebook Live posts, Beto O’Rourke seems to have made up his mind. Barack Obama told him back in December to get in touch with David Plouffe, who ran his 2008 campaign, and Paul Tewes, who directed the Iowa operation that scored a surging victory and propelled him to the White House. Both have now become O’Rourke advisers, along with other top Democratic operatives.
While his staff was signaling to potential hires that he will likely announce his presidential run this week, O’Rourke was still having conversations about who would be his campaign manager as recently as the past few days in El Paso, Texas. But he’s also let emails and phone calls from a number of interested operatives go unanswered, cautious about expanding his circle of trust and showing his hand.
Some professionals who have watched his decision making from afar have started to think of him as a dilettante, roaming the country on road trips searching for epiphanies. They have walked away from interactions with him and his team thinking that after a Senate race that almost overnight took him from being a no-chance nobody to the most famous 2018 candidate in the country, he’s somewhere between confused and conceited.
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