The O’Rourkes drank a couple of Jameson whiskeys and afterward O’Rourke called up a college student in Las Cruces that he had dated once: “And I said, ‘Hey, I know this is really late, or late notice, but any chance you’re free tonight?’ and she was, but she says, ‘I don’t have a ride.’ So I said, ‘I’m happy to come pick you up.’”. 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.

They got on the bill but were kicked off the stage after two songs. Charlotte often joined their mother, Melissa, on the campaign trail for Beto.

But part of the excitement, and the content of his potential candidacy, is generational. He often used a more colorful term for "guts" during his Senate stump speech, Texas Monthly reported.

The O’Rourkes were among the first in El Paso to install a swimming pool. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.

In his telling, he was pathetic but nonetheless chivalrous: When police left his friend in a gas-station parking lot, a handcuffed O’Rourke asked them to take cash out of his jeans so she could get home.

“He asked about: What will this do to my family? O’Rourke now says he would have voted “no” on the ultimate agreement. I ask O’Rourke if he could see himself among the presidential biographies on his shelf—Washington, Lincoln, Kennedy. “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. With our digital pass, you can get unlimited access to coverage on Beto O'Rourke, the border wall and more local news.

Things would have been a lot better. I just felt it. One of O’Rourke’s campaign promises was to limit the number of terms he served. The development plans were met with passionate opposition because Sanders wanted to use eminent domain to clear out an impoverished barrio and build a Walmart or a Target. — How three brothers hijacked South Africa, — The deepening mystery of Trump’s SAT scores, — The best crime show you’re not watching. The freshest-and most essential-updates from Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley. He and his El Paso friends Arlo Klahr and Mike Stevens formed Foss, the Icelandic word for waterfall, and after recording their first album, The El Paso Pussycats, organized a month-long tour, conscripting El Paso drummer Cedric Bixler-Zavala (later a member of a successful indie group, At the Drive-In) and driving across the U.S. and Canada in a station wagon. O’Rourke objects to a New York Times story published in February that he believes painted him as aimless and depressed in New York. The month after O’Rourke returned, he was arrested for drunk driving, an incident that would become a flash point in his campaign against Ted Cruz, and will likely become one again in a presidential race. They all shaved their heads and declared this their “Revolution Summer,” an homage to the D.C. punk scene of 1985.

O’Rourke says perhaps his biggest mistake was making an enemy of David Romo, who has become the source for a wave of negative stories in the national press, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. But O’Rourke also sells a kind of cult of personality of his own, offering himself as the David to Trump’s Goliath, a folk hero for our time.

Amy O'Rourke, who is nine years younger than Beto, has a bachelor's degree in psychology from Williams College in Massachusetts. By the time the O’Rourkes touched down at El Paso International Airport, Amy’s stomach was in knots. Amy O'Rourke took over the company her husband founded, Stanton Street Technology Group, in January 2013, after he was first elected to Congress. “And then just harrowing, just racing through an intersection and he’s got the brakes and the steering and all I can do is just pedal my balls off and hope that we don’t die.”, O’Rourke escaped into early computer chat rooms and made two close friends, Arlo Klahr and Mike Stevens. He acknowledges that what has made Trump successful is also what has made him successful—an outsider who “bent the media to his campaign,” as he puts it. The Guardian, citing analyses on O’Rourke’s voting record, concluded that he’d voted with Republicans 167 times over six years, and roughly a third of the time in the last two years alone. I do.

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. “He was giving me reasons 1 through 10 of why I needed to stay in El Paso,” Amy O’Rourke recalls. His father used the site to publish a diary about a cross-country trip on his recumbent bicycle in 2000. “I really get excited to be for. Amy was reading Becoming, by Michelle Obama, absorbing the former First Lady’s account of her trials living through a toxic presidential race with her husband. Do I see a path to win? Riding around with Beto O’Rourke as he comes to grips with a presidential run. Beto O'Rourke married his wife, Amy, in 2005, about a year after they met on a blind date. But it was not conducive to a career or a discipline or a profession.”. 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. (Beto O’Rourke would later use the same restaurant as his informal think tank when he first ran for office.) Ulysses had watched a clip of Biden reflecting on the impact of the deaths of his infant daughter and wife in a car crash in 1972, and, from cancer, of his son Beau in 2015. “She does not seem to me to be afraid of making a mistake, or not saying it perfectly,” he says, “and in the process says the most important—I think some of the most important—things anyone can be talking about right now, and she’s freed herself from fear.”. He sent it to his wife Amy and said he thought Biden was "the guy for us." He was so hated really—it’s not too strong of a word—when he was in there, and he said the most important thing that I’d heard during that entire campaign.”. “I wanted out of the house. Odyssey! O’Rourke prepares Sunday morning pancakes. “I raised it with him—‘Some people who I really respect have asked me to think about running for president,’ ” O’Rourke recalls. O'Rourke has endorsed Biden, whom he described as "empathetic and caring" and someone who can "reassert our moral standing in the world at a moment that it's been called into question.". “ ‘This is just decorative fencing.’ ”. 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.

To continue reading login or create an account. 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. “I gotta think, What does his team want?” he says of Trump. The closure of Charlotte’s came after an unusual event: In 2010, O’Rourke’s mother’s business was indicted for tax fraud, accused of restructuring more than $1 million in cash sales to avoid taxes. I don’t know if that would happen again.”, At 46, O’Rourke is only a couple of years younger than former rival Ted Cruz. “I don’t have a team counting delegates,” O’Rourke says, again invoking a politics not readily accessible by reason. 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. However, he acknowledged in a BuzzFeed article, that his characterization of Melissa O'Rourke wasn't entirely accurate. In the parlance of the times, he was a slacker. By this time, the idea of O’Rourke as a possible presidential contender was already in the air. She is part of an El Paso nonprofit, CREEED, that promotes educational attainment and opportunity in El Paso. O’Rourke is acutely aware, too, of perhaps his biggest vulnerability—being a white man in a Democratic Party yearning for a woman or a person of color, a Kamala Harris or a Cory Booker. There was a Stan Getz LP on the turntable and a plate of homemade scones in the kitchen. He stayed up until three A.M. to plot his future: “I was excited to think it through,” he recalls, “and ‘Well, if we ran, what if we did it like this?’ or ‘We could do this.’ ” He got up three hours later and went running. A sheriff’s deputy destroyed the evidence before it could be analyzed, the incident was investigated by the D.A.’s office, and the ensuing uproar, known thereafter as “Rubbergate,” became front-page news. “Dad, if you run for president, I’m going to cry all day,” he says. Extend your support today for just $1 a month for the first 3 months. I remember driving to that, I was, like, ‘What do I say?

I’ll take questions.’ I got in there, and I don’t know if it’s a speech or not, but it felt amazing. “I haven’t really thought about that,” he says. “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. In late February, he came home to find Republican protesters live-streaming video and asking why he still had a fence, mimicking Trump’s remark that politicians like walls when they’re around their own homes. So if I were to run, I think it’s just so important that those who would comprise my team looked like this country. And I think in many ways they’re the right people.”), Beto O’Rourke was desperate to escape El Paso. This is the moment where we’re going to win or lose everything.” O’Rourke likes to think in such mythic terms. Where is this coming from? “It may be an incredibly stupid strategy.”. He came of age in a world of crumbling taboos over personal revelation, which has clearly peaked with Donald Trump, whose relentless Twitter habit has basically set the table for O’Rourke’s open-book style.

O’Rourke says it was hard to get legislation passed in a G.O.P.-controlled House, but he’s proud of bills he helped pass benefiting veterans at Fort Bliss in El Paso, his constituents, and sponsoring legislation to legalize marijuana and to expunge arrest records for people convicted of marijuana possession. (“I was a little insulted because it implied that I couldn’t support our family.”) His stream-of-consciousness posts, which Amy edited, were mocked on Twitter, an outlet that O’Rourke criticizes as “mean.” “No human, least of all me, is strong enough to completely withstand the impact that has on you, and it can’t be healthy,” he says. “I said, ‘Come up with me and I will take you to our front door,’ ” he recalls. He exercised on his rowing machine and went on his somewhat infamous road trip to interact with regular Americans, trying to work his way through a self-described “funk” over his loss. I tell O’Rourke that perhaps he’s simply too normal to be president. CAMPAIGN STOP “I didn’t want to make money, didn’t want to be in business,” O’Rourke says. The tract was nobody’s idea of a great political move—drug legalization was still on the fringes of mainstream politics in 2011—but it set the stage for a run for Congress against the eight-term incumbent, Silvestre Reyes, a former border-patrol guard who supported the War on Drugs and made his name advocating for border fencing.

But it’s definitely going to involve higher marginal rates on the very wealthiest in this country.”, His biggest strength, of course, is his unique credibility as a voice on immigration. 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.

He became an avid supporter of the Reverend Jesse Jackson during both his 1984 and 1988 runs for president and once held a reception for Jackson at the O’Rourke home.