New York Times Uses Uvalde Massacre to Crank Up Its Beto-Mania in Texas Again

It looks like Democratic hopeful Beto O’Rourke’s run to unseat Republican Gov. Greg Abbott will be greeted with the same partisan enthusiasm by the New York Times that it showed when O’Rourke failed to knock off conservative Sen. Ted Cruz despite massive out-of-state help in 2018.

Witness reporter Jazmine Ulloa’s piece in Saturday’s paper, “For Beto O’Rourke, Talk of Gun Control Has Become Both a Political Risk and Reward.” Beto’s grandstanding at a press conference now looks….good?

When Beto O’Rourke interrupted a news conference in Uvalde to criticize Gov. Jason Smith was furious at Greg Abbott.

Mr. Smith, a Fort Worth lawyer and Democrat, worried that Mr. O’Rourke’s approach was too confrontational in that moment, a day after an 18-year-old gunman stormed into Robb Elementary School. But in the days that followed, as details emerged that the police waited in a school hallway for more than an hour as children called 911 for help and Mr. Abbott acknowledged being “misled” about the response to the massacre, Mr. Smith changed his mind.

“I was really glad he did it,” he said of Mr. O’Rourke.

Mr. O’Rourke, 49, clearly took a political gamble when he disrupted the governor in an emotional outburst that Republicans and some Democrats believed crossed a line in the aftermath of a mass shooting that left 19 students and two teachers dead.He wasn’t speaking as a Texan and outraged parent. but also as Mr. Abbott’s Democratic opponent in the race for governor.

Now he’s vindicated at least in the eyes of “Democratic lawmakers.” Is his threat to seize your AR-15 any less tone-deaf?

He made comments during his 2020 presidential campaign that called for tighter gun control. This was the exact issue that has haunted his governor campaign for months. Those past comments — “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” he said on a debate stage in 2019 — had seemed politically foolish as he campaigned in gun-friendly Texas, and he had sought to moderate them. Now, to many Texans saddened and angered by a deadly attack on schoolchildren by a gunman with an AR-15-style rifle, Mr. O’Rourke’s stance on guns has taken on a fresh resonance.

Does Beto really resonate? Ulloa admitted that it isn’t looking great. “No Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas since November 1994 and no Democrat has occupied the governor’s mansion since January 1995, the last day of Gov. Ann W. Richards’s tenure.” The…” Times Still believes that Texas has the potential to adopt Beto-style gun confiscation.

For some Democratic state leaders, the massacre and Mr. Abbott’s response compounded their frustration with the Governor after his hard-righted push on abortion and his rhetoric against immigrants, as well as his handling of the state’s troubled electric grid. Mr. O’Rourke has embodied that breaking point.

….

Democrats, as well as some independents, said that they believed this would be the turning point for politics. Many are still feeling the effects of the attack. Funerals in Uvalde have already begun. It is difficult to discuss the political implications. Often, Democratic leaders and voters would speak with emotion. Some even shed tears.

Did the massacre make only Democrats feel sad?

Even after O’Rourke lost, the paper didn’t give up hope for “even bigger things…in store?” That was just one of many embarrassingly gushy news stories the Times ran about the Democrats fresh, new, Kennedy-style hero, praising O’Rourke for making Democrats cool in Texas.

Mr. O’Rourke embraced those Texas symbols and reclaimed them for Democrats, jamming with Willie Nelson, steering his San Antonio-built Toyota pickup truck through rural Texas and air-drumming post-debate in the drive-through lane at Whataburger. To be a Texas Democrat used to seem like a strange counterculture move. It was cool.