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Beto O’Rourke’s political career drew on donations from the pro-Republican business establishment washingtonpost.com/politics/beto-…
Before @BetoORourke became the darling of liberal online donors, his top financial backers hailed from a different set entirely — wealthy businessmen who have sought political influence by collectively donating millions of dollars to Republicans.
Several of El Paso’s richest business moguls donated to and raised money for O’Rourke’ s city council campaigns, drawn to his support for a plan to redevelop El Paso’s poorer neighborhoods.
Some later backed a super PAC that would play a key role in helping him defeat an incumbent Democratic congressman.
For his part, O’Rourke worked on issues that had the potential to make money for some of his benefactors.
His support as a council member for the redevelopment plan, which sparked controversy at the time because it involved relocating low-income residents, many of them Hispanic, coincided with property investments by some of his benefactors.
As a congressman, he supported a $2 billion military funding increase that benefited a company controlled by another major donor. That donor, real estate developer Woody Hunt, was friends with O’Rourke’s late father.
Hunt also co-founded and funds an El Paso nonprofit organization that has employed O’Rourke’s wife since 2016.
In contrast to the aspirational image he has fostered in recent years, however, O’Rourke’s political career traced a more traditional path for a Texas politician — winning support from a typically pro-GOP business establishment interested in swaying public policy.
Born into one politically potent family and married into another, he benefited repeatedly from his relationships with El Paso’s most powerful residents, including several nationally known Republican moneymen.
The former congressman’s GOP ties are likely to become an issue as he enters a crowded Democratic presidential primary field that has so far leaned leftward. Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have already criticized O’Rourke’s voting record as insufficiently liberal.
Republicans are also piling on. A recent ad by the Club for Growth, a conservative group with a focus on cutting taxes, described O’Rourke’s pushing a redevelopment scheme “to bulldoze a poor Hispanic neighborhood.”
“O’Rourke, because of his charisma (?), can kind of pull off some of this behind-the-scenes power peddling,” said El Paso historian and activist David Romo, who has long opposed the business community’s push to redevelop downtown.
“He was the pretty face in the really ugly gentrification plan that negatively affected the most vulnerable people in El Paso.”
O’Rourke and his allies did not see it that way. At the start of his career, O’Rourke went door-to-door to sell the plan, crafted by the Paso Del Norte Group, a dues-paying alliance of business and community leaders on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
O’Rourke, his mother, his wife and his father-in-law, William Sanders — one of the most prominent real estate investors in the country — had all been members of the group, which included many of the financial backers of O’Rourke’s early campaigns.
Sanders led a private investment group that was buying up downtown properties, as some other donors to O’Rourke’s campaigns were doing.
The plan initially called for seizing land in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods through eminent domain — the same tactic that O’Rourke has opposed as part of the Trump administration’s plan to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico.
Faced with accusations of a potential conflict of interest, O’Rourke eventually agreed to recuse himself from city council votes on the plan, which was later shelved as real estate struggled during the 2008 recession.
The downtown redevelopment plan that O’Rourke backed early in his tenure on the city council had been drafted under the leadership of his father-in-law, Sanders, who had also positioned himself to profit from a turnaround by forming an investment group with other O’Rourke donors.
The slide presentation portrayed El Paso with a picture of an older Hispanic man in a cowboy hat, next to a caption that described the city’s image as “gritty,” “dirty,” “lazy” and with people who “speak Spanish.”
The city’s future appeared on another slide, with photos of the Texas-born actor Matthew McConaughey and the Spanish actress Penélope Cruz, who were described as “educated,” “entrepreneurial” and “bi-lingual.”
O’Rourke’s spokesman, Chris Evans, said O’Rourke condemned the marketing pitch at the time. “Beto did not approve of that kind of language to describe those in his community or anyone,” Evans said.
Once O’Rourke got to Congress, he made cleaning up corruption in government a priority.
He stopped taking money from political action committees after his first term, promised to support term limits for members of Congress, and sponsored bills to provide partial public financing for campaigns and limit donations to national party committees.
At the same time, O’Rourke continued to receive large amounts of money from employees of companies run by major donors.
Employees of one of his father-in-law’s former companies, Strategic Growth Bank, including Sanders himself, gave $57,400 during O’Rourke’s 2014 and 2016 House campaigns. Employees of El Paso-based Western Refining, including its chairman, Foster, gave $10,600 in 2014.
Hunt Companies’ employees, including Hunt, gave $60,300 to O’Rourke in the 2014 and 2016 cycles, more than the employees of any other business, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
O’Rourke worked in Congress to promote a military funding issue that directly affected Hunt’s business. Hunt Companies boasts of being the nation’s largest builder and manager of privatized military housing in the country.
The benefits to the O’Rourke household from Hunt were not limited to political donations. Hunt co-founded and has funded the Council on Regional Economic Expansion and Educational Development, or CREEED, an effort to improve academic performance of El Paso-area students.
O’Rourke’s wife, Amy, a former elementary school teacher and charter school founder, reported earning $146,085 between 2016 and 2018 as a consultant for CREEED.
