The gaffe-prone
new U.S. Representative for New York, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, has been an easy target for rightwing mockery thanks
to her tenuous grasp of economics and the self-mythologizing of her youth on
the Brooklyn streets (the daughter of an architect, she actually grew up mostly
in an affluent town in Westchester County, New York). Conservatives
are having great fun online with internet memes ridiculing the proud
“Democratic Socialist” as a brainless fraud. But if those who dismiss her aren’t
careful, it will be Ocasio-Cortez who has the last laugh.
A self-declared
“radical,” Ocasio-Cortez wants to tax the wealthy as high as 70% to fund her
climate change plan called the "Green New Deal." She supports Medicare
for all, tuition-free public college, the cancelation of all student loan debt,
and housing as a federal right. Steeped in the oppressor/oppressed paradigm of identity
politics, she is predictably pro-Black Lives Matter, anti-Israel, and wants to
abolish ICE. She lacks both knowledge of and reverence for the U.S. Constitution.
In other words, she checks off all the right boxes among a growing number of
young Americans who find the idea of “democratic socialism” appealing, despite
the fact that they can’t actually define it. It helps her enormously that new-Latina-on-the-block
Ocasio-Cortez has a hip, youthful, multicultural appeal in a party burdened with
doddering old white people like Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren,
and Hillary Clinton.
As Ocasio-Cortez
was being sworn in to Congress on Thursday, a LiveLeak video featuring the rising
star of the Democratic Party began going viral on Twitter after being shared by
an anonymous account called, well, AnonymousQ1776. “Here is America’s favorite
commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is,” the tweet
read. “High School video of ‘Sandy’ Ocasio-Cortez.”
The apparent attempt
to embarrass Ocasio-Cortez backfired bigly. Far from depicting a “know-it-all
acting like a clueless nitwit,” the video shows an attractive Ocasio-Cortez twirling
and bouncing joyfully to the music, alone and with friends. Absent any
political context, the video is nothing more than carefree fun, and people on
both sides of the political aisle were charmed by it.
“I don’t get why
the video of AOC is supposed to be embarrassing,” tweeted
Jonah Goldberg. “She looks like an attractive young person dancing and having
fun doing it.” Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty wrote,
“Newly unearthed video reveals that when @AOC was in college, she was...
adorable.” The
AnonymousQ1776 account has since been deleted, and skeptics suspect that the video
may not have been posted by a presumed rightwinger, but leaked by the left or
even by Ocasio-Cortez’s team itself, to embarrass Republicans. The media
narrative now is that conservatives have been “driven crazy” by the video,
despite there being precisely zero outrage about it on the right (“Conservatives
up in arms about Ocasio-Cortez getting footloose,” reads the headline of one
article, which cites not a single example of a conservative up in
arms).
Regardless of the
video’s source, it demonstrated that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez possesses a vital
political weapon: she is likeable, even to fair-minded conservatives. For
better or worse, likeability is a compelling factor in politics, and Ocasio-Cortez
doesn't have to fake it. Her youthful exuberance and attractiveness go a long way toward
overriding, in many people’s minds, her intellectual shortcomings.
Contrast Ocasio-Cortez’s
charm power with 2020 presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren’s cringeworthy
attempt to connect with voters in her own recent video, live-streamed from her
kitchen, in which she inauthentically announces, “Hold on a second – I’m gonna get me a
beer,” and proceeds to pop open a cold one as if she is an actual, regular person
kicking back after a long day at the office. This disaster, in combination with
the debacle of her nonexistent Native American ancestry, may have scuttled
Warren’s presidential run even before it got started; social media was abuzz over
her obviously calculated beer drinking and down-home wording. “Nothing says ‘relatable
woman of the people’ like awkwardly using a phrase that some consultant picked
out for you because it ‘sounds folksy,’” wrote Buck
Sexton on Twitter.
The video’s
failure was compounded by the fact that it was in apparent imitation of
Ocasio-Cortez’s own effortless live-streamed videos, particularly one
from her kitchen in which she rustles up some mac-and-cheese while
singing along with a pop song.
Warren is only
slightly more sympathetic than the humanoid Hillary Clinton, whose range of
human emotions runs the gamut from icy rage to volcanic rage. Her propensity
for gaffes aside, Ocasio-Cortez crushes them both in terms of likeability, and at
28, the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives has
literally decades to get her political act together.
Conservatives are
enjoying poking fun at the perceived airhead Ocasio-Cortez now, but it will be
a politically fatal error to underestimate her in the long run. In as little as
seven years when she becomes age-eligible to run for POTUS, she could very well
be in a position to have a go at the White House. If that sounds absurd, keep
in mind that her supporters in the media such as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias are
already arguing that the constitutional age limit on the presidency is “ridiculous,”
and that President Trump should be “relieved”
she can’t run in 2020. The left has the highest hopes for her; with the right
backing and prepping, by the time she is eligible, or shortly thereafter,
Ocasio-Cortez could be a bigger rock star to the left than Barack Obama was in
2007.
The right may be
writing off Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as an economic ignoramus, but as novelist
and pundit Andrew Klavan says, she is a “dangerous ignoramus.”
From FrontPage Mag, 1/4/19
