O’Rourke’s decision-making process was organic and haphazard, an indication of how he will run his campaign.
By Matt Viser Matt Viser National political reporter Email Bio Follow March 17 at 3:52 PM BURLINGTON, Iowa — Beto O’Rourke was in his bathroom, brushing his teeth. He and his wife, Amy, had been engaged in the morning sprint to get out the door. Fixing breakfast for their three children, packing lunches, getting dressed.
Interviews with some of those closest to him provide a window into a decision-making process that was organic and haphazard, one that involved a coterie of informal advisers and longtime friends and allowed thoughts to simmer before making a gut-level call. It is a process that informs how he will run his freewheeling and by-the-moment presidential campaign, as well as how his White House would operate if he were to get that far.
Little of that occurred with O’Rourke. There were no formal sit-downs with the children, even though there were plenty of conversations with them. The call was instead the result of a series of talks among a married couple and a trio of trusted advisers, all culminating in the morning chaos of the O’Rourke household.
And President Barack Obama had him to his office in Washington, where they discussed the rigors of a presidential campaign and the effect on the Obama family. After he left office Jan. 3, O’Rourke and his wife began holding frequent conference calls with his three closest advisers — Cynthia Cano, his road manager; Chris Evans, his communications director; and David Wysong, a longtime friend who ran his House office, helped manage his Senate race, and who had been talking about O’Rourke running for president for some time.
O’Rourke was weighing not only whether to run for president, but how. His Senate race had a small, tightknit team — no pollster and no speechwriter — that largely consisted of O’Rourke driving around the state. Could they keep that same feel in a presidential campaign? A rolling family dialogue The family, meantime, had reconnected, O’Rourke said. When he was a member of Congress, he would spend only weekends at home. When he campaigned for Senate, he traveled for weeks at a time.
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