O'Rourke's Announcement; A Young Bobby Kennedy

That's what several people had to say about their impression of the campaign announcement of Beto O'Rourke earlier this evening.



O'Rourke made his bid for Congress official before a standing-room only crowd at Tablas Restaurant & Bar, which was about a couple of hundred people. Here is the audio of his campaign announcement speech (I'll post video tomorrow):

The crowd was loud, energetic, and decidedly younger than most political crowds in El Paso. I didn't recognize most of the crowd, in fact I only recognized about 20 or so people there, which means the vast majority of the supporters in attendance aren't your normal Democratic Party crowd.

In fact, the only person in attendance that I noticed as a normal Democratic Party regular was Tony Escobedo.

The announcement, as an event, went off without a hitch. After seeing the original "soft-launch" of the campaign, I thought there was a better than even chance that the campaign was going to go off in to young hipster land. In other words, I was really concerned that it was going to be a Facebook-driven campaign.

I was surprised to see that the campaign announcement had the feel of an old-school rally with a modern twist.

Which might explain the Bobby Kennedy context.

There were the balloons, campaign rally signs fastened to actual pieces of wood. It looked like a scaled down version of an old-school party convention. The only difference was that the signs said to follow the campaign on Twitter, Facebook, or by text message.

The text messaging is a first for El Paso campaigns. Yes, the Obama campaign had it, but it was a national effort, not a local one. How much it will help is an unknown, but its still a first for El Paso. It was very well-organized and volunteers were there to capture contact information of the supporters. It wasn't obstructive either, so it went smoothly from what I saw.

O'Rourke himself was clearly in his comfort zone. He's a dynamic speaker and a natural in front of the crowd with just the right mix of intellect and personality. You may not like his policy, but you like him enough as a person that you'll at least hear him out. That's going to come in handy when he's going door-to-door.

The delivery of his speech as an A+ and he fed off the crowd's energy. There were a couple of times when the crowd chanted his name. In terms of the actual content of the speech, it was a B. I thought he gave a great speech if he was running for mayor. He talked a lot about what he's done in the past and I was waiting for a hard, substantive contrast in federal policy to the Congressman and that moment never came. Its just the announcement speech, so I suppose it was a little early to start breaking out the good stuff, but I figured he'd hit some federal issues. I didn't really see that happen.

But I had a chance to chat with O'Rourke and he agreed to sit down with me next week to have an in-depth conversation about federal issues, so I will post the video as soon as we have that conversation. The plan is to have the same kind of conversation with the Congressman.

The two most significant things I took away from the event was the size, energy and excitement of the crowd and the personal dynamism of O'Rourke.

The only real critique I can think of is perhaps the announcement could've been in a different, more significant location. Maybe a bar in the Entertainment District isn't the best place to start.