By BILL CHAISSON
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CLAREMONT — Beto O’Rourke was running a little late for his 8:30 a.m. “meet and greet” at the Common Man. Although his campaign had announced the event only late the previous afternoon, the room was packed, standing room only. State Sen. Martha Hennessey, who would introduce the visiting candidate, cooled her heels at the back of the room, chatting with two young reporters. One of them checked his phone. “He’s live streaming on the way to the event,” he said. “It’s how we keep track of him.” O’Rourke was visible at the wheel, mostly keeping his eyes on the road, and talking non-stop. O’Rourke claimed to be “10 minutes out.” “He’ll be here in 15 or 20 minutes,” said the reporter. And he was.
After a short introduction from Hennessey, O’Rourke began — or rather continued — talking, already in at least third gear. He led with a description of his hometown of El Paso, Texas and in the heart of the 16th Congressional District, which he served in the House of Representatives for three terms, until stepping down in 2016 to run for Senate against incumbent Ted Cruz.
His district, he said, is one half of a “bi-national” region, united, not divided by border. In implicit rebuttal to charges made by the president, the former congressman said his district was a very safe place, and he attributed its safety in part to a quarter of the population being “born somewhere else.” The immigrants, he said, were “called to and inspired by the United States.”
As someone familiar with the region where the border wall would be built, O’Rourke told his audience that it would often go up miles into the United States from the border and that a great deal of land would be taken by eminent domain, whether the owners had been there five generations or five days.
“During the George W. Bush administration,” O’Rourke said, “1.6 million people were apprehended in one year crossing the border. Last year 400,000 people were arrested, and even more are going back to Mexico; we have less than zero immigration with Mexico.” Furthermore, he continued, now most of the immigrants are children.
The candidate express-ed a dislike for the fact that the wall project was being pushed forward by one man. “As long as we are a democracy,” he said, “the burden of this decision is on the people.” He has visited the detainment camps where children are being held and graphically described the emotional damage he witness in the young people there.
O’Rourke moved on to the state of the economy, which he described as “working far too well for far too few.” He had met teachers who were forced to taken second and sometimes third jobs, which he was sure did not improve the education they provided.
He decried the state of health care in the U.S. Why, he wondered, were people in the most powerful country in the world dying of treatable illnesses like diabetes, the flu and some curable cancers. As it is set up now, he said, people receive no care during their lives and then get costly interventions when they are older. He called for “guaranteed high quality health care for all Americans.”
O’Rourke moved on to the “existential challenge” of climate change. He cited the prediction that raising the global temperature one more degree Centigrade will create “hell on this planet.” He noted the recent wildfires in California and the present flooding in the Midwest and said that southeast Texas recently received 58 inches of rain, which caused its third 500-year flood in five years.
“We’ve got 12 years to act,” he said. “The single greatest mechanism for taking action — democracy — is as broken as it has been during my lifetime.” He said that too many elected officials had “interests that are at odds with our interests.” The premise of his campaign is to “fix democracy, fix the country, and lead the globe” to face the challenges in the decades to come.
“Before we’re Demo-crats or Republicans, we’re Americans and human beings,” O’Rourke said. “That’s why I’m running.” The room, which had been relatively quiet, burst into applause. “We need to bring together a divided country and to stand on common ground.”
The first questioner was dubious about O’Rourke’s vow to run a civil campaign in the face of the strong proclivity in the present to dig up dirt. The 46-year-old candidate is a former bass player in a post-punk band and was arrested for driving while intoxicated in his early 20s and was once even caught climbing a fence around the University of El Paso physical plant. All this came out during his Senate campaign and he has said that he is not concerned about further revelations.
On Wednesday morning he simply said he was determined to “maintain a focus on aspirations” and to refuse to let campaign rhetoric “define us by our fears.” In the past, he said, Americans have always found a way to come together to face a challenge. He cited his work in Congress on the veterans affairs committee, where he worked with Republicans to develop programs for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. “We didn’t belittle each other,” he said. “We worked together.”
O’Rourke repeatedly emphasized the importance of going everywhere and meeting as many people as possible face to face. During his senate race he visited very county in Texas. He visited Archer City, made famous by Larry McMurty with “The Last Picture Show,” only to find that he was the first Democratic candidate to have visited since Lyndon Johnson stopped in by helicopter in 1948.
A questioner originally from New Jersey and a former employee of the state gaming regulatory apparatus had nothing nice to say about Donald Trump or Senate Republicans. O’Rourke stood thoughtfully silent for a few seconds after the man’s diatribe and then said, “I’m just grateful there’s an election in 2020.” He cited the example of the Lordstown, Ohio GM plant, and claimed it was an opportunity for a candidate to reach out to working-class Trump supporters. Again, he stressed the power of getting face to face with people and hearing directly from them.
In response to a two-part question about education, O’Rourke promoted improved access to pre-K and noted that studies had shown that if they were given a good start children benefited all the way through school. He then addressed the student debt crisis, saying we needed to “stop digging the hole.” He wanted to see “debt-free higher education,” and urged the spread of high school programs that allowed students to earn an associate’s degree at graduation and he suggested that community college should be free. He argued that the value of the trained and re-trained graduates would be an economic return greater than the cost of the education provided.
The final question came from an older man who said his son was dissuading him from voting for O’Rourke because he was too young. He also mentioned the president’s summation of O’Rourke as a crazy person who waves his arms around. “You do wave your arms around a lot,” said the man, “but you’re not crazy.”
Afterward O’Rourke posed for several photographs with supporters, including a local man who called himself O’Rourke’s “social media warrior” and gave the candidate a statue of the Buddha. Prashanna, an Nepalese immigrant who lives in Claremont, has created the Facebook group “Nepali Americans for Beto 2020,” which he said existed to give new immigrants reliable information about the American political campaign and the wider American culture, in general. “I love the way he speaks,” said Prashanna. “He touches each and every American.”
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