Beto must be doing well, if the Club for Growth goes after him

A WSJ editorial. Yes, with the obligatory digs at us, still interesting. And, yes, it points the pitfall that some here may meet.

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The Club for Growth of Identity Politics

Beto O’Rourke hadn’t even said he was running for President yet, but earlier this week the Club for Growth political action committee announced a five-figure ad buy attacking the former Texas Senate candidate in Iowa. A video ad released last Sunday on YouTube criticizes Mr. O’Rourke for his record as an El Paso City Councilman, a 1998 drunken-driving arrest, and disparaging comments he made about women as a 19-year-old writing for a student newspaper.

Scrutinizing Mr. O’Rourke’s political record is fair game, but we’re sorry to see the Club for Growth resort to the Senate Judiciary Committee standard of vetting teenage prose. In a news release Monday, the Club also dubbed Mr. O’Rourke “the privileged white man Democrats say they hate.” The YouTube ad quotes a San Antonio Express-News columnist who said Mr. O’Rourke is “guilty of cultural appropriation” because he isn’t Latino but uses a Spanish diminutive for his full first name, Robert. The ad accuses Mr. O’Rourke’s campaign of exemplifying “the kind of navel-gazing, self-involved behavior a woman or person of color could never get away with.”

Club for Growth President David McIntosh says Mr. O’Rourke will be a strong candidate so “we purposefully used language and character traits and issues that we knew Democrats and the Democratic Primary would care about.” Mr. McIntosh adds that “the major thrust here is that Beto is a character who’s selling himself as one thing, but the reality is he’s very different. [Mr. O’Rourke’s nickname] is an example of that. That, we think of as a character deficiency.”

More..

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-club-for-growth-of-identity-politics-11552605165 (Paid subscription)