Happy Birthday Beto!

Today is Beto O'Rourke's 47th birthday.

Beto O'Rourke's Long, Hot Road to the Texas Primary

They're out early, long before lunchtime, in the off-and-on rain, staking out corners and putting out their signs before the police vans and the big gravel trucks from the highway department block the streets around Texas Southern University and seal off Debate Land, an alien habitat filled with exotic species of politico and media star who thrive in this hermetic atmosphere. They want you to honk if you love Beto.

The O'Rourke volunteers are not alone as they secure the perimeter and prep their "visibility" for the Sept. 12 Democratic debate. Ambassadors from Castro Country happily dodge the rain at a bus shelter, a few older Biden fans pop up, and Klobuchar's team methodically puts up green "Amy for America" signs at precise intervals along the sidewalks. Others also seek attention, like veritable goon Randall Terry and his anti-abortion bus, covered in shrieking slogans and floating fetuses, parked in front of some unfortunate neighbor's house. He's got live music: teenage boys on bass and drums, MAGA hats askew. There are fierce defenders of charter schools (Houston has many) and seekers of reparations and legal-dope enthusiasts and T-shirt sellers eager to turn Texas blue. There is beer. The actual debate is still eight hours away.

Team Beto expects to outnumber them all; even in these early moments of Debate Game Day, the familiar black-and-white Whataburger-Spicy-Ketchup Beto visuals are everywhere in sight for blocks and blocks. The folks with the signs have never really stopped stumping for their guy since last November, when he came so close to being a senator that a second Senate race seemed to him anticlimactic. Now, the erratic path of the comet that is Beto 2020 is swooping closer to earth and to Texas, and they are ready. "Those were all volunteers, and they really organized that themselves," the O'Rourke campaign told us after the event. In Iowa, paid organizers spend days building visibility squads for the big cattle calls; in Texas, they just showed up. "That energy is just going to keep building."

For the evening, and for the international press corps stuffed into a TSU gym – the "media center and spin room" – with lukewarm fajitas and ABC News swag and no beer and multiple layers of well-armed security, this on-the-ground-in-Texas stuff feels very far away, just as Beto O'Rourke is still very far away from being president, and far from center stage as the debate transpires 1,000 feet away in a different, nicer TSU gym. Julián Castro is even more distant from those destinations, despite how good he looks and has always looked on paper, and both Texans need to do Something Big on that stage to keep themselves in the 2020 conversation that's being managed by the people in this room. Us ink-stained wretches have numbered spots at closely packed tables on one side of the gym; the famous TV people are perched in their tiny little sets flanking the blue carpet of the "spin room" (not really a room, just a zone) on the other side. We're the real audience for the candidates tonight, and this crowd is ready for a rumble.

Read more: https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2019-09-27/beto-o-rourkes-long-hot-road-to-the-texas-primary/