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

DCCC-- Never Too Busy To Protect Paul Ryan's House Seat In Wisconsin-- It's In Their DNA Now

That’s an old Blue America radio spot we ran against Paul Ryan at some point in the distant past. As you may know, Randy Bryce isn’t the first Democrat to go up against Ryan. In 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006 Ryan's Democratic challenger was Jeffrey Thomas, a retired orthopedic surgeon from Ryan's hometown of Janesville. The Ryan-friendly Thomas' only issue for his first three runs was healthcare and he never quite cracked a third of the vote, but in 2006 he ran against Ryan's shady relationship with Republican corruptionists Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay and went all the way to 37%. In 2006 Ryan raised over $1.6 million and Thomas, who always refused to raise money for campaigns, spent $5,000 of his own. He was the ideal candidate for a DCCC uninterested in offering Ryan any kind of a challenge.

In 2008 Obama won Ryan’s district, 51-48%. Predictably (albeit irrationally), the DCCC had refused to back the Democratic candidate that year, Margaret Krupp, and she was only able to spend $134,042 against the $2,251,389 Ryan spent. He took 64.0% of the vote to her 34.7%. The following cycle, there was a lot of excitement about building on Obama’s win and finding a strong candidate to the on Ryan. The DCCC, in no uncertain terms, told Wisconsin politicians that they shouldn’t waste their time. A progressive activist, Paulette Garin, a member of the National Single Payer Alliance and the Wisconsin state Coordinator for both Progressive Democrats of America and the Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care, stood up anyway. Paulette spent almost all of her time campaigning for healthcare reform rather than for Congress but in August, 2009, she faced off against Ryan in the only contest he agreed to participate in-- a goat-milking event at the Racine County Fair. Paulette beat him.



Maybe that made the DCCC nervous, because they smacked her down like a ton of bricks falling on her head. How dare she! She had only raised $3,549 in the primary. The DCCC found their own candidate to run against her, someone they were quite certain would offer no threat to Ryan, and put up John Heckenlively, a hugely oversized unemployed man who lived in his parents basement. After the DCCC worked to sabotage Garin and deliver the nomination to Heckenlively, they promptly abandoned the district and “their” candidate, who went on to raise just $12,066 and accrue just 30% of the vote (two years after Obama had won the district with 51%). That's the DCCC. They've been protecting Ryan's reelection bids every 2 years since 2000. I'm sure there must be a great reason and maybe Pelosi will tell us in her memoir someday.

When we set out to recruit a candidate for the 2018 cycle, we were fully aware that the DCCC would, once again, do whatever they had to do to keep Ryan in his seat. And so were all the local elected officials. Each one of them passed on the race. Finally, progressive state Senator Chris Larson and former candidate Rob Zerban each suggested I call union activist and progressive stalwart Randy Bryce. So I did. He told me he was leaning towards running and that the Wisconsin Working Families Party was urging him to as well. I started to get to know him and I could see immediately that Randy was not going to be another childish, wishy-washy moderate in the Ossoff mold. This was a fully-mature, independent-minded working class family man with a life of experience that has shaped his political perspectives. No one was ever going to have to persuade him that a living wage is better than a minimum wage or that single payer health care is the way to go. Bryce had long ago come to those conclusions and he’s been doing the persuading for years. In 2016, he had been a Bernie activist and a Bernie surrogate-- and after Hillary won the primary, he was a Wisconsin state elector for Hillary.

You probably know by now that he declared his candidacy last Monday. On Monday morning he had 7,200 twitter followers. His introductory video caught fire-- hundreds of thousands of views in the first few days-- and his twitter following rocketed past 85,000. Requests for local and national press started flooding in. The first member of Congress to endorse him was Ro Khanna, an economic populist, who said "We need leaders connected to the community who can speak with authenticity about the need for universal healthcare, better wages, and good jobs. Randy has a bold vision that is rooted in his life experience. It's heartening to see people like Randy step up to serve. That is what our founders envisioned."

But the DCCC wasn’t buying any of it. They immediately started looking around for their own “candidate” to set up as a shill to force Randy to spend his funds in a primary. Now there’s some stolen valor guy from somewhere-- Ohio or Florida-- that’s not WI-01 or even Wisconsin running and EMILY’s List quickly dug up one of their identity politics offerings-- a woman version of Heckenlively. Suddenly a battalion of silly Hillary dead-enders was swarming all over twitter spreading their poison. No one paid much attention and an interview with Randy by Sarah Jones in the New Republic made a mockery of all their lies.

Sarah: Tell me why you decided to challenge Paul Ryan.

Randy: I’m a lifelong resident of Southeastern Wisconsin. I graduated from public schools, went into the Army after that. When I came back, I was diagnosed with cancer and I didn’t have insurance, and now it’s considered a preexisting condition. I worked sometimes two full-time jobs to make ends meet. Finally, I joined the union, the Ironworkers Union, which had an apprenticeship. I got my journeyman’s card and I’ve been doing that for 20 years now. As I drive through the district I can look and see, “I worked on that, I built that.” So literally I spent the last 20 years of my life building the district. Looking over at Paul Ryan, I’m wondering what he’s been doing.

Things have been taken away from us. Autoworkers used to have a lot of great-paying jobs building cars. Right now they’re tearing down the UAW plant-- the General Motors plant-- in Kenosha, there’s a huge abandoned facility in Janesville, and some of the best-paying jobs in Waukesha County are going up to Canada.

People are working harder these days and having less to show as a result for it. Paul Ryan hasn’t been in the district for a town hall in over 600 days and it’s time to make a change. If I can’t perform my job I get fired at work. And it’s time to get someone who can do the job Paul Ryan was hired to do.

Sarah: How will your experience with the union influence your campaign?

Randy: I see this as an opportunity to create stewardship, to look out for the rest of the people in the community. Just like I’ve done as a member of the union’s executive board. It’s about taking care of people, and making sure that they’re heard, and that people are treated fairly. Nobody’s been heard, and that’s the biggest complaint right now.

Donald Trump won an area in Kenosha that had traditionally been Democratic, but people are waking up and they’re seeing that it was all talk. They have buyer’s remorse now. I’m a working person, I don’t play one in a video. That’s my life, and I’ve always stood with working people. That’s where I’m coming from. The majority of the people in this district are working people. They’re not corporate donors, and that’s who Paul Ryan’s been spending most of his time with.

Sarah: Do you support the Fight for 15 campaign?

Randy: I do, and I’ve been at numerous actions on behalf of providing people a livable wage. I feel strongly that anyone who works a full-time job deserves the freedom to be able to stand on their own two feet.

Sarah: Your first ad focused prominently on health care. Do you support single-payer health care?

Randy: I do. I am convinced we need to move towards single-payer. It works every place else. There are improvements that need to be done with Obamacare, but to completely remove it and the protections that are in place, I see that as the wrong way to go.

Sarah: Can you tell me a little bit about how you decided that your first ad would be about health care and that you would feature your mother?

Randy: Well, it’s one of the issues that’s intergenerational. The Ironworkers are self-insured, so it’s based on hours worked. So especially during the winter months, when there’s not a lot of work, it makes me, as a dad, concerned I might lose health insurance, which would affect my son. Do I make him stay inside in his room and wear knee pads and a helmet to eat dinner? Or can I let him be a kid? Parents shouldn’t have to worry about that. It also affects me personally being a cancer survivor. Luckily I’ve been in remission, but what if it comes back? How is it going to affect me? And with medical bills being the leading cause of bankruptcy I don’t want to be in that position. I don’t want to have to choose between paying my rent or seeing my doctor.

And it affects my parents: My mom, who is in the video, has multiple sclerosis. Luckily she has insurance that can get her the medication she needs, but there are too many people that don’t. If one person can’t get the medication they need, that’s wrong. My father’s in assisted living because he has Alzheimer’s, so that affects my mom too. Thankfully, she is able to have her independence due to the medication she takes, so she can go see my dad. Health care is a universal issue that affects all ages and all races-- everybody, regardless of economic status.

Sarah: What’s your position on abortion rights?

Randy: I am firmly committed that it is a woman’s choice to make decisions about what happens to her body.

Sarah: And you support LGBT rights as well?

Randy: Absolutely.

Sarah: For people who aren’t from your district: What do you want them to understand about it?

Randy: It’s a broad section of Wisconsin. There’s large urban areas, cities like Racine and Kenosha, which is now the third-largest city, and more to the west it’s all farmland. It’s a big cross-section of working people. You could pick up the first district in Wisconsin and put it pretty much any place on the map and it would blend in anywhere across the United States. It’s a lot of people, and it’s made up of different ethnicities, and it’s a melting pot of what America should be. We take care of our neighbors.

Sarah: How are you going to address the urban-rural divide in your campaign?

Randy: It’s easier to hit the urban areas as far as reaching more people, but there’s going to be emphasis placed on going to the harder-to-reach places. We need to pay attention to everybody in the district. It’s easier for me, living where I do, to reach out to the urban people, but there are concerns too for farmers-- like making sure that rural roads are taken care of, that they have access to things like broadband service.

I’ve always had such a healthy respect for farmers. I know the hours I put in are hard hours, but we have eight-hour days. Farmers work from sunup to sundown; they don’t get days off and they have to worry about their retirement. Maybe it’s getting them access to some kind of pension system, so that after donating the best years of their life to raising the farm they have some restful years to enjoy what they earned.

Sarah: Paul Ryan often appeals to his roots. But you seem to have a very different vision about what it means to be from a state like Wisconsin.

Randy: It’s obvious who Paul Ryan is making his decisions for when he has time to go to 50 fundraisers throughout the country and not have one town hall in his own district. If I don’t show up for my job, I’ll get fired and they’ll get somebody else to take my spot. I can’t imagine asking somebody for $10,000 to have their picture taken with me. That’s unimaginable. It shows where his priorities are and they aren’t the people in this district. When he shows up there are breaking news alerts: Paul Ryan has been seen in the First Congressional District at such and such a place. It’s so wrong.

There’s no doubt the Pelosi and her DCCC will divert energy and resources from winning congressional races to, once again, throw whatever they can in to protect Ryan, this time against Randy Bryce and his already popular grassroots campaign. But Randy's put together an intrepid and experienced campaign committee that knows how to respond to establishment sabotage and won’t shy away from a fight, not even with all the powers that be inside the Democratic establishment. And... they need our help-- which is why I’ve included the Blue America congressional ActBlue thermometer on the right. Remember, there's no such thing as a contribution too small-- not when you're talking about a grassroots campaign. Please consider giving what you can. It’s a real shame about Mark Pocan though. I had such high hopes for him. We saw him as such a promising guy…