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.

The Elephant In The Room-- Michael Steele Is A Crook

Despite Michael Steele's grasping the third rail of Republican Party politics-- and refusing to let go-- Chris Cillizza offers the controversial-- some would say "clownish"-- RNC chair a glimmer of hope that he won't be out on the street looking for a job again-- at least not right away. In his Washington Post column today, Cillizza lists 5 reasons why Michael Steele won't be removed anytime soon.

1. No More Drama: The Republican Party is reeling from a disastrous 2008 election and a race for party chair that publicly exposed the fissures between its warring factions. The last thing the party needs now is further chaos at the top, which is what would almost certainly ensue if Steele was ousted.

2. Symbolic Suicide: In the after-action report of the 2006 and 2008 elections, Republican operatives concluded that one of the party's biggest problems was that they were viewed as the party of old white men. Putting Steele atop their party infrastructure was a move greeted with a sigh of relief by the GOP's professional political class. Pushing Steele aside just over a month into his tenure would send the exact wrong message about who the Republican Party is and where it's going.

3. If Not Steele, Who?: The field for RNC chair was roundly panned as lacking any real star power. Among a group of largely unknown party chairs from around the country, Steele was the only candidate who could make the case that he could be a star thanks to his personal magnetism and charisma. While that bet hasn't paid off to date, there's not an obvious candidate who could step into the void if Steele was knocked out.

4. Procedural Problems: National party committees are ruled by a series of arcane rules and procedures for doing just about anything. (Ask anyone who attended the RNC chair election; it seemed to go on forever.) Removing a party chairman, not surprisingly, is not something that can be done quickly or easily.

5. Positive Movement: After a month occupied by a huge internal review led by a committee of 10 RNC members, the senior staff is starting to fall into place. Ken McKay, a former chief of staff to Rhode Island Gov. Don Carcieri, was named executive director on Thursday, and today Trevor Francis, a managing director in Burson-Marsteller's media practice, will be announced as communications director. Putting the senior staff in place should quiet some of the chatter that the committee is off the rails.

But what Cillizza isn't taking into account are the implications of the FBI probe into Steele's embezzlement of campaign funds to enrich himself-- and his role in an elite GOP prostitution service, some of whose big name clients are now in prison.

In his wingnut opinion column in yesterday's DC Examiner Byron York was willing to shout about something other Republicans have only whispered about; "There has been all but no discussion of this kind of thing," said an RNC member. "People are terrified that discussing it can make it a reality." It's the elephant in the room though-- and everyone knows about it now. York: "[T]here is another issue about the new chairman that is the topic not of public discussion but of worried private conversation among some of the RNC's 168 members. That topic concerns the allegations of financial irregularities in Steele's 2006 run for Senate from Maryland.  While some RNC members, including the chairman himself, view those accusations as completely unfounded, others worry they could dog the Republican party for months to come, even as Steele tries to remake it."

On February 7, just a week after Steele was elected, the Washington Post reported in a front-page story that Alan Fabian, the finance chairman of Steele's unsuccessful 2006 run for the U.S. Senate, told federal prosecutors that Steele "arranged for his 2006 Senate campaign to pay a defunct company run by his sister for services that were never performed." The day after the Post story appeared, Steele, speaking on ABC's "This Week," said the money-- it was about $37,000-- was "a legitimate reimbursement of expenses" for catering and other services provided by his sister's company.  Steele pointed out that Fabian has been convicted in a multi-million dollar fraud case and made the allegations against Steele in an unsuccessful attempt to have his sentence lowered.  "Those allegations were leveled by a convicted felon who is trying to get a reduced sentence on his conviction," Steele told ABC.

In late February, WBAL-TV, a television station in Baltimore, reported that Steele's 2006 campaign paid $64,000 to a company called Allied Berton, owned by a friend and a supporter of Steele's. The station reported that Allied Berton is a commodities trading firm, dealing in minerals, metals, and agricultural products.  The report said that finance reports filed by the Steele campaign listed the services provided by Allied Berton as "political consulting." When WBAL tried to ask what kind of political consulting a commodities trading firm performed for the Steele campaign, a Steele spokesman declined to comment.

The allegations, which haven't received much national attention, have nevertheless rattled a number of RNC members across the country. "This came out right after his election," one member told me Wednesday. "If people had known that when he was running, he would not have won."
"The committee is split almost down the middle on this," the member continued. "The people who are concerned are very concerned. These are very serious allegations."... [H]is handling of the question is just making already skeptical RNC members even more skeptical.

And in the background is the race to replace Kirsten Gillibrand in one of the only Republican-leaning districts left in New York State. Replacing moderate Democrat Gillibrand-- who is now a U.S. Senator-- with a well known, if inept, local Republican Party hack, Jim Tedisco, was supposed to be Steele's cherry on the cake of the GOP resurgence his election as RNC chair was symbolized. But now Tedisco, once seen as a shoe-in, is blaming the RNC (and the equally inept NRCC) for blowing his 21-point lead, a lead that is down to 45%-41%... for an election on March 31. Independent voters looked at the two candidates and at the obstructionist behavior of the national Republican Party and its bizarre leaders and moved firmly out of Tedisco's camp and into Murphy's. Many observers say that if Tedisco manages to lose the race, it will be another nail-- perhaps the final nail-- in Steele's coffin.