Beto O’Rourke announces presidential campaign for the third time
Today in El Paso, Texas, Beto O’Rourke re-launched his bid for president of the United States–for the third time.
O’Rourke had gone off the campaign trail in the wake of the shooting in his hometown of El Paso, a massacre in the name of white supremacy that left 22 people dead and more than two dozen others wounded.
In his relaunch, O’Rourke said he was going to take the fight directly to President Donald Trump while also putting an emphasis on gun control.
In an interview with the New York Times, before his speech, he called out the president.
“In the immediate term, he is the greatest threat to this country, bar none.”
“We must take the fight directly to the source of this problem,” O’Rourke said during his speech.”We have a racism in America that is as old as America itself … But we have always tried, until now, to change that, until this president … What he says, and what he does not just offend our sensibilities … it changes who we are as a country.”
O’Rourke is from El Paso and has been visibly, angrily moved by the shooting that happened there.
In his speech, he said that America needed to take tremendous action on gun control, but won’t because we “have a Congress too craven to act, a democracy not up to the task.”
Which is all well and good, except O’Rourke has already used up his presidential re-launch. This is in fact the third time O’Rourke’s announced he was in the 2020 race.
O’Rourke first declared he was running for president under the auspices of wearing jeans and standing by a dog, saying he was “born to be in this.”
When that flopped, he tried to reboot his campaign with a CNN townhall and a series of interviews.
Maybe this one will stick? At least, unlike his last two, this one actually has a philosophy behind it.
READ MORE:
- Following El Paso shooting, Beto O’Rourke says ‘of course’ Trump is racist
- Beto can’t leverage his slave owner ancestry to gain Black voters’ trust
- The responses to Beto and Bernie’s plans show how online can be real life
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