Don't Mess With Texas

HE’S A KENNEDYESQUE LONG SHOT IN A ROILING RED STATE. SO WHY ARE SO MANY PEOPLE BETTING ON BETO O’ROURKE?

- ​​​​​​​Matt Viser

Just after he was elected to Congress in 2012, Beto O’Rourke was in a bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with several other newly elected pals. A woman came up, looked at O’Rourke, and said, “Are you who I think you are?”

He had just won a long-shot race for a House seat that had garnered some national attention, so he said yes, he thought he probably was who she thought he was. She pulled him over to her table to meet her friends. They gave him high-fives and started taking pictures.

“It dawns on me: They don’t think I’m Beto, they think I’m Joe Kennedy, or at least some Kennedy,” O’Rourke says. Finally he confessed, “ ‘I’m not who you think I am. I’m Beto. From El Paso.’ I could just see the thrill go out of their eyes.”

Luckily, the real Joe Kennedy was nearby, so O’Rourke went back to the table and grabbed him to come pose for some photos.

“Beto is often referred to as the best-looking Kennedy in Washington,” says Joe Kennedy, who is now close enough friends with O’Rourke to have borrowed his dress shirt one time when he arrived at an event while covered in coffee stains. “Which wouldn’t be so bad if I weren’t standing right next to him when it happens.”

Six years after that encounter at the bar, O’Rourke is running a U.S. Senate campaign a world away, in Texas—a race that resembles one run by another Kennedy. It’s not just the toothy grin, the tall stature, and the shock of hair swept over his brow.

With a disdain for highly paid consultants, a willingness to travel to unexpected places, and an inspiring message for an extraordinarily divided electorate, it’s hard to look at O’Rourke and not think of Bobby Kennedy in 1968.