“Americans are ready to climb out of this darkness.”
He’s the first Democrat of any prominence to announce that he’s exploring a run, I should clarify. Rep. John Delaney of Maryland has been running for awhile now.
Although why should Delaney be thought of as less prominent than Castro? Castro’s never held federal elected office. He’s never held statewide elected office. He’s never run for federal or statewide office. The one elected office he did hold, mayor of San Antonio, isn’t a position of great power locally; it’s the city manager who makes the important decisions there, not the mayor. He’s not even the most accomplished member of his family. His twin brother, Joaquin, has been a member of Congress since 2013.
Yet despite his tender age and short resume, Castro was invited to deliver the keynote address at the 2012 Democratic convention and was later installed as director of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration. It’s his great good fortune to be a young well-credentialed (Stanford, Harvard Law) Latino Democratic politician at a moment when (a) the Latino vote is increasingly important, (b) Democrats are bending over backwards to try to monopolize that vote, with decent success, and (c) their bench of big-name Latino pols is shockingly thin. Somehow they haven’t managed to produce a recent Latino star of the stature of a Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. (Although that might now have changed with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.) And Castro is keenly aware. He was pulling every lever available to him to land on the ticket in 2016 as Hillary Clinton’s VP, to the point that ClintonWorld had to nudge him to back off. But his scheme wasn’t crazy: The whole reason he was appointed to the HUD job was to pad his CV a bit in case Democrats decided that he had to be put on the ticket.
