O’Rourke is more than a decade into his political career, but he continues to portray himself successfully as a fresh-faced outsider. Part of this is due to O’Rourke’s approach to the political process: he’s refusing to take donations from political action committees, favors congressional term limits, shuns outside campaign consultants in favor of trusted El Paso friends, and extols the potential of working across the aisle in an era of partisan knife-fighting. But it’s O’Rourke’s charisma that sells his pitch. He is 45 but comes across as a decade younger. He has a full head of hair and a toothy, boyish smile, and evidence suggests that he has the metabolism of a 16-year-old in the midst of a growth spurt. (O’Rourke is trim and athletic, but his campaign eating habits are more Trump than Obama, with meals that can consist of a burger, a full order of chicken nuggets, and a brownie.) O’Rourke seems to relish saying “fuck” on the stump. He speaks fluent Spanish. He looks like a Kennedy. (Massachusetts congressman Joe Kennedy III, Bobby’s grandson, jokes that O’Rourke is “known as being the best-looking Kennedy in Washington.”) Add to this the fact that O’Rourke’s wife, Amy, is nine years his junior, that his three children are all elementary-school-aged, and that he chose to name his oldest son Ulysses (stump speech joke: “We named him Ulysses because we didn’t have the balls to name him Odysseus”), and O’Rourke overwhelms you with a sense of his vigorousness.

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O’Rourke’s standard stump speech checks off all the boxes for a liberal politician in the aftermath of the 2016 election, which is to say it’s the kind of speech that you’d expect to slay on a college campus. O’Rourke is pro–universal healthcare, pro–universal background checks, pro-Dreamer, anti–border wall, and in favor of restraint in foreign policy and a clear end to America’s decade-and-a-half-long wars. (His most heterodox position for some on the left is his support of free-trade agreements.) He rarely mentions Cruz, but when he does—to criticize his hyperconservative rigidity, to skewer him for running for president from his first day in office instead of representing the people of Texas—the senator’s name is sometimes met with audible hisses.

But the heart of O’Rourke’s appeal to Texas voters—and the reason he’s running—is grander than policy positions or political attacks. As he spoke to the students, he framed the coming election as an epochal moral choice.

“Everything that we care about is on the line for this country today,” O’Rourke said. “We know exactly what direction we’re headed in when the president of the United States of America says he wants to ban all people of one religion from coming into this country. We know where things are going when, given our relative security and safety on the border, he wants to spend $25 billion of your money building a thirty-foot-high, two-thousand-mile, pure-concrete wall to separate us from Mexico. We know where things are going when he attacks the press as the enemy of the people.”

We needed to think about how the future would judge us, O’Rourke said, and he painted a scene. One day, he imagined, when his three children were old enough to understand the full weight of this historical moment, they would ask, “Dad, when all this stuff was going on, where were you? What did you do? Did you stand up? Were you counted?” O’Rourke suggested the students imagine themselves in a similar scenario and ask themselves those questions. Would they be part of the so-called resistance? Or would they stay home and watch as Cruz and Trump continued to impose their will on America?

Beto O’Rourke will have to define himself against a crowded field of Democratic candidates, but he doesn’t feel the need to draw blood to define himself. “I just don’t get turned on by being against,” he says. “I really get excited to be for. That’s what moves me. It’s important to defeat Trump, but that’s not exciting to me. What’s exciting to me is for the United States to lead the world, in making sure that the generations that follow us can live here.

“What’s exciting to me is figuring out something that has eluded us for so long: How do we make sure every single person can see a doctor in this country?” he adds. “That’s really exciting to me.”

Pressed on his national-policy positions, O’Rourke says he wants to shore up the Affordable Care Act and make Medicare part of the health-care marketplace, and eventually make “health care for all” a reality. He would also make climate change a top priority. “Keeping the planet from warming one-half degree Celsius, for me, is the most important for humanity,” he says. He supports Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal in spirit, if not every letter. “The goal of converting to 100 percent renewable energy within a decade, I love,” he says. “It’s ambitious. It captures your imagination.”

As if to rebut the inevitable accusations that he’s a socialist, he proclaims himself a proud capitalist—among the few Democratic candidates, he points out, who have been small-business owners. “The ingenuity and innovation that you only find in America and in capitalist systems, the ability to harness the power of the market,” he says, “it’s hard to argue against pricing carbon and allowing the market to respond to that.”

He also believes in a version of Ocasio-Cortez’s call for a higher top marginal tax rate, though he doesn’t volunteer the 70 percent number, and he makes a different sort of argument. “If you’re trying to mobilize this country to meet an existential threat, as we did against the Nazis in World War II, then you’re going to have to ask everyone to sacrifice,” he says. “If you don’t see a shared interest or shared opportunity to advance, then we’ll no longer see ourselves in this together and this country will truly break apart. This level of gross income inequality cannot persist, and if there’s a better way to get there, I’m open to it. But it’s definitely going to involve higher marginal rates on the very wealthiest in this country.”

His biggest strength, of course, is his unique credibility as a voice on immigration. O’Rourke wants to end the War on Drugs, raise the cap on work visas, find a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and create a system with the Mexican government that would track who was in the country. “In my opinion, that includes citizenship for Dreamers, a legal path to citizenship for their parents, and the ability to get right with the law, and work legally, and pay taxes, and pursue a path to citizenship for millions of others who’ve been working the toughest jobs here.”

For some, O’Rourke can still seem politically indistinct, even slippery, but that may be part of his strategy. When asked if he’s a progressive, a question that will surely dog him in the weeks to come, O’Rourke hedges with the aplomb of Barack Obama circa 2008: “I leave that to other people. I’m not into the labels. My sense in traveling Texas for the past two years, my sense is that people really aren’t into them either.”

Positions on issues matter, of course, but they aren’t everything. Indeed, in the Trump era it may well be that harnessing intense voter passion is more important when facing a bombastic cult of personality who draws on Fox News rage-ratings. Beto O’Rourke is selling the idea that he can unite the country by playing nice with the kind of people he met in rural Texas on his Senate campaign: middle Americans who had barely met a Democrat, let alone considered voting for one. But O’Rourke also sells a kind of cult of personality of his own, offering himself as the David to Trump’s Goliath, a folk hero for our time. He acknowledges that what has made Trump successful is also what has made him successful—an outsider who “bent the media to his campaign,” as he puts it.

But unlike Trump, O’Rourke can appear almost too innocent to be a politician—too decent, too wholesome, the very reason he became popular also the same reason he could be crucified on the national stage. I tell O’Rourke that perhaps he’s simply too normal to be president. “Whether you meant it or not, I take that as a compliment,” he says.