'This is our moment': Beto O'Rourke attacks Trump and calls for unity

Beto O’Rourke, the former punk rocker from a border town in Texas, formally launched his insurgent campaign for the US presidency on Saturday by denouncing fear and division promoted by Donald Trump and calling for a revival of inclusive American democracy.

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Speaking to several thousand supporters in his home town, El Paso, O’Rourke unleashed an impassioned attack on the president’s border crackdown. Just a few blocks behind his back stood the Paso del Norte bridge across the Rio Grande river into Mexico. Beneath it, while he spoke, exhausted migrants were still being penned in by US immigration authorities.

The migrants were being detained “just three or four blocks from here under the international bridge, behind chain-link fence and barbed wire”, O’Rourke thundered, punching the air in the demonstrative style that has become his trademark. “They are our fellow human beings, and deserve to be treated like our fellow human beings.”

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O’Rourke has had a difficult start to his campaign, in which some of the glitz of last November’s Senate run appears to have worn off. He has come under fire for displaying more charisma than policy expertise, for enjoying the unearned privilege of a white man with Kennedy-like good looks, and for lacking a progressive edge to his politics.

He was also forced to apologize for making jokes on the campaign trail about his wife Amy bringing up their three kids, “sometimes with my help”.

If there is some substance to the criticism that he needed to sharpen up his act for a national audience, O’Rourke appears to have heard it. On Saturday he delivered a firebrand’s call for a reshaping of US democracy.

“All people, no Pacs, all the time,” he proclaimed, in reference to his extraordinary ability to raise campaign cash, $6.1m just on day one of his presidential run, without involving super-rich donors and political action committees. Then he hurled himself into a critique of the state of the nation.

“We must ask ourselves how this, the wealthiest, most powerful country on the face of the planet, has found itself in such a perilous position,” he said. “For too long in this country the powerful have maintained their privilege at the expense of the powerless.

“They have used fear and division in the same way that our current president uses fear and division … to make us angry, to make us afraid of ourselves and one another.”

The unrestrained intervention of big money, where politicians can choose their voters and the supreme court can decide in its Citizens United ruling that corporations are people and money a form of speech, had he said left the US government “in thrall to those who can pay for access” and the country at risk “of being a democracy in name only”.

O’Rourke promised that as president he will sign a new voting rights act to end gerrymandering and remove big money from elections. The pledge resonated with his supporters.

So did the rallying cry which he put to use last November: the desire to reunite a divided country. El Paso residents in the crowd responded positively to the call.

Supporters cheer as Beto O’Rourke speaks at his presidential campaign kickoff in El Paso, Texas on 30 March.Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

Lorena Garcia, 45, a housewife from the city, said that for many months she had stopped listening to the news because she found Trump’s attacks on migrants and others so upsetting.

“But when I started hearing Beto it gave me hope,” she said. “He was so positive I began to think things could be different.”

Victor Pina, 49, and Jason Phillips, 44, had flown from Sacramento in California wearing “Beto for president” T-shirts they had designed themselves in the rainbow colors of the LGBT movement. They said they saw O’Rourke as someone who could unite divided America.

Phillips pointed to the bridge just down the road where the migrants were being held: “It makes me think of Ellis Island, where immigrants were brought to a new life under the Statue of Liberty. How did this country change from that to holding people under that bridge?”

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The edgier tone of O’Rourke’s launch speech may help him gain traction as he seeks to transition from a politician appealing to 29 million Texans to one who must court 327 million Americans. He is also having to cope with an exceptionally crowded and diverse pool of Democratic candidates, with 14 people campaigning, including five women, two African Americans, a Latino American and a contender vying to be the first openly gay president.

That is even before Joe Biden piles in, which he is expected to do soon.

With more than 10 months to go before the Iowa caucuses, any polling should be taken with a fistful of salt. That said, the latest surveys put O’Rourke behind Biden and the resurgent democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, but in the top tier.

In addition to his emphasis on immigration and the border, and his call for democratic reforms, O’Rourke touched on the need for rapid action to curb climate change.

“This is our moment,” he said, “with little more than 10 years to spare to free this economy from fossil fuels and greenhouse gasses.”

On healthcare, the issue polls suggest most engages Democratic primary voters, he pointed to a compromise position without using its title, Medicare for America. In contrast to Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All, O’Rourke’s approach would allow families to keep their existing healthcare insurance should they wish to, while expanding Medicare to cover those currently uninsured.

Despite such tweaking of his presidential offer, it remains true that O’Rourke is most effective when he is most expansive. It is in the contrast between his positive, upbeat call for renewal and the dark warnings that give Trump his populist appeal that his potential success lies.

“Every child, every man, every woman must be able to see a future for themselves in this country,” O’Rourke said, before repeating the phrase in Spanish.

“Otherwise this country will have no future as a democracy.”