BEFORE: Here we go, film #45 out of 46 films in the Summer Rock & Doc Block. This is right where I planned to be, if not exactly WHEN I planned to be there. It's been a long road, but the docs have seen me through a tough time, an unplanned period of inactivity that's been wearing on me mentally. Films can be a great distraction when you've got some excess time on your hands, but I think what's going to help me more is going back to my very weird work schedule and at least feeling like I'm accomplishing something, while also earning a bit more money. BUT I still have 12 days before the school starts up its orientation programs for the fall semester, and my shifts start up again. I don't know how other people work from home, I know it's really trendy right now and everything, but come on, the pandemic is OVER, the CDC just changed their guidelines and I'm going a bit nuts with so much down time. I did make a list of things to do at home, and I've crossed off about half of them, but I'm not motivated to do more, so I end up just playing games on my phone, and that's not productive. As Meat Loaf sang, "If you're only killing time, it will kill you right back."
Beto O'Rourke carries over from "Mayor Pete", he appeared in archive footage as one of the other Democrats running for President in 2020. That was unexpected, because he wasn't listed in the cast on IMDB (I fixed that, though) - I had another linking plan, of course, but it turns out SIX other people, politicians and talk-show hosts, carry over, so I shouldn't have worried.
THE PLOT: A behind-the-scenes documentary following Beto O'Rourke's breakaway campaign to unseat Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate.
AFTER: Yeah, it's midterm elections time again, or it will be soon enough - perhaps if I watch a few political documentaries I can mentally prepare myself, like acclimating myself to the temperature of the pool. I'm planning to be busy in October, between the New York Comic Con and then a vacation later in the month, so perhaps I can be distracted from most of the news.
But speaking of vacations, this film is set during Beto O'Rourke's U.S. Senate race against Ted Cruz in 2018, and my wife and I happened to be on vacation in Texas during the last week of October in that year, so we were right in the middle of it. (This was BBQ Crawl #2, from Dallas to San Antonio to Houston to New Orleans - yeah, that was a lot of mileage.). I do remember seeing a bunch of Beto signs, but mostly in the cities, and then once we got out on the highway we could sort of tell that we were back out in Trump country - so there was no disputing that Texas is a battleground state, there are two different ideologies going on down there, and the state is just as divided as our nation is, if not more so.
Think back on all the terrible news stories from the last six years, and who's at the center of most of them? OK, Trump, but in most of the bad news coming out of Texas, Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott are usually at the epicenters. Remember that winter power outage and Ted Cruz took off for Cancun, but came back when he realized how bad the optics were? Then there was all that immigration backlash in the state when families were being separated and kids were held in cages in camps. Then Texas was the first state to make abortion illegal again, the second they had the opportunity to do so, and then the state's record on gun control is just abysmal, and Cruz and Abbott are really at their worst right after a school shooting when they start talking about arming teachers and locking entry doors, as if anything could possibly work better than passing more rules requiring background checks and banning assault rifles. If you really wanted to reduce the number of kids being killed, you'd try anything and everything, not this random finger-pointing and circular non-sensical blame game.
Anyway, as we saw yesterday with "Mayor Pete", a documentary crew is likely to form around anyone running for office, and those filmmakers are taking a chance that this candidate is going to pull off an unlikely win, in which case, their time and effort won't be wasted. But no director wants to make a film about a shoo-in candidate, or even one who's ahead in the polls, because where's the drama in that? You know they pick their subjects because they're looking for that underdog, come-from-behind, "Rocky"-like story where even if the candidate doesn't win, at least they go the distance.
Beto went the distance, in the sense that he visited every single county in Texas at least once, and that's a big freakin' state. Texas has 254 counties, and over 28 million citizens - there's no way to meet all of those people, but he tried to meet as many face-to-face as he could. Look, we drove to four big Texas cities and that took us almost a week, I can't even imagine how long it took Beto to visit 254 counties, and he did that without taking any money from Political Action Committees during that campaign. For the record, it took him 15 months, during which he held hundreds of town hall meeting, and drove tens of thousands of miles. Just like a band on tour, I'd love to see the logistics of working out that route. Most Texas politicians go campaigning in Houston, Dallas and then swing through Austin and San Antonio - how many cups of coffee did Beto drink on the road, how many stops at Buckee's for BBQ sandwiches? I just found an article that states that Beto did about 80% of the driving, had about 5 cups of coffee a day, and lived on trail mix, beef jerky and Hostess cupcakes.
I wish I could say it was worth it, that Beto was part of the "blue wave" of 2018 that was a response to Trump's victory in 2016, but the sad truth is that Ted Cruz got re-elected, but bear in mind that Cruz had one of the best-financed campaigns in the country, and no Democrat had won statewide office in Texas since 1994, so the odds were against Beto from the start. Beto used no professional pollsters or consultants, but did make use of social media, and an army of volunteers canvassing the neighborhoods to encourage more immigrants to register to vote. Then he got lucky when some of his statements about police brutality and NFL players taking a knee during the anthem went viral. And he raised $80 million for his campaign, mostly from small $20 donations at those town halls. Clearly this man could win over a crowd with his statements of hope and encouragement - BUT, still the election went to Cruz, 50.9% to 48.3%.
Damn, that was close - and Beto set a record for most votes ever cast for a Democrat in Texas history. Beto did say he would be unlikely to run for President in 2020, since he had young children, but then he did. That didn't really work out either, and now he's the Democratic candidate for Texas governor, going up against Greg Abbott this fall. He seems like a very smart guy, and I hope he continues to fail upwards, so to speak, and maybe he'll win another election someday, with his pro-gun control, pro-education, pro-environment and pro-cannabis platforms. He's got the right ideas, just the bad luck to have those ideas in the wrong state, it seems. But he didn't come out of nowhere, Beto was a U.S. congressman for Texas for two terms, he probably could have held on to that seat longer, but clearly he feels he was destined for greater things, I celebrate the fact that he gave up the position he had because he wanted to do more.
Also starring Cynthia Cano, Jody Casey, Ted Cruz (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Chris Evans (not that one), Shannon Gay, Rhonda Hart, "Little" Joe Hernandez, Zack Malitz, Esther Martinez, Marcel McClinton, Amy O'Rourke, Estela Torres Powell, Michael Powell, Amanda Salas, David Wysong,
with archive footage of Greg Abbott, Steve Bannon (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Wolf Blitzer (also carrying over from "Mayor Pete"), Mika Brzezinski (ditto), Stephen Colbert (ditto), Ellen DeGeneres (ditto), Rachel Maddow (ditto), Donald Trump (ditto), George W. Bush (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It"), Chris Cuomo (last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Lester Holt (last seen in "Irresistible"), John Lewis (last seen in "John Lewis: Good Trouble"), Bill Moyers, David Muir (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Rick Perry (ditto), Willie Nelson (last seen in "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind"), Pat O'Rourke,
RATING: 5 out of 10 early-morning jogs
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