“Should the Candidates Be Sending Her Bouquets?”: The Rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2020 Kingmaker – By Chris Smith (vanityfair.com) / Jan 9 2019
If she weren’t too young, “A.O.C. might be a front-runner for president,” says a top Democratic strategist. As it is, her growing force is felt everywhere.
He is a top strategist for one of the likely top-tier Democratic presidential candidates. He believes deeply in his client’s abilities, and he has devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to crafting a winning campaign strategy for his client. He trusts in data; he is not generally given to hype. And still he says, “If the Constitution didn’t prohibit it because she’s too young, A.O.C. might be a front-runner for president.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a congresswoman for all of one week; seven months ago, she was a political unknown. She is 29 years old, so any run for the White House must wait until she turns 35. Yet Ocasio-Cortez is already having a significant impact on the Democratic primary, setting both a policy agenda and a charisma standard. The actual and prospective 2020 candidates know that they are now going to be asked more questions, by voters and reporters, about their views on marginal tax rates, because Ocasio-Cortez has elevated the issue, suggesting that every dollar of personal income over $10 million should be taxed at 60 or 70 percent. And campaign strategists for the probable contenders are suddenly wrestling with how they should deal with A.O.C. as a cultural force: Do you try to court her support? Do you try to emulate her Instagram magic touch?
“I don’t think she’s a fad,” says David Axelrod, the strategist who twice helped elect Barack Obama president. “I think she’s a genuinely compelling person, and I think she represents a whole generation of young people who are demanding something more than incrementalism. The answers are something that can be debated, but the absence of big ideas to solve our problems is not going to be tolerated.”
And Ocasio-Cortez is already having an effect not just on the debate, but on the types of positions that Democratic presidential candidates are expected to support. “I can’t think of a comparison with a freshman in Congress who has had so much influence so quickly,” says Brian Fallon, a top advisor to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “It’s hard to break through on any policy question, with the usual stuff that dominates and clutters the news right now, and she has helped make the Green New Deal standard fare and she’s inspired this conversation about tax rates. It’s getting other politicians to gravitate to more aggressively progressive positions than they otherwise would have taken. That’s a feat.”
Ocasio-Cortez certainly didn’t invent policy ideas like universal health care, and she sometimes makes glaring mistakes, like vastly overstating the amount of “missing” Pentagon spending. But she’s quick to own and correct her errors, and those stumbles are outweighed by her gift for framing complex subjects in vividly human terms. That’s an unusual ability in a public figure, and it’s a major reason she has amassed more than two million Twitter followers virtually overnight. It’s also part of why Rachel Maddow had Ocasio-Cortez, not a 2020 Democratic candidate, responding to President Donald Trump’s Oval Office border-wall speech. “Those women and children trying to come here with nothing but the shirts on their backs to create an opportunity and to provide for this nation are acting more in an American tradition than this president is right now,” the congresswoman said Tuesday night, with considerable heat, on MSNBC.
In 2016, Ocasio-Cortez, then a Manhattan bartender, volunteered for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, and in December 2018, she appeared with the Vermont senator for a live-streamed town hall about climate change. But Ocasio-Cortez will savvily hold off from endorsing any of the 2020 contenders anytime soon, preserving and enhancing her ability to shape the dialogue. So most of the campaigns are scheming how best to earn her favor, as part of their wooing of the liberal voters who will be crucial in primaries and caucuses. “You see that most of the senators that are running—Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren—they’re racing to endorse progressive positions, and they will be sure to stay on the right side of the Ocasio-Cortez fan base,” one Democratic strategist says. “She’s more of a problem for people like Terry McAuliffe or Joe Biden, if they get in. Biden would get asked about her and probably sound a skeptical note, and much of the reaction would immediately be, ‘Oh, fuck this guy, he’s out of touch. He doesn’t get it. She’s the future of the party.’ Should the candidates be sending her bouquets? Yeah. But I think she understands that part of her juice is that she’s an ideologically-pure policy spokesperson. I don’t see her sticking her neck out for anybody where she has to compromise.”
Perhaps Ocasio-Cortez’s star will burn out as fast as it has risen; the laws of political-media gravity practically demand that a dive in her popularity is ahead. And time could have other effects. “I don’t want to say this in a way that it almost certainly will sound,” Axelrod says. “But she’s 29 years old. The country and the party needs that kind of idealism, that kind of passion, that kind of fearlessness. She will evolve as a leader and hopefully won’t lose those qualities, but will also gain life and political experience that will broaden her aperture.”
For the moment, though, things are developing according to Ocasio-Cortez’s plan. “Back in October we wrote an internal document, and essentially the role we wanted to play was, have some influence on the policies that are being presented and have some impact on the narrative of the race,” says Corbin Trent, the congresswoman’s communications director. “Economic issues, but issues all over the map. Issues that are near and dear to her and to the district, but ones that permeate across the country. Obviously the presidential is going to be huge in 2020, but we’ve also got a real opportunity to take the Senate back and expand what we have in the House. This office has different opinions than others on how to win those.” Will Ocasio-Cortez back a particular presidential candidate in the primaries? “At some point, sure,” Trent says. “But it’s super-early.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/01/is-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-going-to-become-a-2020-kingmaker
