‘You all never allowed my shortcomings to get in the way of running the best campaign this state has ever seen…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In a clip from an HBO documentary set to premier Tuesday, presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke was seen apologizing to his campaign staff for being a “giant asshole,” according to the Daily Beast.
The profanity-laced documentary—which premiered at Austin’s South by Southwest festival—portrays the candidate in a largely flattering light as charismatic, passionate and earnest, although he sometimes is seen criticizing the staff for not giving him enough time to speak to media.
In an intimate moment prior to his confession speech in the 2018 Texas Senate Race, O’Rourke thanked his staff for putting up with him.
“I know I was a giant asshole to be around sometimes, and you all never allowed my shortcomings to get in the way of running the best campaign this state has ever seen,” he said.
Since then, O’Rourke’s decline from the national spotlight has seemingly set in as quickly and inexplicably as his meteoric rise in the immediate aftermath of the 2018 race.
The eccentric also-ran, defeated by incumbent Republican Ted Cruz, was able to raise gobs of money and was lavished with mainstream media praise when the GOP was his only opponent.
But faced with a crowded and diverse field of farther-left adversaries, his own original sin of “white privilege” has been amplified by the nasty entitlement complex that he developed as an early front-runner.
Following a few missteps and false starts, he has spent much of his campaign since alternately meta-analyzing his own flaws and apologizing for his pretensions.
He has faced scandals—including one that he was involved in a hacking cult and that the leak of shocking violent and erotic writings that he composed while a teenager. One such story was a murder fantasy in which the narrator drove over dead children in the street.
Additionally, he has been criticized for a series of comments that were perceived to be misogynist and racially charged.
O’Rourke also has struggled to find his policy footing, attempting to stake his path as a traditional liberal who will help to mitigate but not obstruct the radical socialist wave consuming the Left.
The result has been a watered-down vision that leaves neither side satisfied on issues like the Green New Deal and gun control.
He has fallen in line with radical leftist positions on areas such as ending the Electoral College and permitting partial birth abortions during the third trimester.
All the while, O’Rourke has been largely supplanted in the crowded Democratic primary field by South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Like O’Rourke, Buttigieg is a younger, white male with mainstream crossover appeal and fundraising prowess, but he maintains a seemingly more disciplined and focused approach to his campaign in contrast with O’Rourke’s free-wheeling punk-rock ethos.