Beto Announces What His First Presidential Order Would Be if He Wins in 2020
When Robert “Beto” O’Rourke, presidential candidate and celebrity dental livestreamer, visited Pennsylvania State University late last month, he probably had a vision in his mind of the kind of questions that students might be asking him:
Why are you so good at skateboarding, Mr. O’Rourke? How do you make sweating through blue dress shirts look so patriotic? Why are you so peachy keen?
Instead, he managed to get a perfectly reasonable question from a student: “When am I going to get an actual policy from you instead of just platitudes and nice stories?”
That wasn’t all, according to a Washington Times account of the exchange. In addition to pointing out that Beto’s campaign has thus far had all the nutritive policy value of artificial sweetener, the student also noted that O’Rourke’s website, at least at that point in time, was “mostly just platitudes and a merch store.”
“I’m going to try to be as specific as I can,” O’Rourke responded, going on to list a small number of issues on which he had been specific.
Well, those specifics are beginning to roll out, albeit slowly. And I, at least, have one message for Beto: Go back to platitudes and the merch store.
In what’s easily the least consequential major policy proposal thus far this campaign season, the former Texas congressman has promised that if elected, his first order of business will be ordering cabinet members to do monthly town hall meetings with constituents.
“I’ll sign an executive order on the first day in office requiring every single cabinet secretary to hold a town hall meeting like this every single month, to listen to you and to be accountable to you so that we deliver for you,” O’Rourke said at the liberal “We the People” summit in Washington on Monday, according to The Daily Caller.
“Those cabinet secretaries will be before you. Not a handpicked audience, not a theatrical production, but a real-life town hall meeting, not just to answer questions but to be held accountable,” O’Rourke said.
A follow-up statement from O’Rourke, according to the Washington Examiner, said that his administration would bring about “historic levels of transparency, accountability and engagement … while ensuring the genius of our democracy and the diversity.” (“The diversity?” Is that like “the Iraq?”)
“At a time when we face an extraordinary concentration of power and access, when our government does too little for too few, we must ensure that the people of this country can hold their government to account for the decisions it makes in their name,” the statement said, according to the Examiner.
“It is only by listening to those we are sworn to serve and represent — by gaining the full benefit of their ideas, their experiences, their creativity — that we can come together to confront and overcome the very real challenges before us.”
To quote the immortal Jeanie Bueller, dry that one out and you can fertilize the lawn.
First, those of you who’re familiar with my scribblings here (and I know that’s like, four of you) can attest to the red mist that descends upon mine eyes whenever the words “town hall meeting” are invoked. Unless you’re at your locale’s actual meeting or watching an episode of “Gilmore Girls,” you aren’t witnessing a “town hall meeting.”
What you’re looking at is a carefully scripted event in which individuals typically vetted by the host ask some softball questions that are easily dispatched using canned rhetoric. You can call this format whatever you want, but please don’t sully the humble town hall meeting by association.
Just like similar town halls like the one with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last week — where host Chris Hayes seemed to keep on agreeing with the candidate as she claimed the 22nd Amendment was passed to force a president who was already dead out of office — cabinet “town hall meetings” will be nothing more than a merch store of administration priorities, no matter what O’Rourke says. There won’t be any Penn State students asking when they’re “going to get an actual policy from you instead of just platitudes and nice stories?”
And while we’re on that very apropos question, let’s also note this is just another platitude and/or nice narrative. As a presidential order, what would this accomplish? Let’s assume that these town hall meetings are actually adversarial and we have citizens venting their collective spleen at the administration. And? What’s that going to change?
These meetings aren’t going to shift the direction of the White House in any way that polling wouldn’t. They’re not going to introduce an additional level of “transparency” or “accountability.” In terms of “engagement,” I suppose it might be engaging to turn the citizenry’s interactions with the president’s cabinet into a reality show, but that’s proof that engagement qua engagement isn’t necessarily a good thing.
Notice, too, that this applies to Beto’s cabinet, not Beto. It’s not that I think that would change anything, mind you, but it’s worth pointing out one of the unstated premises behind this proposal: O’Rourke is apparently willing to throw his own subordinates to some (admittedly very well-vetted) wolves while sedulously avoiding the same treatment himself.
Well, whatever. This isn’t “the genius of our democracy” in action, nor is it an example of “ensur(ing) that the people of this country can hold their government to account for the decisions it makes in their name.”
It’s a nice thing to say at a campaign stop. It’s wholly meaningless. It’ll change nothing about our democracy or the administration of the country’s laws.
It likely won’t even come to pass even in the event that (don’t touch wood) this thoroughly empty, diaphoretic charlatan is elected president, given the practical improbabilities of carving out a time and place for each and every cabinet member to face the public.
In other words, if only he’d done it on a skateboard, it would have been the most Beto-esque moment of the campaign thus far.
Enjoy your metaphorical merch store, Democrats. You’ll be spending a lot of time there over the next year or so.
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