With its silly swipes at AOC,
the American political establishment is once again revealing its blindness to
its own unpopularity
By MATT TAIBBI
One 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.
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