It captures your imagination.”, As if to rebut the inevitable accusations that he’s a socialist, he proclaims himself a proud capitalist—among the few Democratic candidates, he points out, who have been small-business owners. Then he catches himself: “Sorry, kids.”, Beto O’Rourke’s Mission-style home in the El Paso neighborhood of Sunset Heights is the site of a famous 1915 meeting between Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and U.S. general Hugh Scott. Nowadays, Beto O’Rourke seems to have embraced his father’s local globalism. On Election Day, Beto and Amy O’Rourke were leaving their house for a packed El Paso stadium when the race was called for Ted Cruz with only 25 percent of precincts reporting. She is part of an El Paso nonprofit, CREEED, that promotes educational attainment and opportunity in El Paso. Bradner tweeted: "Beto O'Rourke tells me he decided to endorse Biden after his son Ulysses pushed him to do so over the weekend. He grew his hair long and majored in film before switching to English. And I think in many ways they’re the right people.”), Beto O’Rourke was desperate to escape El Paso. “I’m not as concerned about our ability to make it as a family as I might have been three months ago,” says O’Rourke. O’Rourke would blame an accounting error and his mother never admitted guilt. it. “You didn’t do everything you could,” Amy says, completing his sentence. But Trump’s choice of El Paso for a rally had already created a story line, giving new relevance to O’Rourke and his ideas. The tipping point was when O’Rourke gave an extemporaneous monologue defending black N.F.L. players who took a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality. However, he acknowledged in a BuzzFeed article, that his characterization of Melissa O'Rourke wasn't entirely accurate. The store was forced to pay a $250,000 fine. “I think, ego-wise, we’re going to be O.K. — Is this Trump move an actual, real-life impeachable offense? Amy Sanders had grown up in Santa Fe and studied psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts, after which she spent a year teaching kindergarten in Guatemala City. “If you’re trying to mobilize this country to meet an existential threat, as we did against the Nazis in World War II, then you’re going to have to ask everyone to sacrifice,” he says. “It’s probably not the most professional thing you’ve ever heard about this, but I just feel it.”, After dueling rallies in El Paso last February—O’Rourke’s “March for Truth” versus Trump’s “Finish the Wall”—Trump was quick to declare his crowd sizes larger and deem O’Rourke an unworthy failure. In 1986, his father, Pat O’Rourke, an El Paso politician, told Bill Moyers on CBS: “When I was six and seven years old, I didn’t know I wasn’t a Mexican. “It may be an incredibly stupid strategy.”. “Why do you have a door?”Behind the door, in the O’Rourke living room, a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf contains a section for rock memoirs (Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, a favorite) and a stack of LPs (the Clash, Nina Simone) but also a sizable collection of presidential biographies, including Robert Caro’s work on Lyndon B. Johnson. Back in El Paso, his father, Pat O’Rourke, was losing his third consecutive campaign for public office, this time for county judge. O’Rourke is careful to pay homage to progressive icons, crediting Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren with advancing the national conversation on health care and consumer protections, but sells himself as something slightly different: a youthful uniter, willing to listen and learn from the most recalcitrant right-wing voters and work with Republicans. Amy bristled at a CNN essay that chastised him for taking an “excellent adventure” while leaving his wife and kids at home. "I'm just ready to call it.". He supports Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal in spirit, if not every letter. To satisfy his creative itch, he also launched an online news magazine focused on El Paso. During a chat on Twitter, Beto O'Rourke said Ulysses was named for the character in Homer's "The Odyssey," which is one of his favorite books. Ulysses O'Rourke: Ulysses O'Rourke is the son of Beto O'Rourke and Amy Hoover Sanders.. child of Beto O'Rourke and Amy Hoover Sanders; nationality: United States of America Online dictionaries and encyclopedias with entries for Ulysses O'Rourke. Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden at a campaign event on March 2, 2020 in Dallas, Texas. So if I were to run, I think it’s just so important that those who would comprise my team looked like this country. CAMPAIGN STOP Like, by some greater force, which was just the people there. “I gotta think, What does his team want?” he says of Trump. For O’Rourke, what followed was a near-mystical experience. Click on a label to prioritize search results according to that topic: If I were to run, if I were to win, that my administration looks like this country. But in 2015, he traveled with Obama on a trip to Asia to help build support for the deal. When I first met O’Rourke, he showed me a framed snapshot of his father standing atop a mesa, a denim-wearing southwesterner who looked a bit like Jimmy Buffett, bald with blond locks and a wild-man grin. There was a Stan Getz LP on the turntable and a plate of homemade scones in the kitchen. He even hired two forward-thinking field strategists from the Sanders campaign. He came under scrutiny for using government funds to outfit his office with furniture from his wife’s store, and in 1983 he became embroiled in a controversy over a powdery substance—possibly cocaine or heroin—discovered in a condom found in his Toyota Land Cruiser. “My sense is, following some success that I had in Congress, and working with Republicans to actually get things signed into law, including both President Obama and President Trump’s administrations, that I may have an ability to work with people who think differently than I do, come to a different conclusion that I’ve come to on a given issue, and yet find enough common ground to do something better than what we have right now.”. They became devotees of the Washington, D.C., record label Dischord, co-founded by Ian MacKaye, a punk firebrand who influenced a generation of disaffected suburban youth. I think I’d be good at She was overjoyed. O’Rourke worked as an art mover for Hedley’s Humpers and for his uncle on a startup Internet-service provider, called El.Net, building the first Web sites for PEN American Center and the Committee to Protect Journalists. Especially in the fact that there are some really great candidates out there right now.”. It was his first time on Air Force One. And I’m so grateful that I had it. And I said, 'OK, that makes sense.' O'Rourke, who was representative for Texas's 16th congressional district until 2019, quit the primary race in November 2019. The group “totally captured my imagination,” recalls O’Rourke. By the time the O’Rourkes touched down at El Paso International Airport, Amy’s stomach was in knots. After returning to El Paso in 2004, she began working with Centro de Salud Familiar La Fe, and helped create the health and human services organization's preparatory school — a dual-language kindergarten through eighth grade. He drove an hour to Las Cruces and then an hour back to El Paso to drink with an old high-school friend. “The government at all levels is overly represented by white men,” he says. Meet Beto O'Rourke, the El Paso politician who has his sights set on Washington D.C. It was a grand adventure, but also a lesson in scrappy survival. “Almost no one thought there was a path in Texas, and I just knew it. He used the time in D.C. to see Fugazi, the band fronted by his hero Ian MacKaye. He usually carried a novel in his pocket, whether Captain Corelli’s Mandolin or The Sun Also Rises. “Dad, if you run for president, I’m going to cry all day,” he says. Or—”. It was just such a wonderful time. if we don’t run. David Crowder, a veteran reporter in El Paso, says Bill Sanders “was sort of a great white father coming into town, with all this money and ideas for the big-boxing of El Paso.”. O'Rourke children Beto and Amy O'Rourke had their first child, Ulysses, about a year after getting married. The quotation in the headline reflects the quotation in the story. Michigan? Neither idea pleased his father. He co-sponsored a bill with John Cornyn, Republican senator from Texas, to increase border security at ports of entry, and he didn’t always vote alongside liberal Democrats. CNN later reported that she had primarily voted in Democratic primaries since 2000 and that she had donated to both Republican and Democratic candidates, including Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz in 2012 and Barack Obama in 2007. “My dad was so disappointed. Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story. By the time I met O’Rourke again in February, he had nearly found his answer. “Because her voice was shaken and said, ‘Something’s happened with your dad. O’Rourke prepares Sunday morning pancakes. Cruz said O'Rourke had failed to mention an 2010 federal court settlement involving his mother's furniture store. He sent it to his wife Amy and said he thought Biden was "the guy for us.'". She started her career as an educator in Guatemala, where she taught kindergarten. Biden reflecting on the impact of the deaths. “That person literally didn’t exist.”. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 1/1/20) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 1/1/20) and Your California Privacy Rights. “It may be a brilliant strategy,” O’Rourke said. The ads worked. “I would just start throwing up and just forcing as many calories in, and then rowing in the morning and lifting weights in the afternoon every day,” he says. WHO IS BETO O'ROURKE? “You’ve got to give people something to be for, it cannot be who we are against. The first time I meet Beto O’Rourke, he’s lounging on the front veranda of his house on a Sunday afternoon, barefoot in blue jeans and T-shirt, talking on his cell phone. Beto O'Rourke: What you need to know about the El Paso politician. All rights reserved. At the apex of the dot-com boom, he launched his own Web-design company, Stanton Street Technology Group, with two friends from New York who had followed him to El Paso. I really liked seeing myself get better or seeing the boat get better, learning a skill and a discipline I had never really understood or knew existed. These people are my friends, they’re my neighbors.”. Could he deliver Texas? Term limits were an issue O’Rourke believed in, but it weakened his hand as a freshman in Congress, where long-term ambition translates to seats on powerful committees. “What are they expecting us to do? “I was at work and my mom called me and I just knew,” he says. “Whether you meant it or not, I take that as a compliment,” he says. The next day, she finally broke down: “I couldn’t stop crying.”. The odds against beating an incumbent were long, but O’Rourke and his new campaign manager, David Wysong, a local health-care executive who had never run a congressional campaign, tabulated the voter turnout they would need to win—which for O’Rourke translated to numbers of doors he needed to knock on. I’ll take questions.’ I got in there, and I don’t know if it’s a speech or not, but it felt amazing. “Not with the manifest destiny or the heroism of the baby-boomers who believed they were going to change the world. “The more honestly and directly you communicate to people why you’re doing this, the way in which you want to serve them, I just think that the better, more informed decision that they can make.”, If the message is honesty, the medium is, patently, social media. SHOW OF HANDS Is this the right thing for the country? The clip in question was from a town hall last month in Charleston, South Carolina, where Anthony Thompson, whose wife was killed in a mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, recalled how Biden had come to the scene soon after the killings. Ulysses O'Rourke, Self: Running with Beto. Use Columbia for that.’”. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. But it was not conducive to a career or a discipline or a profession.”. And I think that’s a very legitimate basis upon which to make a decision.