EL PASO, Texas — Beto O’Rourke attracted the officers’ attention near the Texas-New Mexico state line, rocketing past them in a speeding Volvo, hustling to nowhere around 3 a.m.
He was so inebriated when the police reached him — after he had collided with a truck and pivoted to a stop across the center median of Interstate 10 — that he nearly collapsed when he tried to step out of the car.
Hours earlier, on Sept. 26, 1998, O’Rourke had turned 26. He was home again in El Paso, back for good after three searching years of post-college odd jobs in New York City. He had moved into an apartment near his parents, in an 18-unit building his family owned. His mother hired him to help with computers and inventory at her home-furnishings store. His father, a hard-charging former local politician, was dreaming bigger.
And an after-hours mistake, even one this serious, was not going to stand in the way.
“I remember he came home afterward; we were talking about it,” his mother, Melissa O’Rourke, said of the arrest. “It was just very, ‘How could I be so stupid?’”
Beto O’Rourke’s fortunes would turn quickly. He had some help.
In the years that followed, he transitioned from rootless former musician to celebrated civic-leader-in-a-hurry. Within months, with a loan from his parents and a business plan guided by his father, Pat O’Rourke, he started a successful web design company and an online newsmagazine. Before long, despite having shunned politics for much of his life, he assumed the sheen of a rising star.
This critical period of Beto O’Rourke’s life, spanning his late 20s and early 30s, was neither the first nor the last time an inherited tool kit of family influence and relative financial comforts helped smooth his stumbles and hasten his successes.
His step-grandfather, a former Navy secretary, had steered him to a prestigious Virginia boarding school. His father’s political connections had landed him a Capitol Hill internship. His eventual marriage to the daughter of one of El Paso’s wealthiest men, the developer William D. Sanders, would ease access to a new network of political allies.
O’Rourke’s tax returns lay bare the extent to which he and his wife, Amy, have benefited from their parents’ largesse, placing them among the wealthiest families in the Democratic presidential field. In the decade from 2008 through 2017, close to 40 percent of the O’Rourkes’ $3.4 million in income came from shares in partnerships gifted to them by their parents. More than $1 million came from two entities established by Amy O’Rourke’s father.
O’Rourke’s often-charmed trajectory has not been lost on some progressive skeptics, who wonder if a white man of relative privilege is the best fit for this Democratic moment.
At the same time, O’Rourke has acknowledged that his rise was made possible, at least in part, by the clear advantages he enjoyed, particularly during this stretch of his life.
Speaking last month in Iowa, he cited his two arrests: the drunken-driving episode — during which he tried to leave the accident scene, according to the police report, though O’Rourke has denied this — and a previous trespassing incident. He noted that neither had limited his opportunities.
“It’s not because I’m a great person, or I’m a genius, or I’ve figured anything out,” he said. “A lot of that has to do with the fact that I’m a white man, that I had parents who had the cash to post bail at the time. A lot of people don’t have that.”
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After returning to El Paso, O’Rourke began connecting with friends, in and outside the city. He had a big idea, a couple actually. His uncle, Brooks Williams, recalled that O’Rourke, skilled at drawing out even strangers in social settings, had expressed an interest in operating some kind of salon for civic discussion.
“I want to have that burrito store,” Williams remembers O’Rourke saying after he returned home. “I want to have that place downtown where politicians come in and talk.”
But it was O’Rourke’s experience working with Williams’ technology company in New York that helped set him on his future path.
He began selling friends on the untapped potential of the tech market in El Paso, with a job environment far more accommodating than in a place like New York.
His business would be called Stanton Street Technology, named for the El Paso thoroughfare where the family-owned apartment building was located.
In November 1999, he posted on his company’s website, StantonStreet.com, hinting at a burgeoning interest in local public affairs. “The big issue today is access to capital,” he wrote, “and whether or not banks are making credit available to the qualified small businesses in town who need it.”
The posting was in the “City Talk Reader’s Forum,” a feature of the new company — part website developer, part online newsmagazine covering local affairs and culture.
His tenure as publisher was short but significant.
The purpose of Stanton Street, on the web and in print, was to “tell the stories of El Paso which I didn’t feel were being told,” O’Rourke said.
From there, friends draw a straight line to O’Rourke’s early political education. “One of the issues they covered was politics,” said Steve Ortega, a close friend who served with O’Rourke on the El Paso City Council. “That kind of sparked his interest.”
Around the time he began considering a run for the Council against a popular incumbent, his personal and professional lives began to intersect — happily, in both cases, for O’Rourke.
Melissa O’Rourke had gotten a phone call from an old friend, Beth Galvin, an El Paso artist. She wondered if Beto would like to take out her niece, Amy Sanders.
William Sanders, Amy’s father and Galvin’s brother, understood the opportunities El Paso afforded.
A pioneer in real estate investment, he was about to turn his gaze on downtown El Paso. Sanders would announce a controversial project that envisioned bulldozing parts of the city center, remaking it as an upscale shopping, dining and tourist destination. (O’Rourke’s support for the plan as a councilman drew the scorn of many barrio residents.)
Several months after Beth Galvin’s call, Sanders would tell business associates, O’Rourke phoned him to ask for a meeting.
Sanders thought O’Rourke, by then a council candidate, wanted a campaign contribution.
That would come later. This time he was asking for something else.
He wanted to marry Bill Sanders’ daughter.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.