Does Beto still have lightning in his bottle?

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump will deliver his State of the Union address, Gov. Greg Abbott will deliver his State of the State speech, and Beto O’Rourke will reveal his current state of mind to Oprah Winfrey in an interview in New York’s Times Square.

When it airs, in the weeks that follow on the Oprah Winfrey Network (Feb. 16, 8 p.m.) and in a podcast (Feb. 27) as one of “Oprah’s Super Soulful Conversations,” O’Rourke’s interview will be the most public appearance of the former congressman from El Paso since he somehow barreled out of a losing campaign for the U.S. Senate last November into what post-election polls indicated was the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates for 2020 alongside old-shoe septuagenarians Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.

In the interim, O’Rourke has done some solo roaming in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico. He talked to folks at bars, cafes, museums and classrooms about their lives and the future of the country, obliquely looking for an answer about whether he should run for president, but without the self-defeating clamor and crush of media that would have inevitably ensued if he had done it in more of a public way than he did.

And then, as is his wont — he does have a literature degree from Columbia University — he wrote about the travels and posted it on social media, in this case on Medium, to the mockery of some who considered his earnest quest an act of white privilege or emo self-indulgence or Kerouacian quackery. But he seemed to find what he was looking for, a reason to run for president if that’s what he wanted.

Read more: https://www.statesman.com/news/20190201/does-beto-still-have-lightning-in-his-bottle