BETO-MANIA AND OUR CULT OF PERSONALITY POLITICS:

Everything about his candidacy feels like a triumph of nostalgia-peddling. The constant refrain that he’s this generation’s Robert F. Kennedy is an interesting play on the time-tested effort by Democratic candidates to claim the Kennedy mantle, though usually it’s John F. Kennedy, not RFK. Then again, it makes sense given that RFK moved left of JFK — and so has the Democratic party.

There’s also a shared authentic inauthenticity to O’Rourke. Joe Kennedy groomed his boys for the presidency from an early age. O’Rourke’s dad assigned his son the nickname Beto almost from birth, because he thought it would help win votes in El Paso.

Like a 1960s Kennedy, O’Rourke is an old person’s idea of what a young person is supposed to be like, albeit with a Gen X spin: skateboarding, membership in a punk band, etc. Sure, O’Rourke was born the same year that Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders first ran for the Senate, as a Democrat and social democrat, respectively. (Biden won.) But that only makes him young compared with those guys.

Then there’s the déjà vu. O’Rourke’s candidacy feels like a rerun, and not merely because the media covered his recently concluded Senate race against Ted Cruz as if it were a presidential contest. (A race, it’s worth nothing, that O’Rourke lost despite having raised more money than any Senate candidate ever, and despite the fact that his opponent was wildly unpopular.)

And speaking of déjà vu, as Scott Whitlock writes at NewsBusters, “Time Cheers ‘Phenom’ Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Best Storyteller in the Party.’”

Their encomium is merely their way of saying thanks, given that AOC’s party piece is a retread of a pair of decade-old Time magazine reruns, which itself are built upon decades of FDR nostalgia.