On Monday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles talks about how the media oversold Beto O’Rourke’s appeal. Video and partial transcript below:
The Beto O’Rourke campaign is officially over. Seems like it barely began, but it is officially over. I am not going to gloat over Beto O’Rourke’s campaign being over. I’m going to miss Beto O’Rourke. He is hilarious.
He was the doofiest candidate in the entire race, he was skateboarding around WhatABurger parking lots, he was filming his dental hygienist while she was poking around his teeth. He was hilarious, he was great. He reminded me of every kind of whiny liberal guy who would hit on your girlfriend when you went out of town. You know, he was just like the archetypal, liberal progressive guy. Really sensitive guy, you know.
He’s out of the race now, which is a huge slap in the face, not to his campaign staffers or his donors or even himself — it’s a huge slap in the face to the mainstream media. The reason that Beto O’Rourke dropping out matters — the only reason that it matters — is because it highlights something that we talk about every other day on the show, probably [that] you should not believe the press. …
That’s the mainstream media for you. And guess who the mainstream media’s favorite presidential candidate was for months? Beto O’Rourke. Big, beautiful, glossy-pictures-in-Vanity-Fair Beto O’Rourke. Tucker Carlson over at Fox put together just a quick little montage of the press’s reaction when Beto got into the race.
JOURNALIST 1: I saw him for the first time just a month ago when he sat down with Oprah, and me and the rest of people in the audience thought, “Wow, this guy has this dynamic positive energy.”
JOURNALIST 2: Yeah, he has that raw talent, he is very kind of Obamaesque, indeed.
JOURNALIST 3: Women voted for him in the suburbs of Houston who hadn’t voted Democrat before because they had a kind of “Beto crush” going on.
JOURNALIST 4: You know, he’s wholesome and he’s earnest.
JOURNALIST 5: He’s got that magic dust. Of course, his son is named Ulysses. I love that that’s his sons.
JOURNALIST 6: And he has that gleam in his eye, somebody, Evan Smith in the Texas Tribune, said seeing him, it’s like a “Jesus Christ Superstar,” seeing this guy in front of people. He’s got that celebrity aura about him, and in that moment he was owning that.
None of that is true. Not a single aspect of what they just said is true. He’s not terribly charismatic — he’s really awkward, and weird, and stiff, and goofy. He’s not like a celebrity, he doesn’t make women swoon. He’s kind of a weird guy. He not Jesus Christ, I know the press actually said he was “Jesus Christ Superstar” — He’s not. He’s an ex-congressman who lost a Senate seat, who lost a presidential race, who skateboards around a WhatABurger parking lot.
He’s also not that earnest. I mean, he tries to affect an earnest persona, [but] he doesn’t believe in anything. He changes his views day-to-day. At first he said — this was a few months ago — he said, “We will never take away your AR-15s, we’re not going to confiscate your guns.” Then like two months later, he said, “Hell yeah, we’re going to confiscate your AR-15s,” shortly after which he said, “Hell yeah we’re going to drop out of the presidential race.” Because he was going nowhere, he didn’t catch on with anybody. He actually said in Iowa, where he got onto a table — because this was his shtick for a while, he would stand on top of tables before crowds of fifteen, sometimes twenty people, all of whom were in the mainstream media, by the way — and he said, “I want you to shape me into the presidential candidate that you want.”
That is not the campaign theme of somebody who’s earnest, somebody with conviction, somebody who’s charismatic, somebody that people can fall head over heels for. That is the presidential campaign theme of a hack who doesn’t believe in anything, who’s just desperate for power, who says from the very first moments of his campaign, I was born for this. I was born to do this, I’m in it to win it.
He’s one of the first candidates out of the race.