Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Crusher of Sacred Cows

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

22 January 19

With its silly swipes at AOC, the American political establishment is once again revealing its blindness to its own unpopularity

ne of the first things you learn covering American politicians is that they’re not terribly bright.

The notion that Hill denizens are brilliant 4-D chess players is pure myth, the product of too many press hagiographies of the Game Change variety and too many Hollywood fantasies like House of Cards and West Wing.

The average American politician 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.

So they talk. What do they talk about? To the consternation of donors, all kinds of stuff. Remember Ted Stevens explaining that the Internet “is not a big truck”? How about Hank Johnson worrying that Guam would become so overpopulated it would “tip over and capsize”? How about Oklahoma Republican Jim Bridenstine noting that just because the Supreme Court rules on something, that “doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s constitutional”?

There’s a reason aides try to keep their bosses away from microphones, particularly when there’s a potential for a question of SAT-or-higher level difficulty in the interview. But the subject elected officials have the most trouble staying away from is each other.

We’ve seen this a lot in recent weeks with the ongoing freakout over newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Lest anyone think any of the above applies to “AOC,” who’s also had a lot to say since arriving in Washington, remember: she won in spite of the party and big donors, not because of them.

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 Sen. 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 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.

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.

The MAGA Teens Aren't Innocent Victims

By Ruth Graham, Slate

22 January 19

The incident at the Lincoln Memorial was more complicated than it initially seemed, but new footage doesn’t exonerate the kids in the red caps.

he viral video that seemed to show a white teenager in a MAGA hat harassing a Native American elder near the Lincoln Memorial turns out to have captured a more complicated conflict. The clip, which drew widespread condemnation over the holiday weekend, appeared to depict a then-unidentified teenager silently leering in the face of a Native American man who was beating a traditional drum. The teenager was surrounded by dozens of rowdy peers from the all-male Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, who were in town to attend the anti-abortion March for Life; the man was participating in the annual Indigenous People’s March the same day. In a post I wrote on Saturday, I described the boy’s serene, smug facial expression as “both punchable and untouchable.”

In the days that followed, new accounts and new angles on the confrontation began to emerge. Nathan Phillips, the Omaha elder and Vietnam War veteran seen in the clip, gave interviews in which he said he approached the teenagers—not the other way around—in order to defuse tension between them and some noisy and vulgar street preachers nearby. Longer videos emerged that showed the street preachers—who belong to a fringe religious group called the Black Hebrew Israelites that the Southern Poverty Law Center once described as “[o]bsessed with hatred for whites and Jews”—shouting insults at both the boys and the Native group. Meanwhile, no footage has emerged that shows the teens shouting “Build the wall,” as Phillips and other witnesses have said they did. And on Sunday, the teenager, Nick Sandmann, released a statement in which he identified himself and attempted to “correct misinformation and outright lies.” Sandmann said the students were shouting school-spirit chants to drown out the street preachers, and that Phillips seemed to single him out for confrontation. He describes himself as having “diffused the situation by remaining calm.”

What a mess. The encounter was indisputably more complicated than it first appeared, and the new accounts certainly chip away at the straightforward narrative of a MAGA teen going out of his way to taunt a Native demonstrator. The discrepancies between initial perceptions of what happened and the facts on the ground have kicked off a predictable cycle of hand-wringing over participation in a too-hasty internet pile-on. “If the Covington Catholic incident was a test, it’s one I failed,” Ohio writer Julie Irwin Zimmerman wrote in the Atlantic, vowing to “sit out” the next outrage cycle. “As I watched the longer videos, I began to see the smirking kid in a different light.”

I still don’t—or at least not completely. Most accounts, including mine, made no claim that Sandmann first approached Phillips. And it’s worth noting that Sandmann’s actions were seen as aggressive by almost everyone who saw that initial video, including those most inclined to be sympathetic to him. The boy’s school and its Catholic diocese quickly issued an apology. The March for Life posted a statement (now deleted) from its president saying that the “reprehensible behavior” in the video does not represent the march. Many other March for Life attendees and supporters reacted in horror and shame. This is because of what everyone saw so clearly in the initial clip, and what hasn’t changed with the additional information: Sandmann’s smirk, and his failure to get out of Phillips’s face. I described Sandmann’s expression on Saturday as “The face that sneers, ‘What? I’m just standing here,’ if you flinch or cry or lash out.” Or, as Sandmann put it in his statement, “I never interacted with this protestor. I did not speak to him. I did not make any hand gestures or other aggressive moves.”

More context: There were dozens of Covington boys on the scene, meaning they vastly outnumbered both groups of antagonists. (A letter sent to parents about the school’s March for Life plans this year said 213 boys attended a few years ago.) Many of the teenagers in this background were clearly snickering at the chanting; some can be seen doing the “tomahawk chop,” a controversial gesture that originated in sports fandom (rather than Native culture) and is considered offensive by some. There’s no mistaking the core dynamics of the encounter: Sandmann smugly grins in Phillips’s face and declines to step backward, and he’s backed by dozens of boisterous teens who are jeering and mocking the much smaller group of Native marchers.

None of this might have mattered—and the clip certainly would not have gone viral—if Sandmann and many of his peers were not wearing red Make America Great Again hats. Racked reported in 2017 that the hats had become popular souvenirs among white teenage boys visiting Washington, in part because they invite “instant attention, instant discomfort, easy transgression.” Boston Globe columnist Renée Graham wrote last summer about seeing more than a dozen white teenage boys in MAGA hats at the National Museum of African American History & Culture. “Clearly, this was meant as a provocation,” she wrote. I’m inclined to believe that Sandmann, too, is smart enough to understand that the MAGA hat is not a symbol of peace and reconciliation, especially when the bill of that hat is inches from the nose of a Native American.

The new facts about this small encounter this weekend in Washington are important, and worth clarifying. But they don’t change the larger story, the one that caused so many people to react so viscerally to the narrative’s first, and simpler draft. We shouldn’t make the same mistake the president does when he confuses climate and weather. The weather is the encounter between Sandmann and Phillips, and it’s the media’s responsibility to describe it accurately (once we’ve decided to describe it at all). The climate includes a president whose name is used as a taunt by school bullies and racist harassers, who wields the rhetoric of domestic violence to cause pain and then blame those who are suffering, who delights in teasing and threatening his enemies, and who just last week made a joke about a government massacre of Native Americans. It would be a mistake to let our preexisting views persuade us to see something in this particular video that isn’t there. But it would also be misguided to let the complexities of the scene at the Lincoln Memorial dissuade us from telling the truth about who Trump is and exactly what he stands for.