Breaking News: 2020 Moveon Poll for Presidential Nomination:
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Branko Marcetic is a staff writer for Jacobin magazine who believes that Beto should not run for President. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand, so is of course privy to great incisive information that Kiwis always have manifested in their knowledge of the inner workings of American politics.
Here is his article: Beto O'Rourke Should Not Run for President
My response: Mr. Marcetic makes a fundamental error at the beginning of his argument that Beto was "convicted" decades ago of some crime, which is simply not true. Neither charge was adjudicated and both were withdrawn.
I have a more current objection to Branko's editorial stance, and this is derived from the recent and perhaps ongoing Democracy for America 2020 Presidential Poll, which, when I last looked, had Beto coming in 3rd after Bernie Sanders (1st with 29%), then Biden with 16%, then Beto with 14%. I voted for Bernie above all, and Beto was my 2nd choice (and no, I don't think Bernie is "too old" to be President!)
Beto's standing in that particular poll was to me both astonishing and gratifying, given that I put in about 1200 hours on his campaign asking people to write letters to the editor supporting him. I know this was to a small extent part of the reason he won the newspaper endorsements from the largest five papers in Texas: Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Fort Worth, and El Paso (and oddly, the Austin American Statesman doesn't endorse any more). Think about it: the person reading the letters to the editor is often the one who writes the eventual endorsement, or with larger papers, is on the editorial board which does the endorsement.
Apparently, Texas voters seemed inclined to ignore any editorial page endorsements from these very serious newspapers, all of which for very clear reasons went against the "Orange Tide" that gripped an apparently majority of Texas voters last month. The fact remains that there were hundreds, if not, thousands of Texas voting machines that were linked together on the internet which then made them extremely manipulable, and was in fact a very clear violation of Texas statutes.
This serious matter has been reported in most notably the largest paper in the state, the Dallas Morning News, going back as early as stories dated October 11, when the first complaints of "vote flipping" came it.
However, nothing further that I know of has come of this enormous problem, no court action or even a request for a formal legal inquiry and investigation. This seems a fundamental shortcoming by Beto and the rest of the revitalized Texas Democrats: it should not go overlooked nor "swept under the rug." Silence is as bad as suppression.
I do appreciate Branko's exhaustive research into the fine points of Beto's legislative career, which goes far beyond what American journalists have compiled in their analyses, from which I learned a lot.
However, I must point out again the larger picture, that Texas is a very conservative political behemoth, and for Beto to have done as well as he did shows that the minor fine points of his voting record are trivial to Texans and perhaps as well to most Americans at large. No doubt, Branko's article will be bandied about in many political circles.
In fact (and I admit that this is wallowing in conventional political wisdom), I personally believe Beto should run for the other Senate seat, John Cornyn's, in 2020.
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