Speaking of Beto, a short piece today about how far the Dem Party has sunk from RFK to RFO
" ...... Nothing says more about the decline of the Democrats than the difference between the two Robert Francises — Robert F. Kennedy and Beto O’Rourke. They stand at the opposite ends of the sixty-year chasm between them. Beto was laid back and ephemeral; Bobby was intense. Bobby's swimming coach at Harvard called him “heavy in the water” — drownable, dense. Beto, by contrast, seemed light as a feather, as if even a strong breeze could blow him away.
Beto was a dilettante who wafted his way through various interests; Bobby was knee-deep in vital concerns: crime and punishment; civil rights and segregation; aggressive communism vs. the West. It's quite a shock to realize that Beto today is four years older than Bobby was when he was murdered. Beto today looks like a young person, whereas Bobby looked like an old man.
In his last campaign, when he drew the hysterical crowds some people today thought Beto’s resembled, people who covered Bobby were stunned by his looks. "The brown-blond hair was turning gray, and the once-boyish face was deeply lined," wrote Evan Thomas. Columnist Joe Kraft had “never seen him look so bad, so tired; his blue eyes were standing out really like a death’s head from his skull."
Nobody needs a president to look quite that bad, but the unlined vacuity of some of these candidates seems at least as disturbing: a candidate needs a few lines on his visage or at least traces of thought. The lowering of the experience bar shows disrespect for the office and arrogance on the part of some of the candidates. Anyone bright enough to one day become president surely should understand that."
The decline of the primaries. From RFK to Beto