AUSTIN, Texas _ Beto O'Rourke said Thursday that he is returning to the presidential campaign trail for the first time since the Aug. 3 massacre of 22 people at the Walmart in his hometown of El Paso, but that the trail won't take him to the "corndogs and Ferris wheels" of the Iowa State Fair or other typical venues in early-voting states that are the usual stomping grounds of presidential aspirants, but to those places in America most victimized by President Donald Trump.
"I want to be the kind of leader for this country El Paso has raised me and taught me to be," O'Rourke said, speaking on an overlook in El Paso before a small audience of supporters and broadcast live on C-SPAN. "But as we head back on the campaign trail today, I know there's a way to do this better. And that came to me last week."
"Someone asked if I was going to be heading back to Iowa, go to the Iowa State Fair, corn dogs and Ferris wheels. And I said, no, I can't go back for that. But I also cannot go back to that. The kind of challenges that we face in this country at this moment of crisis require an urgency," O'Rourke said. "Unless we want to reap the consequences of failing to meet them, consequences that we lived and I hope learned from in El Paso on August 3."
"And so to those places where Donald Trump has been terrorizing, and terrifying, and demeaning our fellow Americans, that's where you will find me in this campaign," O'Rourke said. "From El Paso, we're heading to Mississippi to be with those families who have lost a loved one temporarily, maybe for the indefinite future, because of the hostility of this administration toward immigrants, and I want to be there to help lift them up, to tell their story."
It was a rhetorical formulation, delivered by the lanky O'Rourke, that was reminiscent of Tom Joad's closing speech in John Steinbeck's" The Grapes of Wrath," as delivered by Henry Fonda in the 1940 film adaptation: "Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there."
