The key event that got Beto to say yes to a presidential campaign
During O’Rourke’s Senate race last year, Trump called him a “total lightweight,” and a former campaign assistant, Joey Torres, said O’Rourke himself once questioned the potential of a failed Senate candidate in a presidential campaign. While O’Rourke was running for his House seat in 2012 – and following the Republican presidential primary in the media that year – Torres recalled to POLITICO O’Rourke telling him of then-Sen.
Yet O’Rourke will enter the race at an organizational disadvantage to his more established rivals. His candidacy will immediately test the limits of a relatively inexperienced politician who has only run for office as an insurgent, not as a favorite, and who, despite his broad appeal, has at times befuddled the Democratic Party establishment and angered the most progressive edge of the Democratic Party’s base.
Asked in December if he is a progressive Democrat, O’Rourke told reporters, “I don’t know. I’m just, as you may have seen and heard over the course of the campaign, I’m not big on labels. I don’t get all fired up about party or classifying or defining people based on a label or a group. I’m for everyone.”
“I’m a little frightened by all these new, young Congress people and their audacity,” said George Appleby, a Des Moines-based attorney who has long been active in presidential campaigns in Iowa. “It seems to me we live in a really dangerous world.”
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