Beto O’Rourke Talks Texas Pandemic and Politics

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: What exactly needs to be done, in your view? What are you calling for?

BETO O’ROURKE, FORMER U.S. DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Leadership, in a word, Christiane. Without the CDC, without the White House providing the necessary leadership, states and local communities are left to their own devices. And as you suggested, there is not enough testing in Texas. People are waiting in lines many hours long to get a test. Some people can’t afford to do that, and so they aren’t getting tested. They’re waiting days and sometimes weeks to get test results back, so you can’t even begin and implement a contact tracing program. And when you have the president of the United States retweeting public health advice from a former game show host, Chuck Woolery, who says the CDC is lying and you can’t trust anybody, including, importantly, doctors, instead of tweeting out the medical advice of Dr. Fauci, one of the most respected medical and infectious disease experts anywhere in the world today, then you really have a crisis in leadership. Here in Texas, you have our lieutenant governor, the most powerful elected position in the state, saying that there are some things more important than living. In other words, let’s get on with the dying so that we can open this state. You compare my state of Texas with 29 million people to the country of Germany with 83 million, Germany recorded 250 cases yesterday. Texas recorded nearly 10,000 cases yesterday. So, you mentioned the example of New York where they’ve gone 24 hours without a single death, we look at what Western Europe has been able to do. The only difference between here in Texas and U.S. at large is the lack of leadership.

AMANPOUR: So, let’s talk about, again, that leadership, because clearly, people have been left to their own devices, whether they are elected leaders or whether they’re civilians. People are concerned, people don’t know who to believe, people don’t know whether to wear masks or not to wear masks, don’t know whether to go to school or not to. I mean, there is just so much confusion out there. But your country, doesn’t it sort of embody this innate contradiction, the federal, the state, the local? Your whole system is built on these contradictions. There is no centralization, as you just mentioned in Germany and other successful countries that have got this under control right now.

O’ROURKE: I don’t know. I think that there is a great history and tradition in America of leaders assuming the responsibility at the moments of great crisis. So, think about Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the midst of the great depression and then facing Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II. I think about John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis and making sure that this country was up to the single greatest existential threats we faced at the time, banding us all together in common cause, be us Republicans, Democrats or independents.