America's Sweetheart-- Part V: The Road Ahead

This morning, a friend of mine shared a thought from his meditation: "If Hillary and even Trump have given their country any substantial gifts, the biggest must be making many Democrats and Independents wary and prone to scrutinize contenders before it’s too late. Perhaps an award should be presented Trump for his role in opening the Democratic Party to reform." And that-- plus Colbert's show Monday night-- brings us to... Part V in our newest series, America's Sweetheart.

Monday, Colbert asked AOC about criticism she's gotten from her walking dead colleagues in Congress: "On a scale of zero to some, how many fucks do you give?" (Imagine him asking that question to Steny Hoyer or Kevin McCarthy? No, imagine how Steny or McCarthy would react to being asked that question on live TV.) And, of course... Ocasio answered "Zero... If you think activism is inherently divisive-- I mean, today is Martin Luther King Day-- and people called Martin Luther King divisive in his time. We forget he was wildly unpopular when advocating for the Civil Rights Act. I think that what we really need to realize is that social movements are the moral compass and should be the moral compass for our politics."

Perhaps that's why the new Axios/SurveyMonkey poll found that 74% of Democrats (and people who lean Dem) would consider voting for Ocasio-Cortez if she were old enough to run for president. It also found that Dems like her a lot more than they like the senior senator in New York. (Hint: Schumer's seat will be up in 2022 and she'll be old enough to run by then.)

Please watch the whole AOC-Colbert interview above. She explains her way-too-conservative marginal tax rate proposal and, far more important, why she brought it up for discussion: "At what level are we really just living in excess and what kind of society do we want to live in. And do we want to live in a city, for example, where billionaires have their own personal Uber helidads, when... people are working 80 hour weeks and can't feed their kids." A good way to introduce Clare Malone's essay for FiveThirtyEight yesterday, The Young Left’s Anti-Capitalist Manifesto. Short version: "Its goal is to remake our economic system-- and the Democratic Party." Sean McElwee, she wrote, "is one of a cadre of young left activists whose voices have grown louder in the years following Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump. Many came of political age in the decade following the financial crash of 2008, and many are disillusioned by a Democratic Party they think has been ideologically hollowed out. They’ve organized outside the traditional party apparatus-- the Democratic Socialists of America, the Justice Democrats-- and worked to get representation in Congress, pushing figures like newly minted congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley. Now they find themselves holding greater purchase than ever before in the formal Washington political process."

For a few years now, Democratic voters have shown they’re primed for a leftward shift, and this rising group of activists and politicians wants to push them even further. At the heart of the young left’s project is a discomfort with the free market capitalist system under which we live. It’s a system deeply ingrained in many Americans’ identities, though increasingly less so: 2016 was the first year since Gallup started tracking the question that it found Democrats had a more positive view of socialism than they did of capitalism.

This new group of activists wants to capitalize on that shift. And they’re doing it by tweeting incessantly and acting impertinently toward their fellow Democrats. Unlike bright young political things of years gone by, their purpose is to confound the party’s leadership, not earn their praise.

To this end, McElwee calls himself an “Overton Window Mover.” It’s a high-minded allusion to how activists can influence the national conversation to make fringey ideas seem less radical. He and the others have already opened the Democrats’ window, and the winds of change that blow through it might be more F5 tornado than gentle summer breeze.

...Since the 2016 election, the left’s political and cultural influence has ballooned. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America grew exponentially during the first years of the Trump administration, thanks in part to the invaluable PR that was the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. At the same time, the “dirtbag-left” comedy and politics of Chapo Traphouse, a popular podcast, helped shape a certain shared sensibility among a socialist millennial set. (An excerpt from the Chapo hosts’ new book reads, “Capitalism, and the politics it spawns, is not working for anyone under 30 who is not a sociopath.”)

Many young left activists think the time has never been more right, the culture never more ready, to move left-wing politics into the mainstream. “This moment has radicalized liberals and electoralized radicals,” Maurice Mitchell, the 38-year-old new director of the Working Families Party, a New York-based progressive-left organization with close ties to the labor movement, told me...

Mitchell, 38, is the first person of color to head the Working Families Party. “The aging Jewish radical can take you only so far,” outgoing director Dan Cantor told the New York Times when Mitchell’s appointment was announced in April 2018. Mitchell spent years as a community organizer on Long Island and most recently worked at Blackbird, a communications firm he co-founded that is closely allied with the Movement for Black Lives. By Mitchell’s telling, he’s spent most of his career at the outskirts of Democratic politics, sometimes in opposition to its elected officials, living “somewhere in that place apart.”

Trump’s election, though, had made the Democratic mainstream more receptive to ideas once thought to be liberal pipe dreams. “We’re in a moment of political realignment and it’s disorienting,” Mitchell said. “People are looking for solutions, and people instinctively understand-- even people working in centrist think tanks-- that the solutions of the past will not take us out of this moment of realignment and will not take us into the future.”

What’s difficult, Mitchell said, is that while the culture is primed for a shift, the details still have to be ironed out.

“It starts off by recognizing that this economy is insufficient for all of our needs, for all of our people having dignity-- and then we have to transition, we have to figure out how to transition while we still live under neoliberal capitalism,” he said. “That’s the work that we’re doing.”

Alexandra Rojas, Justice Democrats’ 23-year-old executive director, was 13 years old when the financial crisis of 2008 hit. She recalls nothing of Washington’s deliberations over bank bailouts, only difficult conversations with her parents about scaling back. McElwee’s memories of the historic moment are similarly fuzzy. “I thought it was weird there was an organization called ‘Bear Stearns,’” he said. That childhood naivete was shed over the next decade, and the events of those years left an indelible impression; Rojas, McElwee and so many of their activist agemates were shaped by an early exposure to the potential dangers of the free market.

Much of the Democratic Party’s present identity crisis has its roots in the worldwide crash of financial markets late in George W. Bush’s presidency and at the beginning of Barack Obama’s term of office. Complicated financial products crumpled the U.S. housing market, and widespread unemployment, foreclosures and homelessness followed. While banks and investment firms failed, none of their heads were jailed for wrongdoing.

At the time, Democrats were divided over how to deal with the crisis. Elizabeth Warren-- then a Harvard professor-- made her first full step into Washington politics as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Warren devotes a large portion of her 2014 book, “A Fighting Chance,” to her memories of the crisis — namely, that the government was far too credulous of the banks’ requests. “Now Treasury was giving $20 billion in additional TARP bailout funds to Citibank, plus a $306 billion taxpayer guarantee.”

There was a fundamental divide in how Democrats approached solving the crisis. Dodd-Frank, the legislation that would eventually pass in response to the crash, took an incremental approach to industry reform. But there was a faction that favored broader, more systemic structural reforms of the system. The more incrementalist reform won out under Obama, thanks in no small part, some thought, to lobbying by the heads of investment banks.

“The financial industry has so much clout and so much influence, not just because of the money but because they’re smart people, they’re persuasive, they have great tailors,” Paul Krugman, the 2008 Nobel laureate in economics told me over coffee on a recent afternoon in Manhattan while wearing a tidy, if not tailored, outfit featuring a scarf and zip-up sweater. “I had a little bit of experience trying to persuade Obama and associates of taking a harder line on the bailouts,” he said. But Krugman didn’t prevail. “Jamie Dimon [chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase] cuts a really impressive figure, even though in fact he’s dead wrong about many of the crucial issues.”

Krugman called the emerging clutch of young activists’ skepticism about capitalism useful, and a necessary counterbalance to the lobbying and financial strength of Wall Street. Though in some aspects, he said, the far-left movement hasn’t reached intellectual maturity. “The truth is there aren’t a lot of technically adept people from that [far-left] position, which is not because there couldn’t be, but because they haven’t been a factor-- it’s all new.” He continued, name checking his fellow Nobel laureate, “If you’re having meetings in which Joe Stiglitz and I are the farthest left voices, that’s a limiting spectrum and it would be helpful if there were people beyond.”

In part, that’s because before the financial crisis, American policy makers, including Democrats, didn’t do much about income inequality or widespread financial system reform. Mike Konczal, an economic fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank, characterized past Democratic attitudes toward financial reform as mostly centered on workers increasing their skills and education. Democrats in the Bill Clinton era were still near-uniformly bullish on capitalism. “The system more or less worked fine, it was just a matter of getting people access to the system,” he said. “There wasn’t a big problem with the economy itself, it was just that some people were excluded from it.”

In the last decade, the far left has found the problems too great to ignore. The Occupy Wall Street movement kicked things off a few years after the financial crisis but was plagued by a perception that its demands to end income inequality were too vague and the organization too decentralized. But in recent years, progressive politics have found more precise policies and voices in figures like Warren and Sanders. Rojas, the director of Justice Democrats, dropped out of community college in 2015 to work for the Sanders campaign. “I’ve had to experience what it’s like to have four or five jobs, each at $7.50, to make rent. I saw my dad suffer during the financial crisis,” she said. “I’m someone who comes from a family that really loves work and is hard working but has also experienced a capitalist system that’s run amok.”

The rising far-left Democratic activists are necessary counterpoints, Krugman told me, pushing new ideas to the masses. “Banking is on the one hand a deeply technical issue, but on the other hand it’s too important to be left solely to the technocrats,” he said. “Elizabeth Warren shouldn’t be the outer bound; we should have some people who are much more radical.”

With its incessant tweets and Instagrams, the young left has in essence begun a long session of political exposure therapy with the Democratic mainstream, popularizing ideas that many people have never heard of before or ones that would have been laughed down at first mention not so long ago.

It hasn’t gone over well with some factions of the party. In an exit interview following her November 2018 loss, Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill said she wished Ocasio-Cortez well, but called her “a bright and shiny new object who came out of nowhere.” She advised her to “stick to issues we can actually accomplish something on,” saying, “the rhetoric is cheap. Getting results is a lot harder.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been more measured, but in the wake of Ocasio-Cortez’s primary upset, she tamped down suggestions that the surprise election was indicative of a radical shift in the party. “Nobody’s district is representative of somebody else’s district,” Pelosi said. “It should not be viewed as something that stands for everything else.”

That hasn’t stopped Ocasio-Cortez from using her ever-growing national platform to push for new candidates like herself all over the country. In November she announced that she would support Justice Democrats’ effort to primary Democratic members in the 2020 election, a move that’s seen as highly unusual, if not uncollegial. Maneuvers like that haven’t universally endeared her, even to sympathetic members of the party. In the weeks following the November election, one anonymous staffer from the Progressive Caucus told the Atlantic, “She’s so focused on truly Instagramming every single thing that, aside from the obvious suspects in her friendship circle, she’s not taking the time to capitalize on building relationships with members as much as she should.” (Recently, Ocasio-Cortez helped lead a Twitter class for members of the Democratic caucus.) In a recent Politico piece, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver said, “I’m sure Ms. Cortez means well, but there’s almost an outstanding rule: Don’t attack your own people, we just don’t need sniping in our Democratic caucus.” Corbin Trent, Ocasio-Cortez’s spokesman, told FiveThirtyEight that the freshman would stay the rhetorical course and continue to support efforts to primary Democrats. “Most of her time is spent sniping Republicans and white supremacists-- very little time is spent in intraparty conflict. It’s a mountain out of a molehill.”

Perhaps the policy activists care most about promoting in the next year is the Green New Deal. It’s a plan that’s been pushed by a group of high-profile new Democratic legislators, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ocasio-Cortez, who proposed creating a new congressional committee to develop a detailed plan. As of now, the policy specifics are vague, but the plan’s broad goals are to fund a “massive investment in the drawdown in greenhouse gases,” explore renewable energy sources, and train Americans in new, more sustainable jobs. Recently, Elizabeth Warren endorsed the idea of a Green New Deal, which Ocasio-Cortez was quick to point out on Twitter. (Cory Booker and Sanders have also voiced support.)

Krugman is also bullish on the young left’s centerpiece policy. “If the Green New Deal means that we’re going to try to rely on public investment in technologies and renewables and things that will make it easier for people to use less fossil fuel, that’s a pretty good start,” he said.

The policy that has him more worried is single-payer health care, a centerpiece of Sanders’ campaign that many likely 2020 candidates have already come out to support. “That’s a huge amount of money-- you can’t just do that by running up the deficit. You’d have to be collecting a bunch of new taxes, which is a reason for concern,” he said.

Krugman has been thinking about other ways to fiddle with the market system, though.

“I’ve been trying to do a little exercise with myself. I think with the fall of communism, we’d say central planning, government control of production doesn’t really work. But actually that’s not totally true,” he said. “What I try to put together is what could plausibly actually not be capitalist, actually not be markets-- maybe 20-25 percent of the economy.” Things like health care, education, and utilities are all in the mix.

...A trademark of the young left movement is its urgency of mission. This, coupled with a deep disdain for establishment politics, has made the dissemination of their gospel of change-- particularly online-- sharp-elbowed and disdainful of naysayers. “You don’t win over these people, you crush them,” McElwee told me of Republicans the first time we met. “I don’t make friends with Republican operatives. I don’t try to reach across the aisle. I think they’re bad people and I don’t want to be associated with them and you’ll never find a picture of me shaking hands with David Frum or something,” he said, referring to George W. Bush’s former speechwriter who is now a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Now that some of the left’s candidates have found themselves in office, agitation from inside the party is a tactic that will be put to greater use. After her election, Ocasio-Cortez attended a sit-in at Pelosi’s office over climate change. Tlaib unsuccessfully asked the Democratic leader to put her on the powerful House Appropriations Committee-- an assignment that typically goes to seasoned members. (Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez have both been placed on the Financial Services Committee.) And on the first day of the 2019 House session, Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ro Khanna of California said they would vote against Democrats’ rules for the new Congress because they included a measure that necessitated any spending be offset by spending cuts or revenue increases. For progressive politicians pushing massive government-funded programs like Medicare for all and the Green New Deal, the rules are not seen as bureaucratic minutiae, but as sabotage.

When I asked Shahid if the new left movement was going to be the Democrats’ version of the House Freedom Caucus, his answer was unequivocal: “Yes, it is.”

He had another historical example in mind, too: Thaddeus Stevens and the Radical Republicans, a group of abolitionists who stridently pushed for Lincoln’s Republican Party to abolish slavery. “Politics is still the art of compromise, you still have to pass legislation,” Shahid said. “But the idea is on whose terms is the compromise?” Every transformative president, he said, had found himself pushed into radical new policies by movements. (Ocasio-Cortez said something similar in a 60 Minutes interview that aired a few weeks after Shahid and I talked.) Abraham Lincoln had the abolitionists at his throat, Franklin Roosevelt had labor unions pushing for the New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson had civil rights leaders prodding him toward reforms of racist laws.

“Maybe we can make Joe Biden into a Lincoln,” he said.

Who's Your Favorite Freshman? America's Sweetheart, Part IV

If Fox keeps it up, AOC is going to be president when she turns 35

I mentioned earlier that not all the freshmen are like AOC. A number of people seemed offended and asked me what I meant. I was thinking about independence, smarts, solidarity, relatability, dedication... that kind of thing, which holds up well against... well, careerism. Yesterday Matt Taibbi was tackling the same kind of criticism on Twitter because of an essay Rolling Stone had just published, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Crusher of Sacred Cows. He agreed that many of the politicians are morons, but he put it more gently than I usually do: "One of the first things you learn covering American politicians is that they’re not terribly bright." No 4 dimensional chess players. "The average American politician," he wrote, "would lose at checkers to a zoo gorilla. They’re usually in office for one reason: someone with money sent them there, often to vote yes on a key appropriation bill or two. On the other 364 days of the year, their job is to shut their yaps and approximate gravitas anytime they’re in range of C-SPAN cameras. Too many hacks float to the capital on beds of national committee money and other donor largesse, but then-- once they get behind that desk and sit between those big flags-- start thinking they’re actually beloved tribunes of the people, whose opinions on all things are eagerly desired."

Excellent definition, although he forgot to mention most of them are drunk all the time. His concern with the stupidity of so many members-- he doesn't mention the corporate media shills, basically stenographers, who cover them-- is because the "political establishment is once again revealing its blindness to its own unpopularity with its silly swipes at AOC," and reminds us of what they're all painfully aware, namely that "she won in spite of the party and big donors, not because of them."

AOC: "When so many others have abdicated their responsibility, it's on all of us to breathe fire"

That doesn’t make anything she says inherently more or less correct. But it changes the dynamic a bit. All of AOC’s supporters sent her to Washington precisely to make noise. There isn’t a cabal of key donors standing behind her, cringing every time she talks about the Pentagon budget. She is there to be a pain in the ass, and it’s working. Virtually the entire spectrum of Washington officialdom has responded to her with horror and anguish.

The mortification on the Republican side has come more from media figures than actual elected officials. Still, there are plenty of people like Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) doing things like denouncing “this girl, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whatever she is” for preaching “socialism wrapped in ignorance.” A group of GOP House members booed her on the floor, to which she replied, “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas.”

The Beltway press mostly can’t stand her. A common theme is that, as a self-proclaimed socialist, she should be roaming the halls of Rayburn and Cannon in rags or a barrel. Washington Examiner reporter Eddie Scarry tweeted a photo of her in a suit, saying she didn’t look like “a girl who struggles.”

High priest of conventional wisdom Chris Cillizza, with breathtaking predictability, penned a column comparing her to Donald Trump. He noted the social media profiles of both allow them to “end-run the so-called ‘media filter’ and deliver their preferred message… directly to supporters.”

The latter issue, of course, is the real problem most of Washington has with “AOC”: her self-generated popularity and large social media presence means she doesn’t need to ask anyone’s permission to say anything.

She doesn’t have to run things by donors and she doesn’t need the assent of thinkfluencers like Cillizza or Max Boot (who similarly compared her to both Trump and Sarah Palin), because she almost certainly gains popularity every time one of those nitwits takes a swipe at her.

Which brings us to elected Democrats, who if anything have been most demonstrative in their AOC freakout. We had Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) saying, “We don’t need your sniping in our Democratic caucus.” Recently ousted Senator [and new Republican-lite MSNBC thing] Claire McCaskill expressed alarm that she’s “the thing” and a “bright shiny new object.”

This is in addition to the litany of anonymous complaints from fellow caucus members, some of whom felt she jumped the line in an attempt to get a Ways and Means committee assignment. There were whispers she did this through some online-pressure sorcery she alone could avail herself of thanks to her massive Twitter following (nearly every news story about Ocasio-Cortez mentions her 2.47 million 2.56 million Twitter followers).

“It totally pissed off everyone,” one senior House Democrat said about the Ways and Means campaign. “You don’t get picked for committees by who your grass-roots [supporters] are.”

“She needs to decide: Does she want to be an effective legislator or just continue being a Twitter star?” said another Democrat, whom Politico described as being “in lockstep” with AOC’s ideology.

[Maybe her policies, but absolutely not her ideology, which goes way beyond a bag of policies. Let me just add that one high-ranking, clawing member who had attached his own star to Crowley-"the-next-speaker" and was already whipping for him, has described AOC with far more venom than anything he ever uses towards Trump or any other Republican. He's out "to get" her and her allies. "In lockstep" with AOC's ideology? I don't think so-- just another pompous blowhard, but this one a proud "liberal."]

This is what they hate her for most of all

All of which brings us back to the issue of Washington’s would-be 4-D chess players. Time and again, they reveal how little they understand about the extent of their own influence, or anti-influence, as it were.

They all think the pronouncements of their own party leaders, and donors, and high-profile commentators at the Times and the Post or CNN, have extraordinary importance. They think this for the obvious reason that most of them owe their political careers to such people.

Ocasio-Cortez does not. In this one narrow sense, her story does indeed have something in common with the story of Trump. As did Trump, Ocasio-Cortez probably picks up a dozen future votes every time a party hack or hurrumphing pundit or ossifying ex-officeholder like McCaskill or Scott Walker or Joe Lieberman throws a tantrum over her.

Somehow, three years after the 2016 election, which was as graphic a demonstration of the public’s well-documented disgust with Washington as we’ve ever seen, these waxen functionaries of the political class still don’t understand that their disapproval more often than not counts as an endorsement to most voters.



The Lieberman example is the most amazing. Here’s a person who was explicitly rejected by his own party in 2006 and had to run as an Independent against the Democratic nominee to keep his seat. Yet he somehow still has the stones to opine that if Ocasio-Cortez is the “new face” of the Democrats, the party does not have a “bright future.”

How many Democrats, do you think, heard that and immediately thought the opposite-- that if Joe Lieberman disapproves, Ocasio-Cortez must be on the right track? Sixty percent? Seventy?

I have no idea if Ocasio-Cortez will or will not end up being a great politician. But it’s abundantly clear that her mere presence is unmasking many, if not most, of the worst and most tired Shibboleths of the capital.

Moreover, she’s laying bare the long-concealed fact that many of their core policies are wildly unpopular, and would be overturned in a heartbeat if we could somehow put them all to direct national referendum.

Take the tax proposal offered by Ocasio-Cortez, which would ding the top bracket for 70 percent taxes on all income above $10 million.

The idea inspired howls of outrage, with wrongest-human-in-history Alan Greenspan peeking out of his crypt to call it a “terrible idea,” Wisconsin’s ex-somebody Walker saying a 5th grader would know it was “unfair,” and human anti-weathervane Harry Reid saying “you have to be careful” because voters don’t want “radical change quickly.”

Except polls show the exact opposite. Almost everyone wants to soak the rich. A joint survey by The Hill and Harris X showed 71 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of Independents, and even 45 percent of Republicans endorse the Ocasio-Cortez plan.

Is it feasible? It turns out it might very well be, as even Paul Krugman, who admits AOC’s rise makes him “uneasy,” said in a recent column. He noted the head of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers estimated the top rate should be even higher, perhaps even 80 percent.

We’ve been living for decades in a universe where the basic tenets of supply-side economics-- that there’s a massive and obvious benefit for all in dumping piles of money in the hands of very rich people-- have gone more or less unquestioned.

Now we see: once a popular, media-savvy politician who doesn’t owe rich donors starts asking such questions, the Potemkin justifications for these policies can tumble quickly.

There is a whole range of popular policy ideas the Washington political consensus has been beating back for decades with smoke and mirrors, from universal health care to legalized weed to free tuition to expanded Social Security to those higher taxes on the rich.

As we’ve seen over and over with these swipes on Ocasio-Cortez, the people defending those ideas don’t realize how powerful a stimulant for change is their own negative attention. If they were smart, they’d ignore her.

Then again, if politicians were smart, they’d also already be representing people, not donors. And they wouldn’t have this problem.

Last night I had a long talk with a member of Congress who wanted to compare notes about how the new freshmen members are shaping up. I said, OK, you start-- who's the best? "I love Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez," he said. He was the second member who told me that yesterday! He agreed that Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan (D-MN) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) are all off to a great start and he added Deb Haaland (D-NM), Mike Levin (D-CA) and Joe Neguse (D-CO) as well. Jury's still out on most of the others but he agreed with me that early action doesn't bode well if we expect anything from Elissa Slotkin (New Dem-MI), Abigail Spanberger (Blue Dog-VA), Mikie Sherrill (Blue Dog-NJ), Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY). They're already exerting pressure to pull to Democratic caucus right on core issues. We'd be better off without these corrupt zombies in Congress.

America's Sweetheart, Part III

(Part I and Part II)

Watch the Justice Democrats video above where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explaining explains the difference between a real champion of the working class and a garden variety careerist Democrat who manages to ooze into Congress. "There's a lot of people in the Democratic caucus," she tells her colleagues. "When we are courageous enough to just puncture the silence on an issue, they will start to move. Don't people realize that the most powerful position you can be in is when you are not materially attached to a position of power? If you're a one-term Congressmember, so what? You can make ten years worth of change in one term if you're not afraid."

Wondering who the problem children will be in the 116th Congress? On Thursday, Joe Cunningham (SC), Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ), Conor Lamb (PA), Seth Moulton (New Dem-MA), Max Rose (Blue Dog-NY) and Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ) backed Trump on a government shut-down procedural vote. The bulk of the freshmen have voted 100% party line on roll calls. According to ProgressivePunch the only Democrats who have gone below the 90% mark are

Conor Lamb (PA)- 88.46
Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)- 88.0
Joe Cunningham (SC)- 84.62

The problem with the Benedict Arnolds who abandon the party on procedural votes to make themselves look "good." Democrats who have been in Congress for a while have been trying to walk freshmen through the ropes about why the caucus should stick together on procedural votes, particularly when the Republicans offer a random motion to recommit, which is what happened with the one above where we had the 6 defectors. Apparently Gottheimer and Moulton-- each notoriously out for himself and no one else-- never learned the lesson. Lamb, Rose and Van Drew, not especially sharp Blue Dog freshmen, decided to tag along. What that does to the freshmen in tough districts who stood with the party to just ignore the irrelevant GOP sideshow and instead just work towards reopening the government is to give a 2020 opponent an opportunity to exploit the faux-bipartisan nature of the motion to recommit. "Why didn't Harley Rouda vote with Seth Moulton and Josh Gottheimer and 4 other Democrats for this bipartisan attempt to..." whatever, is what Republican opponent Scott Baugh could be yelling at a debate. I would never expect anti-union faux-Dems like Van Drew, Lamb, Rose, Moulton and Gottheimer to understand the importance of solidarity.

What these 6 did is nothing but pointless fake independence. They accomplished nothing except, perhaps, their own selfish goal of being able to tell voters backs home they're bipartisan. Republicans will attack them anyway. This is a losing strategy. Independence is what Ocasio-Cortez does, a concept way beyond the ken of a Jeff Van Drew or Max Rose or Conor Lamb.

As for Republicans, the 10 members (none of whom are freshmen) who seem to be most open to crossing the aisle so far this session are:

• Brian Fitzpatrick (PA)- 42.31
• John Katko (NY)- 38.46
• Elise Stefanik (NY)- 30.77
• Will Hurd (TX)- 30.77
• Jaime Herrera Beutler (WA)- 23.08
• Chris Smith (NJ)- 23.08
• Justin Amash (MI)- 19.23
• Fred Upton (MI)- 19.23
• Greg Walden (OR)- 19.23
• Adam Kinzinger (IL)- 15.38
• Rodney Davis (IL)- 11.54

America's Sweetheart, Part II

See America's Sweetheart, Part I here


Over the weekend, the Financial Times published a short essay by Edward Luce, The Clinton-Obama Era Ends As U.S. Democrats Seek A Radical New Voice. He wrote that the Democrats owe a debt of gratitude to Trump "as it sweeps away a cautious mindset." Well... maybe an overly-cautious... and if it does. It sure hasn't yet. Luce bids us to listen carefully so we can hear "the retreat of the Democratic establishment." I'm trying. He contends that Clintonian incrementalism served a purpose: making Democrats electable again and safe for Wall Street and that "it has had its day. The generation of Democrats that downplayed concerns about inequality and embraced global markets is being replaced by a far bolder political voice. No matter who takes the Democratic nomination in 2020, they will speak for a radicalised party in quest of the new New Deal."

I wish I could be as optimistic. L'ancien régime has made it abundantly clear, it's not going without a fight. Nice that Congress now has AOC, along with Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar. And there are a few other good ones-- but very few. Thanks to the control Pelosi and the New Dems have over the DCCC, way too few. Actually let me start with the control Schumer has over the DSCC and point out what that brought us this cycle. The Democrats have 2 freshmen in the Senate, both handpicked by Schumer from the House. One, Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) was tiger single worst Democrat in the House, a deranged sociopath who is about to start voting with the GOP just like she did in the House. The other, Jacky Rosen, was nearly as bad, not because she's any good, only because Sinema was so unfathomably horrible. Sure they are different from Clinton-Obama Democrats; they're even worse.

And now the House. Of the 88 freshmen who have just been seated. 59 are Democrats (42 of whom flipped seats from red to blue. There are 45 members of Congress who have signed onto the Green New Deal-- all Democrats of course. Of the 45, just 11 are freshmen. That's 11 out of the 59 Democratic freshmen. Worse yet, only two (2) come from a flipped district. The rest, like Ocasio, Tlaib, Pressley and Ilhan, come from solid blue seats, where they defeated establishment Democrats. Of the 59 Democrats, 35 have joined the New Dems and or the Blue Dogs, basically the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. Just 24 have joined the Congressional Progressive Caucus and 6 of those are also New Dems and may or may not even be progressives at all. We shall see. But it was largely the DCCC strategy to recruit and support conservative Democrats and kick progressives to the ground.

A couple of weeks ago, I ran into one of the freshmen who joined the New Dems and asked him why he hadn't signed onto the Green New Deal, since he basically campaigned on it to attract progressive voters. Dramatically and condescendingly, he told me that that "isn't how it's done intros town if you want to go anywhere." And where he said he was going was onto the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. He said if he signed onto the Green New Deal, the Energy and Commerce Committee chair, Frank Pallone, who takes millions iff dollars from the special interests the committee oversees, would be angry and not allow him on the committee."So you're already turned into a complete scumbag?" I wanted to say, but didn't. Long story, short, he wasn't picked to be on the committee-- no freshmen were, just 7 conservative Dems and one progressive, none of whom support the Green New Deal. I just called him and asked if he'd sign on since Pallone rejected him anyway. He said he hopes to get on next time there's an opening and plans to kiss Pallone's ass at every opportunity. Nice.

Luce continued by asserting that Trump serves as a personification of the demolition of "whatever case remained for the idea that Democrats must forever ready themselves for a promised land of bipartisan amity. In practice, many thought that stance had already been discredited by Newt Gingrich, the take-no-prisoners Republican Speaker of the House during the Clinton years. Others thought the wrecking ball the Tea Party took to Mr Obama's fiscal plans had finally settled the argument. No matter how much Democrats tacked to the centre, the rewards for this virtue never came. Republicans simply moved further to the right. Democratic presidents, such as Mr Clinton, created budget surpluses. Republicans, such as George W Bush, duly spent them on tax cuts. Inequality is far worse today than in 1992, even though Democrats held the White House for more than half that time. Median incomes, meanwhile, have barely shifted. The initial anger over the 2008 financial crash was captured by the Tea Party. " All good points-- forever lost on people like Pelosi, Hoyer and those they have and continue replicating themselves with, from status quo loving younger versions like Cheri Bustos, Hakeem Jeffries, Ben Ray Lujans, Joe Crowleys to the nightmare crop of New Dems and Blue Dogs they just ushered into Congress.



Luce writes that Trump "changed the weather. He showed that you could bamboozle a hostile establishment and still win an election. Then he switched horses and pursued an aggressive Republican agenda. From tax cuts and deregulation to gun rights and anti-abortion judges, Mr Trump now has Republican lawmakers eating out of his hand. Those who still believed it would be possible to work across the aisle-- and who pined for the days of Rockefeller Republicans-- were robbed of any remaining force. Mr Trump has done a service for the American left." Try telling that to Steny Hoyer or Jim Clyburn, let alone Ron Kind, Stephanie Murphy, Jim Costa or Henry Cuellar.

Reality has also lent it a helping hand. Regardless of your ideology, today's numbers paint a stark picture. Ten years into the US recovery, median household incomes are, in real terms, still much what they were they were in 1999. The top one per cent of households own more wealth than the bottom 90 per cent. America's average life expectancy has started to decline.

Mr Trump has made inequality worse. But he is not its author. The numbers were almost as bleak at the end of Mr Obama's two terms. So tinkering no longer holds much appeal.

OK, fair enough... and then Luce reminds us that, though based in DC, he is English, not American and may still know more about Indian politics from his days based in Delhi than about U.S. politics. "Much of the focus is on who should be the Democratic nominee to challenge Mr Trump. That obviously matters. But the significant point is that the party's centre of gravity has shifted. Whoever the challenger turns out to be, whether Joe Biden, the former vice-president, Elizabeth Warren, the economic populist, Beto O'Rourke, the sunny optimist, or Mr Sanders, their platform will have to reflect that shift. Stances such as 'Medicare for all,' a 'Green New Deal,' and public election financing will have to be part of the package. So too will higher taxes." I suspect he doesn't know enough about status quo candidates like Biden and Beto to understand just how different they are from change agents like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie. Biden has already been assuring supporters-- albeit quietly-- that they won't have to worry about Medicare for All, Green New Deals, 70% marginal tax rates or anything that alters the comfortable conservatism he resides in. Beto was a member of Congress who didn't support Medicare for All or the Green New Deal.

Attention has also been lavished on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 29-year-old Democratic socialist and youngest member of Congress. More notable is the respect her ideas, including a top tax rate of 70 per cent, commands among establishment Democrats. "The congresswoman is right," Lawrence Summers, Mr Clinton's former Treasury Secretary, said last week. Mr Summers personified the Washington consensus of the 1990s. Like Keynes, however, he says he changes his mind when the facts do. They no longer fit the arc-of-history Democrats used to narrate. "The false doctrines of the neoliberal priesthood are losing their hold," writes Nick Hanauer, the entrepreneur who made his fortune with Amazon.

America's left is turning into a factory of new ideas. Some of them, such as a universal basic income, may be questionable. Others, such as breaking up monopolies, are more promising. Either way, for the first time in decades, America's intellectual energy is now on the left. Some liken the ferment to the "bold persistent experimentation" of Franklin Roosevelt, author of the 1930s New Deal. Doubters compare it with the false dawn of George McGovern, who lost in a 1972 landslide to Richard Nixon. Whichever view proves correct, the Clinton-Obama era is drawing to a close. A new one is just beginning.

Universal basic income may be questionable? If you say so. And breaking up monopolies is a new idea. Oy. How about this: "for the first time in decades, America's intellectual energy is now on the left?"

America's Sweetheart, Part I

Not a popular position in Congress-- but OUTSIDE the Beltway...

I have to admit I stopped watching 60 Minutes quite a few decades ago. But I don't remember it being a place where they spotlighted too many members of the House, let alone a freshman who was on her first week in the House. Many members of Congress are just seat warmers who do what their party's leadership tells them to do, but some actually do a lot of hard work and accomplish worthwhile stuff for the country. 60 Minutes doesn't do profiles of them either.

As I write this, she has 2.36 million twitter followers. Axios did a story yesterday comparing her twitter power to the establishment and concluded that she's has more twitter power over the last 30 days than the five most prolific news organizations combined. A couple of weeks ago some white GOP walking corpse with an inflated imagine of himself was on Fox referring to her as "that little girl." Axios explained that "she has far more power on Twitter than the most prominent Democrats, including the congressional leaders and the likely 2020 presidential candidates. Dwarfed by her:

• every other member of the House
• every GOP House leader combined
• every Democratic Party House leader combined
• Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Lou Dobbs, Laura Ingraham combined
• every living former U.S. President combined

It would be so smart of the DC Dems to harness that power, don't you think? But they're not smart; they're stupid. After all, they aspire to be a little, tiny but less horrible than the Republicans. And that's exactly what they usually achieve. Instead of working with AOC, many are hysterical with jealousy and barely controllable hatred. One of the guys who still plays poker with Joe Crowley, the corrupt conservative "next speaker" she eviscerated in a primary, can't talk about Ocasio-Cortez without people wondering why his mother never washed his mouth out with soap. The hatred is ugly and palpable-- and he's not a Republican.

So what good is all this social media-- and unsocial media-- star power doing her if Democrats like Pelosi and her cronies were able to turn her down flat without a second thought for a position on the House Ways and Means Committee while advancing a gaggle of worthless and corrupt political hacks to the top committees? Over the weekend, The Hill helped explain what good it is: her ability to spark debate on issues that congressional leaders had no intention of debating-- like a 70% marginal tax rate. Republicans and Trump-TV just lie to their simple-minded fans about what a marginal tax rate is-- Ocasio's plan, which was so far from radical that it has some progressives grousing, is to tax income above $10,000,000 at a possible 60-70% rate. Democrats have been barely better than Republicans so far. I don't hear anyone saying, "Hey, what about having that top marginal rate kick in a $2 million, not 10 million" or saying 60-70% is way to low and recent U.S. history proves that the country thrives most when the marginal rate is more like 90% and when it kicks in at around 1 million dollars. Instead the Democrats are doing what they do best... whining.

House Democrats are treading carefully when it comes to talk of a 70 percent marginal tax rate on income above $10 million, an idea floated by freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in a recent 60 Minutes interview.

Many Democrats are supportive of the freshman phenom’s call for higher taxes on the rich, but even some progressives are stopping short of endorsing that high a marginal rate.

...Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), a leader of the progressive caucus in the last Congress, said that while it’s important to make sure that “everybody’s carrying their load,” he didn’t know if 70 percent “would be the right number or not.”

House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-KY) said he wasn’t sure about a specific top rate but said that Ocasio-Cortez is “not off-base.”

Other Democratic lawmakers were more critical.

“I thought it was comical,” said Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ), a member of the tax-writing Ways and Means panel.

“You can have reasonable taxation, and then you can send signals that we’re just going to go after people who have a few dollars,” he said.

Is $10 million "a few dollars?" Pascrell hasn't been given $2,221,655 (also more than "a few dollars") from the Finance Sector because of his stunning good looks but because, as a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, he's never brought this kind of heresy up-- and never will. AOC made a lot more sense than these "experts" did, noting that "a high marginal rate wouldn’t hit most Americans, and that it would also only pinch a portion of a wealthy person’s income. A 70 percent marginal rate on income of $10 million would be effective only on a person’s income above $10 million." That isn't too hard to understand-- unless you really, really, really don't want to understand, like Pascrell and his campaign donors.

Ocasio-Cortez’s call for a 70 percent marginal tax rate does have the support of another freshman progressive lawmaker: Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), who said she could potentially see herself introducing or sponsoring legislation down the line.

“I think we have a decisive mandate from this electorate, this 116th Congressional class to be bold. I think every creative solution needs to be on the table,” Pressley told The Hill. “And from a values based perspective to tax those, you know, who earn $10 million a year, I think it's exactly what we should be doing.”

Pressley said while she and most members are currently focused on the partial government shutdown, she looks forward to continuing having a dialogue with like-minded members as they consider crafting policy.

Freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), when asked about a top rate, noted that there had been a rate of 90 percent in the past and thinks that lawmakers should be “as bold as we can so that we can implement the courageous policies that are going to usher in prosperity for all Americans.”

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), who offered a bill in 2017 that would have created a 49 percent rate for income over $1 billion, said that she hasn’t proposed rates as high as 70 percent in the past but “would not reject that out of hand.”

Some Ways and Means Committee Democrats said that the focus should be on holding hearings looking at the tax code following the enactment of Trump’s tax law, rather than pursuing Ocasio-Cortez’s idea.

“I think what makes sense is for the committee to step back and start holding hearings on what’s out there right now, seeing what the impact is, whether that meets our needs and obligations as a country, and maybe not just pursue policy because a newly minted freshman thinks it’s a good idea, who isn’t on the committee,” said Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI), who is also a member of the moderate New Democrat Coalition.

There is nothing remotely "moderate" about Ron Kind when it comes to fiscal policy or corporate America. He's as far right as almost any conservative Republican. He also stinks of gross corruption, sitting on the Ways And Means Committee while taking $3,308,271 from the Finance Sector and sitting on that committee's Health subcommittee while gobbling up another $2,676,043 from the health sector. People like Kind fear and hate Ocasio. How could it be otherwise? Her worldview would crash their neat little scam. As Micah Uetricht put it in a Jacobin post, Welcome Their Hatred last week, "Democratic leaders are outraged at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s actions in Congress and are trying to reel her in. It’s a clear sign she’s antagonizing all the right forces in the party." Uetricht focussed on the same Politico hit piece we "re-editted" for them last week.

The article paints a portrait of a fairly pathetic party, led by officials who style themselves as #Resistance leaders but shit their pants when a twenty-nine-year-old with a Twitter following joins them and actually takes pro-working class, stop-the-world-from-burning-to-a-crisp policies seriously. “People are afraid of her,” one jittery, anonymous Democratic aide says, perhaps while wearing a fake mustache and trench coat, calling from a payphone on the outskirts of the capital.

But the fact that Ocasio-Cortez has drawn this kind of ire so quickly means she-- and the broader movement she is a part of-- is antagonizing all the right forces within the Democratic Party.

Her rhetoric thus far has zeroed in on the contradictions between the kinds of social-democratic policies growing numbers of Americans want-- Medicare for All, free college, a Green New Deal, taxing the rich-- and the complete unwillingness of the party’s leadership to do anything to achieve those policies. The Politico article focuses on issues of congressional decorum, but fundamentally, the Democratic gnashing of teeth comes down to their opposition to those policies.

No one should be shocked that party leaders are reacting to AOC this way. The Democrats are hopelessly pro-corporate, America’s “second-most-enthusiastic capitalist party” and all that. This is who they are. But just in the past few weeks, by helping make issues like a Green New Deal or a 70 percent tax on all income over $10 million part of the mainstream discussion, Ocasio-Cortez shows that it is possible to open up new, leftist political possibilities while operating within that party-- and, whether she means to or not, highlight the reality that progressive forces will have to break with the Democrats at some point if they really want to achieve their goals.

The Democratic leadership isn’t afraid of AOC herself. They’re afraid of the movement that is coalescing around her and Bernie Sanders, and groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and Justice Democrats; they’re terrified of multiple Ocasio-Cortezes running in elections around the country, backed by more socialists and climate change activists and angry rank-and-file workers demanding much more from the party and taking to the streets to do so.

So, the pressure on Ocasio-Cortez from Democratic power brokers isn’t going to let up. If she sticks to her agenda and rhetoric, Democrats will only cook up more ways to fight her. The threats from House members that she will end up isolated on the Hill aren’t empty. Whatever the quoted representatives say about primarying “fellow Democrats,” in four years, donors and party leaders would surely be happy to go all in on a challenger who’s willing to stick to the party’s script.

...Ocasio-Cortez won’t win these Democratic leaders over. She should welcome their hatred.

Yesterday, her hometown paper, the NY Times, which largely ignored her primary challenge to Crowley, weighed in with a piece by Shane Goldmacher warning that she's pushing the party left, whether they like it or not. And they certainly do not. "In the two months since her election," he wrote, "Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has had the uncanny ability for a first-term member of Congress to push the debate inside the Democratic Party sharply to the left, forcing party leaders and 2020 presidential candidates to grapple with issues that some might otherwise prefer to avoid." Some of the 2020 presidential contenders aren't appealing to the same status quo forces corrupt congressional hacks are, so they are making an effort to be seen to be embracing Ocasio and her ideas with more love and less venom. Bernie and she have been campaigning around the country together and Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and some of the others on the progressive end of the spectrum seem excited about the energy she's bringing to ideas they are using in their own campaigns.

"A bartender from the Bronx has been able to create a litmus test around climate and economic policy for every 2020 Democrat,” said Waleed Shahid, who was one of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s early campaign advisers and is now the communications director for Justice Democrats, a liberal activist group. “If that’s not seen as a metric of success, then I don’t know what is.”

Far beyond policy, she has emerged as a potent symbol for a diversifying Democratic Party: a young woman of color who is giving as good as she gets in a political system that has rarely rewarded people who look like her. Her mastery of social media has allowed her to connect with audiences who might otherwise be alienated from Washington.

Here's the dumbest paragraph in Goldmacher's piece, one he should be made to stand in the corner and explain why its stupid and why he will never make the same stupid mistakes: "Still, her unexpectedly outsize profile could bring perils. Her threats to knock out more moderate Democrats in future primaries in particular seem to have rankled. Some whisper her tweet-first, ask-questions-later mentality reminds them of President Trump." Here's why it's stupid and misleading and shameful:

• She didn't make any threats
• "Moderate," the most favorably-viewed word in American politics, is used here to describe the Republican-wing of the Democratic Party. Ocasio's marginal tax rate discussion point is moderate. Pascrell's and Kind's is reactionary. A thesaurus describes the antonyms of moderate as: "unfair," unreasonable," "excessive in behavior," "intemperate," "unjust," "beyond reasonable limits," "incautious"-- all loaded-- negatively loaded-- words and phrases conservatives have successfully fostered in a largely unthinking mass media.
• She is spontaneous but nothing whatsoever like Trump and Goldmacher is slandering her when he spreads that kind of calumny.

He does seem downright giddy though to pass along that "Many Republicans are downright giddy at the notion that a self-described democratic socialist is driving Democratic policy discussions. Congressional Republicans saw up close the dangers of having the more staunchly right-wing elements of the Tea Party come to define their tenure in the House majority." Exception she isn't anything like the Tea Party and Goldmacher has neglected to mention that every time two the GOP and their media shills goes after her, she comes out on top and her power grows while they just look foolish. Hopefully they'll find more videos of her dancing when she was in college and release them as new scandals. At least he admits that "Republicans face their own risks if their attacks on her are perceived as sexist or condescending."

Supporters and rivals alike agree that she has upended the traditional rules of engagement on Capitol Hill with a millennial’s intuitive sense of what sells online-- all before she has hung anything on her barren office walls or even found a permanent place to live.

In an interview, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez rejected “the general notion of, ‘Oh, you’re here and need to be quiet and keep your head down.’”

“For me, especially as a member who won her seat via a primary election against another Democrat, my constituency was telling me the exact opposite thing,” she said.

Republicans, she said, fundamentally misunderstand her: “They think I’m just a Tea Party mirror. It’s an easy and convenient way to frame something. But I don’t think it’s the same.”

Still, she has fully embraced the radical label-- especially if it means pulling the Democratic Party to the left. “I think that it only has ever been radicals that have changed this country,” she told 60 Minutes.

...She had a full 60 Minutes segment devoted to her on her first Sunday as a congresswoman. She was the first lawmaker that MSNBC turned to after Mr. Trump’s first Oval Office address for analysis on what was Rachel Maddow’s most-watched show ever. And she has become a viral internet sensation many times over, including one video of her dancing outside her office that has topped 22 million views across the globe.

She’s a draw on the right as much as the left: Fox News spent more than two hours covering her first five days in Congress, according to a tally by Media Matters, the liberal media watchdog group. MSNBC spent 52 minutes and CNN 96 minutes talking about her in that span.

(Interest in Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is so intense that even her chief of staff has appeared on CNN-- something almost unheard-of in Congress, where 30-second hits on cable are a sought-after commodity for members of Congress themselves, not their aides.)

In a recent Instagram chat-- live from her kitchen with several thousand fans watching-- Ms. Ocasio-Cortez outlined her strategy to “shape the national narrative” while chopping vegetables for an Instant Pot recipe.

“In Trump’s America,” she explained, “I’m not a big fan of bipartisanship.”

On the environment, she said that her goal was to move the boundaries of debate far enough to the left that a carbon tax would look like the moderate option, compared to “wildly ambitious” direct government intervention imagined in the Green New Deal.

Perhaps Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s most talked-about idea, raised on 60 Minutes, has been that people she called “the tippy tops”-- those earning above $10 million-- should pay a 70-percent rate on income above that threshold. The remark sparked days of debate among economists and pundits, on the right and the left, about tax rates unseen in America in decades but common during the post-World War II era.

“I’ve been trying to open up this rhetorical space for many, many years,” said Stephanie Kelton, a former chief economist for Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee.

“They used to talk about the Oprah effect,” said Ms. Kelton, now a professor at Stony Brook University. “I think it’s the Ocasio effect at this point.”

Julian Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and federal housing secretary who is running for president, was shown the clip of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s tax comment during an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos-- and then went even further than her.

“As you know, George, there was a time in this country where the top marginal tax rate was over 90 percent,” Mr. Castro explained. “Even during Reagan’s era in the 1980s it was around 50 percent.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was still glowing about it days later.

“It’s so incredible to see,” she said in the interview. “First we had Elizabeth Warren come out and talk about a Green New Deal. Next we have Julian Castro defending marginal tax rates and he basically is saying we’ve had 90 percent-plus in the past. It’s totally changing the conversation.”

...“She absolutely does have the ability to put issues on the map,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Seattle-area Democrat and a leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “It’s not that there haven’t been champions of these issues before. But when you’ve got 2.1 million Twitter followers and a press that will cover anything you say, it’s a huge opportunity for us.”

The sheer brightness of her star has evoked more than a few eye rolls among House institutionalists. Most colleagues do not know quite what to make of her just yet.

“I love Alexandria Ocasio. I saw her in her 60 Minutes interview. I thought she was great,” said Representative Adriano Espaillat, a 64-year-old Democrat from a neighboring district that includes part of the Bronx. “She is like one of our daughters. You know, she could be my daughter, one of anybody’s children. She’s an adult, obviously. But you know I love her. She’s sharp, has a great smile, intelligent, is liberal, progressive. I think she has great ideas, bold ideas.”