Beto puts on a show at the border

SAN DIEGO -- Welcome to The Beto Show!

Running for president ain't no spelling bee. The top job doesn't always go to the smartest person on the ballot. If it did, Adlai Stevenson, Jerry Brown, Al Gore, Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton would have all ended up in the White House. They didn't. Because they couldn't perform.

You see, running for president is performance art. And the goal is to capture the public's imagination.

Bill Clinton played the saxophone on "The Arsenio Hall Show." George W. Bush would work a crowd by speaking Spanish and grabbing people's cellphones to chat up whomever was on the other end of the line. Barack Obama practically changed his official address to Iowa and became a fixture at every picnic, festival, and barbecue in the state.

A former reality star, President Trump puts on shows nonstop. "What Trump promises" vs. "what Trump delivers" takes a back seat to "how Trump performs." It's the show that the audience comes to see.

This is how things work -- especially now when so many things compete for our attention. Republican or Democrat, it makes no difference. If you want my vote, put on a show.

Robert Francis O'Rourke -- a cultural enigma who goes by "Beto" while trying to woo Latino voters back home in West Texas but went by "Robert" at prep school and an Ivy League university -- understands this reality.

When Trump visited El Paso recently to push the idea that there is a national emergency on the border, the commander in chief set out to convince people that one of the safest cities in America was actually one of the most dangerous until a border barrier was built.

None of that is true. But since his days selling real estate in Manhattan, Trump has never let the truth interfere with a good pitch. The P.T. Barnum of Fifth Avenue used to attempt to convince people that Trump Tower had ten more floors than it really did.

Trump doesn't just sell the steak, or the sizzle. He can get by with just selling you the mere thought of a steak. That's a gift, folks.

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.