AOC Is Not Asking Permission To Be The Best Member Of Congress-- She's Just Being Herself

Early in the campaign Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called me on the phone to ask for a Blue America endorsement. We'd been looking for someone to take on Joe Crowley for a decade, so I knew Digby and Amato would agree that backing her was a good idea, even if her chance to actually win was practically non-existent against Queens Democratic Party Machine boss and "the next Speaker of the House." I told her we'd endorse her and help her raise money for the campaign but that she needed to work on name recognition and then take on Crowley again in 2020. She laughed at me and told me she ws going to win in 2018. I asked her how she thought she could accomplish that. She told me. She convinced me. I was awe-struck. We didn't just endorse her. We spent PAC money, independently-- so she doesn't even know-- on her campaign as well. I couldn't be happier with our "investment." Even beyond ridding Congress of the stench of the corrupt slime bag that was Joe Crowley-- a pillar of a crumbling repulsive establishment-- AOC has already accomplished more since being elected than most members do in their whole tenure. Not everyone understands that-- and among those who do, many do not like it, not one bit.

Ed Rollins, a broken down old GOP hack who now chairs Trump's corrupt Great America PAC, refused to say her name on a right wing talk show referring to her instead as "that little girl."

A far right Republican Party blog, Gateway Pundit, ran a typically silly and hysteric post about her filled with misinformation, trying to make it sound like she's some kind of trust-fund baby because

a- her family moved to Westchester County
b- she graduated from Yorktown High with honors
c- her nickname name for part of the time she was in college was Sandy
and...
d- "A video was discovered this week where Sandy Ocasio-Cortez is seen dancing"

This isn't parody, This isn't DWT making fun of a deluded, brainless right-winger. Those were his words and, yes, he bolded them and enlarged them so they would stand out because... well, we all know about what dancing means. Right? I'm so happy I get to embed it again. It's so great!



And the video credits her as Sandy Ocasio-Cortez. OMG! What a scam! What a scam! When these GOP geniuses started publishing the video on social media, Ocasio had 1.62 million twitter followers. That's been growing everyday since. It's now 2.16 million, higher than Nancy Pelosi's 1.88 million followers, more than Kevin McCarthy's 46,700 followers even combined with @GOPLeader's 210,000 followers. In fact, Miss Ocasio-Cortez now has more twitter followers than any other member of the House. You know why that's important, right? You see how she can bring up ideas that cause everyone from Fox and Fiends to Rachel to start talking about them and put them into the zeitgeist.

Is she too radical? Don't take me laugh. As CNN reported she's "a talented, charismatic young politician who has struck the political world with a force and impact rarely seen among even those who have been at it for a much longer time." And the knives are out for her. That same CNN report: "Fudging the facts in pursuit of 'being morally right'-- as Ocasio-Cortez puts it-- assumes that moral righteousness is an agreed-upon thing. As Trump's decision to institute a travel ban or build a wall around the country show, it's not. Ocasio-Cortez is new to all of this, yes. But the high profile she already enjoys caries with it some responsibility. Namely, to get the facts right. And when you get them wrong, to correct it as quickly as possible rather than trying to justify the error."



Whoopi Goldberg, co-host of The View, "scolded" AOC yesterday on the show. "It is very, very difficult" for her to admire Alexandria when she makes "accusations where you say, you know, the Democrats have done nothing, the establishment of the Democrats have done nothing. And I just want to throw this out to you. John Lewis (D-GA) wasn’t sitting still. [Sen.] Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wasn’t sitting still... So, you just got in there and I know you got lots of good ideas, but I would encourage you to sit still for a minute and learn the job… You don’t have to be born into it. You don’t have to know it when you step out, but before you start pooping on people and what they’ve done, you got to do something too."

Yeah, Alex From The Bronx, sit still and be a good little girl and in 150 years you may be just like Dianna Feinstein!

Mark Cuban's not as thick-- and is more sympathetic to where OC is coming from than poor old Whoopi. But he had some advice for her too after watching 60 Minutes. He wants her to continue being a radical (whew) but wants her to drop the "partisan language [because] we are all intros together."

Be a radical, Be different. Be a change leader Innovate. It’s your generation’s turn to govern. Go for it. But please leave our bad habit of using partisan language 'Us vs Them', 'Rep vs Dem', 'Libs vs Cons' behind... We are all in this together. Change the Game to Change the World.

Maybe he was stoned, unhappy about this:

He still may run-- probably as a Republican (since he is one)-- against Trump in 2020. His perspective: "now would be a great time for the new generation of politicians, across the board, to take a new approach [because] the partisan approach doesn’t work."

So the Whoopster is pissed because she's not cuddling up to old Democrats and Cuban is freaked because, she's not being nice to Republicans. OK. Andrew Kragie dissected her 60 Minutes appearance too. He has questions and is worried about her inconsistencies to his own vision and expectations: "Ever since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won an insurgent primary campaign in June against a well-established party elder, it hasn’t been clear whether she plans to push or pull the Democratic Party to the left. Will the former Bernie Sanders volunteer and self-identified democratic socialist try to push House leadership on policy while remaining well outside the party’s power structure? Or will the youngest woman ever elected to Congress opt to work inside the system, build alliances, and seek institutional power to pull the party toward her position?"

At first, it seemed she would pursue the first route, endorsing a progressive group’s campaign to challenge incumbent Democrats, joining climate activists in a sit-in outside Nancy Pelosi’s office, and refusing to support Pelosi’s return as speaker of the House until late November.

But in a 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday night, the new congresswoman downplayed her rebellious reputation. Yes, she wants Democrats to be more progressive, but it seems she plans to work within the party rather than launch public attacks from the left.

“We acknowledge that we are part of-- and I am part of-- a larger party,” she told the interviewer Anderson Cooper. “So a lot of that is going to do and deal with building relationships across the party, making sure that we are building consensus around these issues.

“There’s a lot of folks that I think sometimes want to brand me as a flamethrower,” she said. “I think the truth of what I am is I’m a consensus builder.” Breaking into a wide grin, she added, “And I like to think that I’m persuasive.”

Cooper asked her about centrist Democrats who worry that she and other progressives will push the party too far. “While I understand that concern, I think that I’m a much more reasonable person than people tend to make me out to be,” she said.

The 60 Minutes spot was Ocasio-Cortez’s first high-profile interview since taking the oath of office late last week and was likely her longest serious sit-down to date. It’s unusual for a freshman representative to land such a prominent interview, but since her improbable primary win over the summer, she’s been the subject of countless stories in both the mainstream and the right-wing press, fed in part by her unusually transparent approach to public relations. The frenzy has created a feedback loop, with Ocasio-Cortez winning media attention because of all the media attention she’s already received. Still, the 60 Minutes interview did provide some substantive details about how Ocasio-Cortez plans to work in Congress.

Ocasio-Cortez positioned herself as a principled insider rather than a purist outsider. She articulated goals that fall within the mainstream of the post-2016 Democratic Party: “I want to be able to tell my grandchildren that we established a single-payer [health-care] system, tuition-free universities, and that we saved our climate for their future, because we decided to be courageous in the moment and make it happen.”

Yet she also continued to promote progressive policies outside the Democratic comfort zone. For example, she affirmed her goal of reducing U.S. carbon emissions to zero by 2030. When Cooper asked how that unlikely scenario might be possible, she talked briefly and vaguely about “trying to push our technological capacities to the furthest extent possible.” To fund the “Green New Deal” she and other progressives demand, she suggested returning marginal tax rates for the highest earners to levels not seen since the 1970s. Such rates would mean a massive tax hike on what she called the “tippy tops” of personal income.

“What you are talking about, just big picture, is a radical agenda compared to the way politics is done right now,” Cooper said. Ocasio-Cortez didn’t run away from the label. “Well, I think that it only has ever been radicals that have changed this country,” she said, citing Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation and Franklin D. Roosevelt creating Social Security.

“Do you call yourself a radical?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she replied. “You know, if that’s what radical means, call me a radical.”

...With the biggest megaphone of all the House progressives, Ocasio-Cortez can help chart the course for the Bernie wing of the party in the House. It will have to decide whether it wants to be a thorn in Speaker Pelosi’s side, like the GOP’s hard-line Freedom Caucus under John Boehner and Paul Ryan, or play nice in public in the hope of influencing leadership behind closed doors. The new congresswoman’s interview suggests she’s got a plan, at least for herself: She’d rather become an influential insider than stay an outside agitator.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by Nancy Ohanian