We remember when all the talk was that the Democrats were going to run Matthew McConnaughey for governor of Texas. Those were scary days. Now, things are apparently improving, because the word is it’s going to be Beto O’Rourke instead.

That’s exactly the kind of Democrat we’d like to see Greg Abbott, or whoever ends up the GOP nominee if Abbott isn’t able to survive the busy primary race to come, draw in the general election.

O’Rourke is good at one thing: raising money. He’s absolutely awful at everything else. Other than perhaps generating tingles and Betogasms from partisan Democrat media operatives, which he’s currently doing.

Beto O’Rourke, the former El Paso congressman who became a darling of Democrats after nearly defeating Senator Ted Cruz in 2018, is inching closer to announcing a run for governor of Texas, according to three people who have spoken with him.

In recent weeks, Mr. O’Rourke has been making calls to Democratic leaders across Texas to inform them that he is seriously considering taking on Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who is up for re-election next year. And he has begun talking to supporters about having them join his campaign staff.

A decision could be made in the coming weeks, the three people said, possibly as soon as October. Democrats in Texas have been urging Mr. O’Rourke to get into the race for governor almost from the moment he dropped out of the 2020 race for president, a quixotic effort that stumbled early and failed to gain traction amid a crowded primary field.

But despite his troubles on the national stage, Mr. O’Rourke has maintained a deep wellspring of support in Texas, where many Democrats still display the black-and-white Beto signs from the 2018 campaign on their lawns and on their cars.

Think of this guy as one of those one-hit wonder bands whose first song you heard got so much radio play you went from thinking it was OK to abjectly hating. And then every other song of theirs is so bad it’s laughable.

That’s Beto.

They made this guy, who was a spoiled rich-kid beta male congressman from El Paso with a fraudulent Mexican cultural persona and some fairly serious ethical issues, into the next JFK when he was running against Cruz, who was still nursing bumps and bruises from the brutal HOP primary in 2016. But the fawning media coverage and the sanctimony of wine-mom leftists in the prosperous precincts of Austin and Dallas, combined with some $85 million in campaign cash set ablaze, wasn’t enough to take Cruz down on the best of days.

And 2018 is ancient history at this point. The national mood couldn’t possibly be different than it was at the height of the Trump-Russia hoaxism and Orange Man Bad hysteria.

Particularly in Texas, where there are 15,000 people living under a highway overpass in Del Rio and the FAA won’t let news organizations film the squalor with drone cameras, where the federal government is insisting on transporting COVID patients through the state’s highways and byways and where the Biden administration is doing everything it can to shut down the oil and gas industry. You want to run an open borders gun-control freak against the Republican governor who’s doing what he can to stop the bleeding?

Best of luck, gang.

McConnaughey would at least have been something new and different, even if he’d clearly make rookie mistakes and the voters might recognize a lot of same-old, same-old from him policy-wise. O’Rourke is the same loser politician the Dems send up in every statewide election in Texas. Instead of a real celebrity it looks like they’re going to run a fake one, which is just fine.

Texas stays red in 2022 if this is what the top of the ticket will look like.