By David Wilfong, NDG Contributing Writer
Sometimes it pays to just throw an idea out there.
DeSoto City Councilperson Candice Quarles was perusing Facebook when she saw a post regarding the campaign schedule of Democratic Candidate Beto O’Rourke. While Beto would definitely be visiting the DFW metroplex a few times before the election, Quarles was determined to bring the campaign a little closer to home.
“I said, ‘No, you need to come to DeSoto!” Quarles recalled emphatically. “And they responded. Their team got back with me, and they found a venue and made this happen.”
So the campaign of one of America’s most talked-about senatorial candidates made a swing through the city situated in Dallas County’s southern corridor on March 29, holding a town hall meeting at the Chocolate MINT Foundation, and drawing more than 300 spectators on a Thursday afternoon.
After a roundtable discussion held with local Black faith leaders as covered earlier by NDG, Beto made the short trip from Disciple Central Community Church to the town hall location.
Beto had the opportunity to lay out his priorities for the audience; ranging from universal healthcare to the end of marijuana prohibition, the future of the Veterans Administration, gun control and more. One theme that emerged repeatedly between the faith leaders meeting and the town hall as well, is the feeling a person can feel “out of the way” and smaller communities like DeSoto can feel unheard.
Coming from El Paso, which shares space with Ciudad Juarez – once the most dangerous city in the world – Beto assured the audience he understood perceptions and how they can be skewed from reality.
“We’re not a war zone,” Beto said. “We’re nothing to be afraid of. I’m raising my family there. In fact, we happen to be the safest city in America, because we are a city of immigrants.”
He also emphasized the value of compromise, adding it had become “a dirty word” in Washington, D.C. Recalling a veteran’s bill to extend medical benefits to veterans with less than an honorable discharge, he joined a Republican in writing the bill and worked with Republicans to get it into a form likely to pass the House. Then he had to work to get it through a primarily Republican Senate, before being signed into law by President Donald J. Trump on March 22.
One of the primary differences between his campaign and his opponent, a source of pride he shared in his DeSoto visit, was he had out-raised U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz despite not taking any money from political action committees or corporations. Beto reported he had received an average of $25 per donation from more than 185,000 individual donors.
The event included questions from the audience, many of which gave Beto the opportunity to reiterate some of his stated positions on a wide variety of issues. There were, however, heavy concerns raised by two attendees to the town hall.
The first said she had researched Beto’s website and was disappointed. She said the campaign had “white-washed” the most important issues facing African Americans, and she needed to know the person she voted for was going to address issues “head on.” She also pointed out that while DeSoto is 80 percent Black, the crowd gathered for the town hall meeting was primarily white.
“I needed to hear everything you just had to say,” Beto responded, “I want you to know, I understand some of the structural barriers, the way that this is baked into the system that helps to explain some of the otherwise confounding results. We just learned about recently a study that looked at young white boys and young Black boys born into wealth. Parents have the same income. Born on the same block. And chances are that white boy will be a wealthy white man. Chances are that Black boy will be a poor Black man. Why is that?”
The other speaker stated that, as a Christian Black woman, she felt the Democratic party was ostracizing and attacking anyone who did not fall in line with the preferred position on each and every issue. In her case specifically, she opposes abortion and felt attacked by Democrats every time she raised it. The voter admitted she did not vote for the office of president in 2016 because neither candidate represented her.
“I couldn’t agree more with the premise of your question,” Beto told her. “It’s got to be all of us and not just Democrats. There are a lot of Independents and even some Republicans … who we need to be listening to if we have any hope of representing them, or earning their vote to get in a position of trust to represent them in the first place. With the cotton growers in Lubbock, Texas, I don’t ask them if they are Republican or Democrat. There’s a good chance that they are Republicans. But I’m learning about farming issues, and what it’s like to grow up in Lubbock, Texas.”
He shared the fact his mother was a conservative Catholic who also opposed abortion, and while they differed on the abortion issue itself, they found common ground in ways to reduce the demand for abortion through effective family planning.
“I’m not going to turn my back on her just because she doesn’t see things the same way that I do,” Beto said. “Democrats used to win statewide in Texas because Democrats would show up and listen to people statewide.”
The town hall ended with a group of four children being given the opportunity to ask their own question, the last of which was a child asking how he could make sure children could feel safe in their classroom.
Beto’s position on the issue which has consumed the country in the past few weeks is an advancement of universal background checks. He also stated he wanted to ban the sale of the AR-15 rifle. And he lamented that his own children are having to face questions about what to do if a shooter entered their school.
