O’Rourke keeps Biden at arm’s length

Well, well, well. Looky there! Democratic gubernatorial front-runner Beto O’Rourke doesn’t want Joe Biden to campaign for him.

O’Rourke to Biden: stay out of Texas business

The Dallas Morning News broke the story Friday. Beto O’Rourke was holding a news conference in Austin, Texas, to talk about mail-in ballots. It seems that election officials in Dallas, Tarrant, Collin and Denton Counties are rejecting as many as forty percent of mail-in ballot applications. Ten U.S. House Democrats from Texas want the U.S. Justice Department to audit those counties.

So Beto O’Rourke called a news conference to talk about the mail-in ballots. Inevitably someone asked him whether he would welcome Joe Biden’s support of his campaign for governor. And he said:

I’m not interested in any national politician — anyone outside of Texas — coming into this state to help decide the outcome of this. I think we all want to make sure that we’re working with, listening to and voting with one another here in Texas.

Whoa.

O’Rourke said the same back in November of last year, on CNN’s State of the Union:

This campaign in Texas is not going to be about Joe Biden. It’s not going to be about Donald Trump. It’s not going to be about anyone from outside of our state. This is going to be about the people of Texas and what the people of Texas want,” O’Rourke said. “I’m focused on Texas and on my fellow Texans. Those are the people most important to me. There’s no politician, there’s no other person from outside of this state who can help change the course of this election, for better or for worse.

What has changed?

Funny. Beto was sure willing to share a stage with Biden in March 2020. He even endorsed Biden in the Presidential primary. The Dallas Morning News’ Philip Jankowski reproduced the AP photo of O’Rourke and Biden sharing a stage for that event.

So what changed? Well, O’Rourke apparently blamed “action or inaction from Congress and the Supreme Court” on:

• Those two mis-called voting rights acts, and
• The Texas Heartbeat Act.

With regard to that last, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 not to enjoin the Act. They heard arguments, then remanded the case to Texas state courts, not federal court. So Beto O’Rourke now says:

No one in Washington D.C. right now can help us with the challenges that we have. This one is on all of us.

Horsefeathers. Especially since Beto was saying the same kind of thing before any of this happened about the federalization of elections or the Texas Heartbeat Act. So clearly, that’s not it.

No, Beto O’Rourke recognizes what Virginia former Governor Terence McAuliffe also recognized. Which is that Joe Biden can’t help him, and would in fact make things worse. Of course, McAuliffe lost anyway. It was too late for him to tell Biden not to stick his nose into Virginia business. Particularly when Barack Obama did stick his nose in.

Beto hopes it’s not too late for him to say this is all about Texas. Which shows, in Biden’s case, how the (allegedly) mighty have fallen.