It is not yet clear whether Beto O’Rourke is running for president. What is clear, however, is that in the course of making his decision, he has been going for a lot of runs. Head-clearing runs. Meaningful runs. In November—just after O’Rourke lost, by a slim margin, the U.S. Senate campaign he had waged against Ted Cruz in Texas—Beto shared the details of a jog he took during a morning snowfall in Washington, D.C. “I was concerned that I might slip, that the ground would be too slick,” the politician wrote, “but it was wet and grainy enough that traction wasn’t a problem. Cold but not too cold.” Later: “The sleet stinging my face, I wondered if the winds had changed too.”
Posts of this manner continued as Beto embarked on a winter road trip, Texas to Kansas to Colorado to New Mexico, meeting new people—finding new meaning—along the way. He narrated the journey in a style roughly suggestive of Hemingway, had Hemingway had access to a LiveJournal. “What followed was one of these transcendent moments in public life,” he wrote of an event at Pueblo Community College. “Something so raw and honest that you want to hold on to it, remember every word … a flow between people.”
It’s both a very old story—the political listening tour—and a relatively new one: an approach to political message-making that is inflected by the raw confessionalism of the social-media age. (“Have been stuck lately. In and out of a funk,” Beto wrote in January, teasing the trip. “Maybe if I get moving, on the road, meet people, learn about what’s going on where they live, have some adventure, go where I don’t know and I’m not known, it’ll clear my head, reset, I’ll think new thoughts, break out of the loops I’ve been stuck in.”)