Matt Flegenheimer

“Medicare for All is comprehensive,” he insisted, swatting away concerns that his health care plan might imperil benefits for union members. “It covers all health care needs,” he said.

Older Americans, he enthused, would be covered for dental care, hearing aids, eyeglasses.

“You don’t know that,” Rep. Tim Ryan, a union-country congressman from northeast Ohio, interjected, later reasoning that Sanders “does not know all of the union contracts in the United States.” “You don’t know that, Bernie.”

Ryan turned to face him. For a moment, Sanders appeared inclined to ignore the interruption.

“Second of all, second of all,” he said, waving off Ryan.

Then the Vermont senator reconsidered.

“I do know it,” he said. “I wrote the damn bill!”

For months, Sanders, 77 and familiar by now, has often strained to stand out in an oversize field stocked with fresher faces. He has appealed to voters’ memories of his insurgent challenge to Hillary Clinton in 2016, barely changing his stump speech for the 2020 race. He has reminded audiences that he was at the leading edge of the Democrats’ leftward lurch: free college, Medicare for All, higher taxes on the wealthy. And while few can summon the rumpled zeal of Sanders in full riff, some in the party have appeared to view Sanders as a less essential vessel, welcoming a new voice if it sounds enough like his.

But in his blithe dismissal of Ryan on Tuesday and other exchanges like it — with several candidates nipping at him and a team of CNN moderators goading the contenders into open conflict — Sanders made this much clear: For better or worse for the party, he can still own the Democratic debate. And, on this night, the Democratic debate stage.

The questions were about him. The answers were about him. The acoustics were about him. (“You don’t have to yell,” Ryan said at one point.) A viewer with the sound off would have had no trouble guessing which candidate many rivals were aiming at. “Do you believe Sen. Sanders is too extreme to beat President Trump?” a CNN chyron read.

Many Democrats fear not only that the answer is yes but also that merely entertaining the kinds of policies Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren are pushing jeopardizes the party’s electoral fortunes. On health care in particular, moderates both inside and outside the two-dozen-strong presidential field have sounded alarms about how voters will respond to promises of dismantling private insurance.

“We can go down the road that Sen. Sanders and Sen. Warren want to take us, which is with bad policies like Medicare for All, free everything, and impossible promises that will turn off independent voters and get Trump reelected,” former Rep. John Delaney predicted Tuesday night, before ticking off the surnames of past Democratic presidential losers. “That’s what happened with (George) McGovern, that’s what happened with (Walter) Mondale, that’s what happened with (Michael) Dukakis.”

After an exchange over immigration, Ryan warned that the unyielding progressive tilt of the night’s debate was dangerous politics.

“Now, in this discussion already tonight, we’ve talked about taking private health insurance away from union members in the industrial Midwest, we’ve talked about decriminalizing the border, and we’ve talked about giving free health care to undocumented workers when so many Americans are struggling to pay for their health care,” he said. “I quite frankly don’t think that that is an agenda that we can move forward on and win.”

From their centrally located lecterns, Sanders and Warren, sharing the debate stage for the first time, formed a persistent tag team, quickly dispelling any notion that they might snipe at each other.

Although either’s path to the nomination probably depends on consolidating progressive support, neither has seen much upside in attacking, sustaining a peace born of broadly shared policy goals and a friendship that aides describe as genuine.

“Giant corporations and billionaires are going to pay more,” Warren said of the health care vision she shares with Sanders, in a line either could have uttered. “Middle-class families are going to pay less out of pocket for their health care.”

Their mutual nonaggression was notable, if unsurprising. Sanders’ poll numbers of late have been middling, with Warren appearing to siphon support among some of the party’s most liberal voters, even if their coalitions do not always overlap. (Warren’s base tends to be older, more female and more educated, while Sanders remains especially popular with younger voters.)

Still, the two can be contrasts in style and substance. Sanders speaks of wide-scale revolution; Warren has self-branded as the candidate with a plan for everything. Sanders’ best-known campaign medium is the megarally; Warren has often subsisted on smaller events, defined by personal voter interactions and winding lines for photographs. Sanders aligns himself with democratic socialism; Warren says she is “a capitalist to my bones.”

On Tuesday, Warren declined a moderator’s invitation to label herself “the safer choice” when asked if she was calling herself a capitalist to make a point.

“It’s my way of talking about I know how to fight, and I know how to win,” she said.

In another exchange, as Warren tried to respond to Delaney’s criticism of her trade plan, Sanders briefly jumped in, before being told to wait his turn.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, deferring to his Senate peer.

Soon after, he planted himself firmly on Warren’s side.

“Elizabeth is absolutely right,” he said.

Yet if Warren’s steady rise in recent months has threatened Sanders’ hold on the hearts and minds of some progressives, he demonstrated repeatedly Tuesday that his political brand is to be underestimated at his detractors’ peril, regularly earning ovations from the crowd in Detroit.

After another more moderate rival, former Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, suggested that the Sanders agenda would effectively “FedEx the election to Donald Trump,” Sanders reminded viewers that he is polling well against the president.

“If we’re going to force Americans to make these radical changes, they’re not going to go along,” Hickenlooper said.

He spotted Sanders stewing at the implication that those radical changes were not what people wanted. The senator began to lift his arms in protest.

“Throw your hands up!” Hickenlooper said, urging on the reaction.

And Sanders did just that, and the people roared.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/politics/bernie-sanders-debate.html" id="e3505585-14dc-385f-a655-afb1d95046d8">The New York Times</a>.

Sanders 'Wrote the Damn Bill.' Everyone Else Is Just Fighting About It

Bernie Sanders was at it again — center stage, his baritone building to something — right hand raised and restless, as if he were scribbling his words on an invisible chalkboard.

“Medicare for All is comprehensive,” he insisted, swatting away concerns that his health care plan might imperil benefits for union members. “It covers all health care needs,” he said. Older Americans, he enthused, would be covered for dental care, hearing aids, eyeglasses.

Ryan turned to face him. For a moment, Sanders appeared inclined to ignore the interruption. “Second of all, second of all,” he said, waving off Ryan. Then the Vermont senator reconsidered.

After an exchange over immigration, Ryan warned that the unyielding progressive tilt of the night’s debate was dangerous politics. “Now, in this discussion already tonight, we’ve talked about taking private health insurance away from union members in the industrial Midwest, we’ve talked about decriminalizing the border, and we’ve talked about giving free health care to undocumented workers when so many Americans are struggling to pay for their health care,” he said. “I quite frankly don’t think that that is an agenda that we can move forward on and win.”

Though either’s path to the nomination probably depends on consolidating progressive support, neither has seen much upside in attacking, sustaining a peace born of broadly shared policy goals and a friendship that aides describe as genuine. “Giant corporations and billionaires are going to pay more,” Warren said of the health care vision she shares with Sanders, in a line either could have uttered. “Middle class families are going to pay less out of pocket for their health care.”

On Tuesday, Warren declined a moderator’s invitation to label herself “the safer choice” when asked if she was calling herself a capitalist to make a point. “It’s my way of talking about I know how to fight, and I know how to win,” she said.

In another exchange, as Warren tried to respond to Delaney’s criticism of her trade plan, Sanders briefly jumped in, before being told to wait his turn. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, deferring to his Senate peer. Soon after, he planted himself firmly on Warren’s side. “Elizabeth is absolutely right,” he said.

“If we’re going to force Americans to make these radical changes, they’re not going to go along,” Hickenlooper said. He spotted Sanders stewing a bit. The senator began to lift his arms in protest.

Bernie Sanders 'Wrote the Damn Bill.' Everyone Else Is Just Fighting About It

“What’s the opposite of woe?” Hickenlooper, the former Colorado governor and still-presidential-candidate, asked inside a hotel reception room last week, testing a favorite equine comedy bit before tens of listeners. “Giddy up!” A few people giggled cooperatively.

All right, how about some biography?

“Time magazine called me one of the top-five big-city mayors in America,” he boasted, recalling his time leading Denver, as a couple of Dartmouth College students peeked at their phones.

OK, OK, why don’t we open it up for questions?

“Why not enter the 2020 Senate race?” asked Daisy Hagen, a 16-year-old visiting from Oregon for a debate camp.

“All right. Heh, heh,” Hickenlooper said, swimming a bit in a baggy blue-checkered button-down. “A fair question. You’re not the first person to ask.”

Hickenlooper, 67, will have one more — and quite possibly final — chance to break through on a national stage at the debate next week, though if his June performance is instructive, he is unlikely to see a definitive jump in fundraising or polling. By September, the Democratic National Committee will impose far stricter bench marks to qualify for the debates, and the historically large field will face a mathematically inevitable fate: Not everyone can catch fire.

The challenge Hickenlooper faces is, to some degree, the struggle of the majority of the 2020 candidates. Perhaps five out of two dozen Democrats can credibly claim to be resonating widely at this point.

President Donald Trump’s unlikely rise has only encouraged runaway ambition in elected leaders, fueling a not-unreasonable belief that the volatility of today’s politics favors the bold — or, at least, that there is often little downside to giving a national campaign a try, and hanging on as long as possible.

Yet there is also a kind of Tolstoyan principle of presidential contests: All happy campaigns are alike; each flailing campaign flails in its own way. And Hickenlooper’s disappointment runs deeper than most of his peers’. It is easy to imagine him succeeding in a past cycle, as a popular, moderate two-term executive of a purple state, known for brokering deals on environmental issues and gun regulation. He has arrived instead at a moment of celebri-fied elections and simmering progressive opposition to Trump.

Nowhere is the disconnect more visceral than in the rented reception halls in early-voting states across the country. Eyes migrate to the carpet patterns. Campaign stickers sit unstuck. Volunteer sign-up sheets remain wrenchingly white. It is the difference between polite applause and spontaneous affection, abiding a handshake and demanding a selfie. It is the difference between a former governor and a future president.

“I somehow don’t feel he’s got the punch,” said Rachel Rosenblum, 82, of Danbury, New Hampshire, leaving the Hanover event a few minutes early.

A woman nearby noticed the small gathering through a window and approached Rosenblum, curious to know who had reserved the space. “Is that a private event?” she asked.

“No,” Rosenblum replied. “He wants to win the election.”

Other indignities have been more public. Before the first Democratic debate in Miami, a security guard mistook Hickenlooper for a reporter. In an appearance on “The View” last week, a host, Ana Navarro, confused him with Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington. “All white people look alike, apparently,” a co-host, Joy Behar, said.

It is a particularly humbling comedown for a man who, just a few years ago, garnered reasonably serious consideration to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate — and who retains outsize status in Colorado as the spindly brewpub owner who made it big.

On the campaign trail, he has leaned on business analogies to explain himself. Asked in an interview about a recent staff exodus that saw his campaign manager, finance director and communications director leave, Hickenlooper recalled his personnel turnover once at an underperforming restaurant in Kentucky. “If you’re having trouble getting momentum,” he explained, “you have to adjust everything you can to achieve momentum.”

Asked by a voter how he might overcome the intractability of Mitch McConnell as president, Hickenlooper appeared to liken the Senate majority leader to a moody patron. “One of the basic rules in restaurants is when someone’s really angry, you repeat back to them what they said,” he said. “And in hearing their own words, they feel validated.”

“I’m not saying this will work with Mitch McConnell,” Hickenlooper added. Then again, he did not propose an alternative tack.

On policy, Hickenlooper has moved to establish himself as the sensible antidote to leftist overcorrection. In June, he earned cascading boos at the California state party convention with a speech rejecting socialism. “Did it catapult me into the lead?” Hickenlooper said in the interview. “Not yet.”

On personality, he has reached often for whimsy. He recounted during a CNN forum the time he accidentally went to an X-rated movie with his mother. (“So, I took my mother to see ‘Deep Throat.’”) He punched back playfully at a parody article from The Onion about his “ambitious $250 fundraising goal.” (“Since you published, we’ve already met our goal and we are on track to do more,” Hickenlooper tweeted. He raised $1.1 million last quarter, placing him near the back of the 2020 pack.)

He turns down no opportunity to fetch a banjo and strum.

“Have you seen my YouTubes on the banjo?” he asked during the interview, reaching to tune an instrument he had just purchased for his family vacation home in Squam, New Hampshire.

After months of internal friction and, according to Hickenlooper, a meeting at which several senior advisers suggested he drop out and run for the Senate, his new and remaining aides say this is their most viable strategy: letting Hickenlooper be himself. His circle now comprises a mix of true believers determined to see him shine and mercenary professionals happy to attach themselves to a presidential campaign. Recent hires have included veterans of the stalled prospective candidacy of Howard Schultz, the billionaire former chief executive of Starbucks, and the failed Chicago mayoral bid of William M. Daley.

“Somebody told me you like milkshakes,” Peter Cunningham, Hickenlooper’s new communications director, told him from behind the wheel of their New Hampshire rental car. Cunningham gestured toward the strawberry and chocolate shakes he had procured between events. Hickenlooper’s face fell a bit. “Vanilla milkshakes,” he said. He settled for strawberry.

But Hickenlooper has also retained admirers deeply committed to his cause. He was joined in Hanover by a friend and supporter, Minyoung Sohn, who appeared to choke up while introducing him. “I’m here because I love this man, John Hickenlooper,” he said. “I know we’re only polling 1%, but we’ve got a plan.”

Alan Salazar, a former senior Hickenlooper aide in Colorado, suggested it was a mistake to ever count him out. “Lightning can strike,” he said.

Hickenlooper appears genuinely surprised that it hasn’t yet, after years of bending local politics to his whims. As he prepared to enter the race several months ago, he privately assured associates he had a handle on how to distinguish himself.

“What struck me was how confident he was,” recalled Gary Hart, the former Colorado senator and two-time presidential candidate to whom Hickenlooper made a pilgrimage for a meeting before his 2020 run. “I just said, ‘John, it really costs a lot of money.’ He said, ‘I’ve got that covered, I have a lot of wealthy friends and friends who know wealthy people who have committed to raise whatever it takes.’ That made me a little nervous.”

In the interview, Hickenlooper acknowledged that he had “misjudged how difficult it would be to raise money with so many candidates.” And he conceded some frustration that his message was not resonating “as frequently as I’d like.”

“You saw that one TV reporter ask, ‘Does it bother you that you’re at 0% in this poll?’” Hickenlooper said. “I felt like saying, ‘What are you kidding? Of course it bothers me.’”

But so far, he has betrayed no intention to step aside. On Thursday, he tweeted with pride, and a #GiddyUp hashtag, that a Fox News poll put him at 2%. “You did this,” he wrote. “This campaign is gaining serious momentum and we’re just getting started.” (The poll listed a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points.)

In New Hampshire, Hickenlooper presented himself as a leader of singular experience in the field, as the governor of an economically diverse state. He took aim in the interview not at front-runners like Joe Biden or Kamala Harris but at the records of two other low-polling governors from the West: Inslee and Steve Bullock of Montana.

“Jay Inslee’s economic success is pretty much all in Seattle,” Hickenlooper said. “Bullock, where’s his economic development?”

Hickenlooper insists he would present the strongest challenge to the president, pledging to defuse any Trumpian taunts with the slashing wit he forged growing up as “a skinny kid with a funny last name” and Coke-bottle glasses. “He’s going to come up to me and come up with some great nickname and I’m going to say, ‘That’s the best you can do?’” Hickenlooper told about 30 people at a backyard gathering in Laconia, New Hampshire. “‘You couldn’t come up with Chickencooper or Poopenscooper?’”

He was joined for this event by his half brother, Sydney Kennedy, a rare attendee in a “HICKENLOOPER” shirt.

Kennedy, 74, was asked afterward how he thought the campaign was going. He held for eight seconds of silence. A few yards away, Hickenlooper retrieved the banjo from the back seat of the rental.

“How do I think it’s going?” Kennedy repeated, as the candidate plucked on. “John’s who he is, who he is.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/us/politics/john-hickenlooper-2020-campaign.html" id="5387af08-39d1-30c1-a27f-3b8d2fbb83c5">The New York Times</a>.

The Extraordinary Humbling of John Hickenlooper

HANOVER, N.H. — Can John Hickenlooper interest you in a joke?

But so far, he has betrayed no intention to step aside. Presenting himself as a leader of singular experience in the field, as the governor of an economically diverse state, he took aim in the interview not at front-runners like Joe Biden or Kamala Harris but at the records of two other low-polling governors from the West: Inslee and Steve Bullock of Montana.

Here's Why John Hickenlooper and His Banjo Are Still in the 2020 Race

“There’s just absolutely no downside and only upside,” Antonia Ferrier, a longtime Republican strategist, said of quixotic presidential runs. “It is an industry of self-promotion. What better way to self-promote than run for president?”

Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, has leveraged two losing presidential campaigns into an empire of folksy conservative ubiquity across television, radio and print. Ben Carson transitioned from renowned neurosurgeon to national hero of the right during a 2016 run that included an extended midcampaign hiatus to promote his book. His efforts were rewarded with a job in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker, clawed back to national prominence seven years ago despite posing little threat to take the nomination.

“It gives you a certain stature the rest of your life, kind of like having once been speaker of the House,” Gingrich said in an interview. “They introduce you, and then they say, ‘... and former presidential candidate!’ It’s not bad.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who sought the Democratic nomination in 2004, said the experience aided his civil rights advocacy and increased his personal clout, expanding his opportunities even though he never approached serious electoral strength.

He recalled hosting “Saturday Night Live” just before the primaries and later securing an invitation to meet with President George W. Bush. “No one in New York, when I was a tracksuit-wearing local activist, would ever dream I would sit down with a Republican president or host ‘Saturday Night Live,’” Sharpton said.

Of course, it was Trump’s belief in the branding powers of a presidential campaign that pulled him into the 2016 race — and his triumph that has helped inspire successors. But Trump was already famous when he declared his intentions. And his blistering campaign style revealed a potential complication for those who see only benefits in running: Some of the top-tier contenders in 2016 — like Jeb Bush, appraised as “low energy” on Trump’s Twitter feed — came away plainly diminished as national figures.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/us/politics/democrats-2020-presidential-field.html" id="dbd442b9-39dd-36f7-a15d-fd4fa759fcab">The New York Times</a>.

Today’s primaries tend to produce one nominee but many winners. Beyond the long-shot candidates effectively auditioning for Cabinet positions or building a profile (and donor base) for future races, there are prospective books to sell and television contracts to sign, boards to join and paid speeches to paid-speak. Any setback is temporary, any embarrassment surmountable.

The Many Reasons to Run for President When You Probably Don't Stand a Chance

The case against: He is a 38-year-old California congressman of little legislative distinction. He would appear to have minimal running room in a deep and accomplished Democratic field expected to grow to 20 or so — large enough to fill two baseball starting lineups, with another contender or two left to heckle from the dugout.

“We don’t have time for vanity things,” Swalwell insisted in an interview this past week, the morning after he announced his candidacy on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” pledging to anchor his bid in a call for greater gun control. “We’re doing big things.”

That remains to be seen. But at the very least, if recent history is a guide, a run is likely to yield better things, perpetuating the victory-in-defeat incentive structure endemic to modern presidential politics.

Today’s primaries tend to produce one nominee but many winners. Beyond the long-shot candidates effectively auditioning for Cabinet positions or building a profile (and donor base) for future races, there are prospective books to sell and television contracts to sign, boards to join and paid speeches to paid-speak. Any setback is temporary, any embarrassment surmountable.

“There’s just absolutely no downside and only upside,” Antonia Ferrier, a longtime Republican strategist and former senior aide to Sen. Mitch McConnell, said of quixotic presidential runs. “It is an industry of self-promotion. What better way to self-promote than run for president?”

Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker, clawed back to national prominence seven years ago despite posing little threat to take the nomination, turning the protagonist of his wife’s children’s book — a fictional elephant named Ellis — into a kind of campaign mascot available for voter consumption.

It is not. And underdog entrants have grown skilled at presenting their campaigns in altruistic terms, suggesting that finding a platform for a worthy cause is a reward tantamount to winning.

Tulsi Gabbard, a Hawaii congresswoman barely registering in most polls, has presented herself as the “peace” candidate opposed to military intervention overseas, though her willingness to visit President Bashar Assad of Syria has attracted wide scrutiny. Andrew Yang, a businessman and political newcomer, has found a semi-viral following with a focus on automation and a “universal basic income.”

“It opened doors. I was taken more seriously and what I represented was taken more seriously,” Sharpton said.

Of course, it was Trump’s belief in the branding powers of a presidential campaign that pulled him into the 2016 race — and his triumph that has helped inspire successors. But Trump was already famous when he declared his intentions. And his blistering campaign style revealed a potential complication for those who see only benefits in running: Some of the top-tier contenders in 2016 — like Jeb Bush, appraised as “low energy” on Trump’s Twitter feed — came away plainly diminished as national figures. (Others, like Rick Perry and Carson, joined Trump’s administration.)

Severe humiliation seems less likely among these Democrats, without a leading candidate who revels in savaging others in the party. In fact, for those with little to lose but an election, a national campaign appears to have grown only more attractive, even in a primary contest now teeming with 18 candidates.

Many politicians look in the mirror and see a president. But at least as many look at the television, see peers with equivalent qualifications succeeding and reason that they should wander onto the set themselves.

If Beto O’Rourke, a Senate-race-loser little known before last year, can shoot to the top tier of the Democratic field, what is stopping others? If Pete Buttigieg — a millennial mayor of a barely midsize city who was an also-ran in a 2017 bid to head the Democratic National Committee — can achieve national celebrity, why can’t anyone?

“I don’t think anyone who runs for president does it just to boost their careers,” said Steve Israel, the former chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “At the back of your mind is the constant calculation that you can catch some wave.”

Swalwell, explaining his decision to run, cited Buttigieg’s success as evidence of his own viability. “We’re seeing generational cases being made here and they’re landing,” Swalwell said. “It’s completely reaffirmed to me that a generational candidate can connect.”

This Democratic cycle does afford uncommon courtesies to nonfavorites. Sensitive to any perception of party meddling from on high, the DNC does not plan to place front-runners and long shots on separate debate stages, opting against the so-called undercard debate format used for low-polling Republicans in 2016. Democrats who reach a minimum (and not especially stringent) threshold for polling or fundraising will be slotted randomly into one of two debates on consecutive nights; some lesser-known contenders, including Yang, already seem poised to qualify.

Rick Santorum, a Republican presidential candidate in 2012 and 2016 who has since become a political commentator on CNN, noted that his network was inviting Democratic candidates on air for hourlong town hall forums, whether or not they have gained much traction.

“There’s just so many more opportunities to break through,” he said. “I don’t know anybody who has a quasi-legitimate shot at running for president who should pass it up.”

But Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator who won 11 states in 2012 as the primary runner-up to Mitt Romney, cautioned candidates against expecting lasting personal dividends from an unsuccessful run.

“I was on the national stage before,” he said, suggesting that his presidential campaigns had little effect on his future prospects. “I did Fox for five years after I left the Senate. I did books. If you’re someone who’s relatively obscure, who’s not had a national profile, I don’t know. You can ask them.”

This warning was bipartisan. Lincoln Chafee, the former Rhode Island governor who sought the Democratic nomination in 2016, said his professional life had not appreciably changed since a campaign that was most closely associated with his pitch to convert national measurements to the metric system (and that ended after only four months).

He still believes he deserved a longer look. “I was in favor of bringing Snowden home, stopping drone strikes, ending capital punishment,” Chafee said. “But everyone screamed about metric.”

He contends that the instincts that led him into the 2016 contest, despite Hillary Clinton’s overwhelming advantages, were validated by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ strong showing.

“I always thought there was room for somebody to take off,” Chafee said. “I was right. It just wasn’t me.”

There is no discernible mass groundswell for an Eric Swalwell presidential campaign.

All at once, New York City seemed to be conspiring against Beto O’Rourke.

His girlfriend was moving to France. His punk bandmates had scattered. Twenty-three and searching — with an Ivy League degree that could not pay rent — O’Rourke subsisted as a live-in nanny on the Upper West Side, with a futon in the maid’s quarters, watching over a wealthy family’s two preschoolers.

“I just remember his dad coming,” said the former girlfriend, Sasha Watson, recalling a pep talk from Pat O’Rourke, a prominent Texas county commissioner and judge, who insisted his son was destined for “bigger things.”

“He really saw great things for Beto.”

Great things were not happening. By late 1995, O’Rourke had fallen into the deepest depression he can remember. He worked for an uncle’s tech business because it was a job. He spent nights alone listening to his cassettes because it passed the time.

“Little bit of a sad case,” O’Rourke said.

More than two decades later, long after what friends describe as a quarter-life crisis, O’Rourke has arrived at a midlife crossroads of enormous consequence, with revealing parallels to his time in New York. Forty-six and searching — after a narrow Senate loss in Texas last year that propelled the former El Paso congressman to Democratic stardom — he has been driving around the country, alone, introducing himself to strangers, deciding if he wants to run for president.

He has described himself as “stuck,” in and out of a “funk.” He has compared the present reckoning to moments of rootlessness in the city, when he last found himself out of work.

“I just didn’t ever want to feel like that or be in that place or that position again,” O’Rourke said in an hourlong phone interview. “So that lately has felt kind of strange, maybe with some echoes.”

Early polls and prospective opponents agree that O’Rourke, with his message of generational change and liberal-for-Texas politics, would enter the race as a top-tier contender, buoyed by a national network of small-dollar donors and an instinct for uplift and social media ubiquity.

Well before his return this week to his former city — for an interview Tuesday with Oprah Winfrey in Times Square, heightening 2020 expectations — O’Rourke’s New York chapter has stood as the unlikely forerunner to his political rise, laying bare the unusual path that led him to national politics and the who-should-I-be self-reflection that has come to define his presidential deliberations.

Then, as now, he appeared less concerned with political ideology than the pursuit of authentic experiences and a sense of community, an instinct that has frustrated some progressive voters who question O’Rourke’s policy convictions. Then, as now, he could swerve quickly from mawkish to mischievous — by turns a goofy extrovert and a lone wolf, withdrawing in moments of introspection.

If there is a certain kind of New York story that successful people tell about themselves — the tenacious artists, grinding until they get discovered; the downtown capitalists, rat-racing into the 1 Percent — O’Rourke’s is not one of those.

While past political figures, most memorably a young Barack Obama, found their intellectual moorings among the city’s thinkers and strivers, O’Rourke’s seven New York years (four at Columbia University and three after graduation) were, in his own telling, often an exercise in recognizing his own averageness. He loved music but came to see he was not talented enough to hit it big. He thought he might pursue publishing but struggled to break in. He was intimidated by the intelligence of his peers.

“He didn’t really have the kind of ambition that a lot of people have in New York,” said Brooks Williams, O’Rourke’s uncle, who has lived and worked for decades on Franklin Street. “It wasn’t fulfilling for him.”

Yet New York also supplied an early proving ground for the kind of personal appeal that would power O’Rourke’s ascent, showcasing a gift for gab and whimsy and binding him to a circle of friends who remain confidants.

At the age when many would-be presidential rivals had long since chosen their course, zipping through law school and storming into politics, O’Rourke was paying $130 a month to share a 2,000-square-foot loft with creative types in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (Downsides of the bargain included DIY bedroom construction and indoor temperatures so low that tenants could see their own breath.)

For O’Rourke, the period was an early lesson in his own limitations. “I’m not great solo,” he said. “I need people.”

For those who knew him, another observation now comes to mind: They did not believe they were looking at a future statesman.

“You’re supposed to make friends with future secretaries of state, not weirdo musicians,” a friend, Adam Mortimer, said. “It’s like, wait, one of the weirdo musicians might run for president.”

The rollicking music years

He seemed like any other punk-minded student: Jawbox T-shirt, hair past his shoulders and a grim insistence that the Smashing Pumpkins had grown pretentious.

By college, friends say, O’Rourke had settled on the outlines of an identity that would last: a rebel in moderation, more puckish than unruly. He said he chose Columbia in part because of the financial aid package and in part because he looked up to his bohemian uncle, Williams, who had tapped into New York’s music scene. Before that, O’Rourke had attended boarding school in Virginia, largely to create some distance from his father, a political obsessive who did not understand his son’s musical leanings.

Now O’Rourke had the run of the city. He went by Robert — Beto was a nickname from El Paso, owing to its border-town bilingualism — and he played the guitar, establishing himself as the school’s gentle punk rocker.

When a bandmate in a group called Swipe adopted a belligerent performance persona, telling crowds that they were listening to “Angry Swipe,” O’Rourke protested from the stage. “He was like, ‘No, we’re not. We’re not angry,'” the band member, Alan Wieder, said. “It made him very uncomfortable that I was mean.”

Offstage, O’Rourke was a prolific dabbler, straddling disparate orbits. He was socially conscious but not especially political, “other than whatever kind of politics were being talked about in Fugazi,” a former roommate, Jeff Ryan, said, naming one of O’Rourke’s favorite groups.

He often kept a musician’s rollicking hours — “He liked to drink beer,” Wieder said, “not in the Brett Kavanaugh sense” — but also rowed crew, requiring him to rise by 4 a.m. for practice on the Harlem River. He was an English major skilled enough with computers to introduce roommates to the culture of early-1990s chat rooms, once pranking a girlfriend by posing as a romantically interested woman online.

“I kind of have a boyfriend,” the girlfriend, Katherine Raymond, recalled typing back to the person she did not know was O’Rourke, as he sat in an adjacent room. Then she heard a shout through the wall: “What do you mean you kind of have a boyfriend?”

For a time, O’Rourke still thought that music might provide a long-term plan. Friends from El Paso, with whom he had toured, seemed committed to trying. One of them, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, later headlined successful groups like At the Drive-In and the Mars Volta.

But as he prepared to leave college, his hair now shorn a bit, O’Rourke seemed to accept that music would become more passion than profession. He took writing workshops. He read Greek tragedies (“the Greeks got me, man”). He attended astronomy class with Watson, his girlfriend at the time, despite not being enrolled.

“He was sort of seeking,” Watson said. “He was looking for how to be, in kind of a pure way.”

She remembered a professor asking once what students wanted from life. O’Rourke said he hoped to be “a simple man.”

“That,” the teacher said, “is not a simple thing.”

A Texan in Williamsburg

The nanny life was perhaps too simple for O’Rourke.

High above Manhattan, in the historic Apthorp building at 79th and Broadway, he would wake to make breakfast for the family’s young son, help him dress and walk him to school. “Another nanny,” O’Rourke said, “came in for the little girl.”

Still working during the day for his uncle, he left the caretaking job after a few months and answered an ad in The Village Voice to rent a room in a small Brooklyn apartment alongside a couple recently emigrated from the Ivory Coast. Loneliness consumed him.

“You kind of feel sorry for yourself,” O’Rourke said. “You don’t know how to connect again.”

A chance reunion with a college friend at a bar in Williamsburg landed O’Rourke a share of a not-yet-livable loft area on Wallabout Street. The group essentially constructed the interior from scratch, clearing mounds of debris and erecting walls. Guitars and drums soon filled the space. A cat named Dot paced among the record collections. Someone scrawled an apartment motto in a bathroom rich with graffiti: “It’s not a lot, Dot, but it’s what we’ve got.”

In a neighborhood of Hasidic Jews, Mexican-Americans and residents from the Marcy Houses blocks away, O’Rourke developed a reputation as the socially dexterous Texan who could talk to anyone. “If you needed somebody to talk to somebody, you asked Beto,” a neighbor, Yuval Adler, recalled.

O’Rourke grew so close to the building superintendent that the man gave the group a premium toilet, albeit with a cracked seat cover.

“He would come to the building in the morning and just stand outside and scream, ‘Robert! Robert!'” a roommate, David Guinn, said of the super. “It would be like 6:30 in the morning.”

In other moments, apartment security was found wanting. Amid a celebration after building a new room, O’Rourke noticed something strange through the window. “We were drinking a beer in the room that we had just built,” he said. “I was like, ‘Hey, Dave, that guy’s riding a bike that looks a lot like your bike. And he’s carrying a word processor that looks a lot like yours, Mike.'”

They had been robbed as they sat in their own apartment.

Most memories were happier ones. Live music pounded until dawn. Housemates gathered on a rooftop trampoline, recovered from the set of a Busta Rhymes music video, to watch the sun sail past the Twin Towers. O’Rourke found work moving fine art for a company called Hedley’s Humpers — a Picasso here, a samurai sword there — and the apartment remained a neighborhood hub for creativity and mind-calming indulgence.

“Pot, yeah, there was definitely, you know,” O’Rourke said. “There was, uh, I don’t know how to put this, but yeah. People smoked pot, but not habitually.” (He allowed that he was among those people.)

Yet O’Rourke never felt like a permanent New Yorker, he said. No job fit quite right; no prospect particularly appealed.

His father’s hopes, friends say, loomed as subtext, even if O’Rourke seemed intent on making his own choices.

“Pursuing a life so different from Pat’s — an artist’s life — and fearing that his father would not understand, that was hard for him,” Watson said.

The New York dream was punctured for good, like many before and since, on the rails of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. O’Rourke was commuting to the Bronx for an entry-level publishing job, “smashed up against the glass” of a packed subway car.

He thought about El Paso open spaces, El Paso food, El Paso family.

“I just had this vision of being in my truck with the windows down,” he said. “I remember calling my folks that night, and I said, ‘Hey, I think I’m going to come back.'”

O’Rourke bought a truck on Long Island for $1,000 and packed his New York life away. He said his goodbyes and drove.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/us/politics/beto-orourke-president.html" id="1faef6f0-9a61-3b82-a03f-07d99af8a0f6">The New York Times</a>.

Beto O'Rourke Was Once Adrift in New York City and Now He's Searching Again

(The Long Run)

He sleeps soundly — nine hours a night, he ballparks — and organizes the self-described “unemployed celebrity” chapter of his life around a series of workaday goals. “One of my goals has been to get to 10 consecutive pullups,” Comey said in an interview, legs crossed on the back porch of his stately Virginia home. “I’m at nine now. So, I’ve been doing a lot of pullups.”

He writes and thinks and reads and worries from a tidy downstairs office surrounded by the trinkets of his past: the White House place card from the night President Donald Trump asked for his “loyalty” as FBI director; a book by Nate Silver, the political data whiz who believes Comey’s explosively ambiguous letter in October 2016 about the Hillary Clinton email investigation probably handed Trump the election; a page from a quote-of-the-day calendar, saved for its resonance: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

“It reminds me so much of the FBI,” Comey said.

But then, a lot of things have lately. Another Trump-branded election interference scandal is upon us. Institutions are wobbling. And Comey, as ever, cannot fight a nagging conviction about it all: James Comey can help. He must help.

“I feel stuck,” he said. “Like I can’t do something else. And I couldn’t look myself in the mirror if I went and did something easy.”

What he is doing, exactly, is not entirely clear even to him. Rather than proceed with the standard arc of an erstwhile intelligence leader — think tanks, corporate boards, studied political silence — Comey has pledged to spend the next 13 months working to drive Trump from power.

The former FBI director, a lover of order, sees little of it in a norm-smashing president spiraling toward impeachment, riffing on “sick and deranged” Democrats at a recent rally and playacting the dialogue of FBI officials like an insult comic. In this concern, Comey has ample company. In this company, he carries a kind of customized psychic baggage.

Who can know how it feels to wonder, to have everyone you meet wonder, if the president is standing behind that seal because of you?

“Thanks for giving us Donald Trump,” an older woman heckled recently, adding an expletive as Comey strolled through a Yale Law School building, where he had come for a talk that focused largely on his fateful 2016 decisions and attendant personal anguish.

“Thank you for the feedback,” he told her.

Divorced from its singular context, Comey’s condition is somewhat typical of the wandering urgency with which many presidential critics are approaching the 2020 election. Last year’s season of midterm activism has given way to a long electoral winter of Democratic primary skirmishes and an emphasis on just a few early-voting states, leaving Trump opponents to wrestle with how to contribute amid a gush of executive outrages they feel powerless to counteract.

Lawmakers can impeach. Whistleblowers whistle-blow. What of the private citizen, determined to live publicly?

“It’s hard for people who’ve had a lot of power to come to terms with the fact that there’s actually very little you can do when you’re not a candidate,” said Jennifer Palmieri, a former top aide to Clinton. “Or the FBI director.”

While short on formal authority, Comey has suffered no deficiency of platforms. He says he has signed a contract to write opinion pieces for The Washington Post. He is the subject of an upcoming miniseries, starring Jeff Daniels as Comey, based on his best-selling memoir. He travels the country giving speeches on ethical leadership, mixing pro bono appearances on college campuses with paid bookings that command a six-figure fee. (“It’s a lot!” Comey enthused, while declining to name his precise rate. “Seriously, it’s crazy.”)

Over nearly two hours last month at his Northern Virginia home, whose coordinates he prefers not to publicize given the president’s affection for lathering up supporters with tales of “Leakin’ Lyin’ James Comey,” the former FBI director could register as a spindly contradiction. He is at once a just-the-facts lawman and a prodigious feeler of feelings, introspective about the size of his ego and incapable of suppressing it entirely.

He says he is “not that important in the great sweep of American history” but believes his firsthand view into the president’s psyche can offer uncommon value to the anti-Trump movement. He can hold forth in one breath on the humbling task of bird-feeder maintenance and in another invoke the teachings of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. He says “dude” a lot.

At times, Comey can sound as if he is suggesting that the Twitter account from which he slings grave warnings and measured hope (“This country is so much better than this president”) is yoked to the health of the nation.

“I have a fantasy about on January 21, 2021, deleting my Twitter and moving on to something else,” he said. “But until then, I can’t.”

Closure has eluded some of his audiences, too. They lard Comey’s public events with skeptical questions about his choices in 2016. The Justice Department’s inspector general has lashed Comey for “insubordinate” conduct during that period, accusing him of breaking with longstanding policy by publicly discussing an investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server, including in a letter to Congress less than two weeks before the election.

Comey has conceded that he may have allowed himself to be influenced subconsciously by the political consensus that Clinton would win. But he has betrayed no major regrets, defending his chosen course as the best among bad options. “I wish like hell we hadn’t been involved,” he said. He predicted that history would judge him kindly for prizing disclosure over concealment (not, as some Clinton allies see it, opting for spectacle over discretion).

Asked if he cared about how he would be remembered for the ages, Comey, 58, said, “I was going to say I don’t care. I’m sure I care a little,” adding, “It frustrates me in general that millions of people have a false impression of me. I wish they knew I was funnier.”

Asked if helping to defeat Trump would provide a measure of catharsis given his role in 2016, Comey paused. “Hmm,” he said. “I don’t think so. At least in my own conscious mind, I don’t connect those things.”

There is little template for a modern FBI chief pursuing a prominent perch in political advocacy. Comey has performatively bristled at the observation that he is the bureau’s most consequential leader since its first, affecting a grimace recently when a forum moderator introduced him as “the first FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover to be a household name.”

“There’s no precedent,” Tim Weiner, author of “Enemies: A History of the FBI,” said of Comey’s present ambitions. “But then, there’s never been a president who’s been perceived as a threat to American national security.”

James Comey slumps strategically in restaurants — all 6-foot-8 of him, drooping faux-furtively with his back to the room — and daydreams about deleting the civic-minded Twitter feed where a bipartisan coalition pronounces him a national disgrace.

Matt Flegenheimer

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