Beto puts on a show at the border

O'Rourke knows this gift. At the same time as Trump's border rally, the Enigma put on his own show with a counter-protest. Sensing that the anti-Trump media would devour an alternate narrative, O'Rourke gave them one.

"Walls do not save lives," he told supporters. "Walls end lives."

Hmm. Really? How? The soundbite did not come with an explanation.

Still, The Beto Show worked. Just like The Trump Show did. Though Trump probably won on the basis of crowd size, O'Rourke -- who says he'll soon announce whether he's running for president in 2020 -- got an ego boost when the president called attention to the counterprotest in his remarks.

I'm a little surprised that O'Rourke figured out this game. Watch him speak, and you'll see that this guy is never going to make the honor roll.

In January, when the former congressman was asked about immigration by The Washington Post, he treated the topic as if it were advanced calculus. Asked what we should do about visa overstays, O'Rourke said: "I don't know."

Right. Because growing up in El Paso, and representing it for six years in Congress, when would a guy have a chance to think about immigration?

O'Rourke meandered his way through an answer before declaring that the issue is "something that we should be debating." This is his standard line with the thorniest subjects: Let Americans argue and figure it out, and they'll eventually do the right thing.

Imagine if John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson did that same thing with civil rights.

The Enigma actually seems to consider this outsourcing of leadership to be an enlightened approach instead of what it is: a cowardly one.

When asked by the Post why he doesn't have firm stances, O'Rourke said: "The genius is we can nonviolently resolve our differences, though I won't get to my version of perfect or I, working with you, will get to something better than what we have today."

Funny. If there's one word I don't associate with O'Rourke, it's genius.

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Ruben Navarrette's email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com. His daily podcast, "Navarrette Nation," is available through every podcast app.