Beto O’Rourke Failed His Campaign When He Apologized For Being White
ONN – Beto O’Rourke Failed His Campaign When He Apologized For Being White
(Vlog transcript): Hey everybody! A couple of friends of mine decided to – well in fairness one didn’t, the other did – but John hood who I have known each other way I back to my Cal days, decided to tag me on Facebook. I’m thinking it “Why am I being tagged?” and it was some sort of rant that Steve Heywood (who is the brother my friend, longtime friend, Greg Heywood (we all went to school together to Cal) headmen on this rant about why Beto O”Roarke dropped out, and mentioned something about lefties and weakness, and and all that. (Uh. I am of the left however even though technically I’m center left. Whatever. I don’t care about that.)
I have this observation I want to share with Steve and John and everyone else in the world regarding why I believe Beto O”Roarke failed. Primarily, because, how do I put it, the idea of Beto O’Rourke was bigger than the reality of Beto O’Rourke. And when the reality of Beto O”Roarke hit, what we saw was a person who was still pretty much at odds with his place of how he perceived – his place in the world – versus reality.
The reality is the dude was running for high office. He ran for Congress and then he ran for Senate, but he didn’t beat Ted Cruz. And that was my first clue that “hey there wasn’t as much there as people said there was” in terms of his ability to win it – be a leader.
But he pressed forward, and suddenly ‘boom’ a presidential candidate, and I thought “Well the the train keeps going. It apparently is picking up steam in this direction toward the eventual path of the White House, right?
And then he did something in July that personally bugged me. He apologized for being white, and talked about white privilege, and at that point he lost me. Yeah it wasn’t that he was right about it, it’s just that if you’re running for president of the United States you don’t apologize for who you are.
Barack Obama at no point ever apologize for who he or was. He was strong. He made a statement – he said messages that we all wanted to hear. But he never, at any point, apologized for who he was as a person. And in all my life, people who were proud of who they were, were consistently that.
I remember my grammar school – way back in Skyline, my high school teacher in English Mr. Rizzo. He would always say I’m Italian – and would say that all the time in front of the class and everybody
And it wasn’t a joke. It was presented in this way that was oh so wonderfully, one would think, “Italian”: free of life, free of, free to express themselves. Free of.. of worry. Enjoying a life and that in his own way was the sign of a leader. And so, what I felt was that: this is a person who understood who he was unabashedly, so he was actually even dating the person I was in high school with in my class think about that (And no one thought anything wrong was wrong with it, think about that to, okay?), but he was unabashedly himself
Beto O’Roarke was not unabashedly himself. Yeah, we know that white privilege exists. We know there are people who are white supremacist. We know people are racist – fine. But, as a leader, you don’t want to say to people who look like you ‘Oh, hey, by the way, I’m white, and you’re white, and I think being white sucks.’ Are you gonna vote for somebody like that? Of course not. No one is.
So it could be no surprise that after that July, his support started going away. I mean you don’t want to go on an ethnic apology tour with someone who’s running for the White House. You want that person to represent the best of America, and regardless of color, you want to see in that person best of how you can be and how the country can be. And that should transcend race.
And for Beto O’Roarke, he basically said to lot of white folks “I’m sorry for being white”, but he said to me as a black guy “Hey, I’m sorry for being me too, and I hope you like me because of that” and I’m thinking “No dude. You’re an awful presidential candidate. You have to show strength. You have to like who you are, regardless of who you are. And in this world of people in social media – too often attack each other. There’s a shame culture. In order to be a strong leader, you have to be strong enough to say to everybody else “Heck with it! I am who I am. I know I’m good, and that’s it!”
And that message didn’t resonate with Beto O’Roarke.
But with Barack Obama, he never had to apologize for who he is. And if you think about, it and I hate to put it this way, but it has to be said: Donald Trump does not apologize for who he is either.
Keep that in mind; back for more.
Note from Oakland News Now Technical: this video-blog post shows the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018. This is a major part of Zennie62Media’s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. The uploaded video is from a vlogger with the Zennie62 on YouTube Partner Channel, then uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Now site and Zennie62-owned social media pages. The overall objective is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours. Now, news is reported with a smartphone: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners.