This is a revealing commentary about many things, CNN probably, but mostly about the Democratic Party. From News Busters:

MRC analysts looked at all of CNN’s coverage from March 14 (the first full day after O’Rourke’s announcement) and found 52 instances in which talking heads criticized Beto for being both white and a male. Those cases included only mentions by hosts, analysts, or outside journalists — not politicians or Democratic operatives.

The video below doesn’t show all 52 instances but it does show 20 of them and it’s clear in many of them that being white and male is either a big problem for Beto or, from the flip side of the same coin, the only reason anyone cares about him at all.

You could put this down to CNN being fixated on this issue but, to be fair, it was Beto himself who got this ball rolling in the 9,000-word profile piece about him which was published the same day he announced:

O’Rourke is acutely aware, too, of perhaps his biggest vulnerability—being a white man in a Democratic Party yearning for a woman or a person of color, a Kamala Harris or a Cory Booker. “The government at all levels is overly represented by white men,” he says. “That’s part of the problem, and I’m a white man. So if I were to run, I think it’s just so important that those who would comprise my team looked like this country.

If you don’t want to make this a campaign issue, don’t make it an issue. Will others make it an issue? Almost certainly, but Beto is so eager to present himself as woke he’s taking whacks at his own campaign before it even launches.

Unfortunately, Beto is probably not wrong. In a party that sees racial characteristics as fundamental elements of identity and which believes white privilege is an ever-present issue that needs to be addressed, the idea of rallying behind a white candidate will seem counter-intuitive to many. Here’s the clip.