Buttigieg gets best of O'Rourke

The shorthand of Beto O'Rourke's presidential campaign is that it foundered early on its own hype, was surprised by the sudden rise of Pete Buttigieg, and then was reborn with a zealous new purpose in the traumatic aftermath of the mass shooting at the Walmart in O'Rourke's hometown of El Paso in August, punctuated by his declaration at the third Democratic debate in Houston in September, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”

That came in reply to a question about whether his call for mandatory buybacks of what he calls "weapons of war" would amount to what critics call "confiscation." It was a question that was reprised at Tuesday night's fourth debate at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, and it led to a sharp and personal exchange with Buttigieg, who has dismissed O'Rourke's plan as a distracting "shiny object," and on Tuesday bristled when O'Rourke challenged his rivals to "lead and not be limited by the polls and the consultants and the focus groups."

"The problem isn't the polls," Buttigieg replied. "The problem is the policy. And I don't need lessons from you on courage, political or personal."

It was a sharp and memorable retort, coming from the 37-year-old wunderkind, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., a married gay man and a Rhodes Scholar who enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve and deployed to Afghanistan. Buttigieg exploded on the national political scene just as O'Rourke, the previous shiniest object on that scene, was launching his candidacy last April with impressive poll numbers that soon tumbled even as Buttigieg's rose.

Buttigieg projects a preternatural poise and gravitas that the free-wheeling, 47-year-old O'Rourke lacks, and Buttigieg's words at Tuesday's debate packed a punch that might come to be seen as the final blow for O'Rourke's already long-shot 2020 presidential chances.

For O'Rourke and Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Tuesday night's debate could be their last. The higher polling thresholds to qualify for the November debate in Atlanta appear, for now, to exceed their grasp.

"The debate seemed to do little to jump-start the stalled candidacies of O’Rourke and Castro," said Joshua Scacco, a University of South Florida communication professor. "With voting four months away and these candidacies now several months old, the field is coalescing around a top tier that, absent a disruptive event, will mean that candidates like Beto and Julian probably have seen their last opportunities for a second look from voters."

"Every debate where they are not showing forward momentum and differentiation from a still-crowded field means less time to justify their candidacy to donors and voters," Scacco said. "Castro was not as aggressive as in past debates, meaning he lacked an attention-grabbing moment. O’Rourke garnered attention, but in ways that highlighted the shaky foundation on which his messages and policies are based."

A memorable line

Castro did have a couple of the night’s most memorable lines.

Threading together Trump’s policies in the Middle East and the Mexican border, Castro said, “I also want people to think — the folks this week that saw those images of ISIS prisoners running free — to think about how absurd it is that this president is caging kids on the border and effectively letting ISIS prisoners run free.”

He also weighed into the gun debate, after O'Rourke said his mandatory buyback plan would largely depend on gun owners proactively complying with the law.

“There are two problems I have with mandatory buybacks: No. 1, folks can’t define it, and if you’re not going door-to-door, then it’s not really mandatory," Castro said. “But also, in the places that I grew up in, we weren’t exactly looking for another reason for cops to come banging on the door."

“You all saw a couple of days ago what happened to Atatiana Jefferson in Fort Worth,” Castro said, citing a white police officer's fatal shooting of a black woman in her home on Saturday. “A cop showed up at two in the morning at her house, when she was playing video games with her nephew. He didn’t even announce himself. And within four seconds, he shot her and killed her through her home window. She was in her own home.”

“And so, I am not going to give these police officers another reason to go door-to-door in certain communities, because police violence is also gun violence, and we need to address that,” Castro said.

'Increasingly irrelevant'

Buttigieg meanwhile, is poised as a centrist alternative to Joe Biden if the former vice president fades.

He is polling fourth, at 12%, in Iowa, where the voting begins.

He has $23.4 million in cash on hand, behind only U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and 2½ times as much as Biden.

O'Rourke, who raised a record $80 million in his 2018 U.S. Senate campaign, has $3.3 million in the bank. Castro has $670,000, according to campaign finance reports posted Tuesday.

"Castro and O'Rourke seem increasingly irrelevant in this race," said Josh Blank, director of research at the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas.

"Buttigieg clearly got the better of O'Rourke in the exchange, and I think it just becomes increasingly apparent with every passing debate that Beto is out of his depth in this whole presidential campaign honestly,” Blank said.

O’Rourke took umbrage at Buttigieg’s umbrage in Ohio.

"When you, Mayor Buttigieg, described this policy as a shiny object, I don't care what that meant to me or my candidacy, but to those who have survived gun violence, those who've lost a loved one to an AR-15, an AK-47, March for Our Lives, formed in the courage of students willing to stand up to the NRA and conventional politics and poll-tested politicians, that was a slap in the face to every single one of those groups and every single survivor of a mass casualty assault with an AR-15 and an AK-47,” O'Rourke said.

But Buttigieg replied he was thinking with his heart not his head.

“On guns, we are this close to an assault weapons ban,” Buttigieg replied. “That would be huge. And we're going to get wrapped around the axle in a debate over whether it's 'Hell, yes, we're going to take your guns?’”

On Wednesday morning, a wan O’Rourke was interviewed on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“So what’s your plan on the confiscation of guns ,which obviously many believe is unconstitutional and also very concerned that it plays right into the hands of Republican candidates?” host Joe Scarborough asked.

"To be clear,” O’Rourke began his reply, “I am not talking about confiscating anybody's guns.”