It’s customary to begin a campaign obituary with some kind of cliché. If the candidate in question enjoyed some success before the fall, a hypothetical retrospective will probably commence on a downbeat but defiantly optimistic note (“While not securing the ultimate prize, there can be little doubt that Candidate X has made their mark,” etc.). Less successful politicians, meanwhile, are liable to generate still more inane platitudes that could mean practically anything (e.g., “a campaign that ended much as it began,” “never really found its footing,” “couldn’t ultimately attract enough support to win by getting more votes than its competitors,” etc.).

In truth, it’s difficult to find the right cliché with which to describe the demise of Beto O’Rourke: a figure whose campaign was at once so utterly generic in its politics and so unbearably awkward in its execution that it belongs in a museum alongside other 2019 oddities that will probably prove indecipherable to future generations. Even for those of us who lived through the failed Texas Senate candidate’s Icarus-like ascent and subsequent fall, the pace of events makes his candidacy a dizzying one to unpack.

In less than six months, O’Rourke made the journey from national celebrity to forgettable also-ran: a breathtaking trajectory typically reserved for erstwhile YouTube stars and former reality-show contestants. Such comparisons are only too fitting for a candidate who initially shot to fame thanks to a series of viral, off-the-cuff videos before arguably being undone by the same transitory environment that had enabled his rise in the first place. The kind of ephemeral political commodity that is only possible in the social media age, O’Rourke’s campaign began with comparisons to Bobby Kennedy and ended only months later in a flourish of increasingly desperate, almost pitiable attempts to generate clicks at any cost.