SEP 19, 2019
By now, Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez has gone through more full-on political attacks than President
Trump has gone through cabinet members.
Fox News’ abuse of power, and
of Ocasio-Cortez, comes as no surprise, given the Murdochian media
complex’s total
commitment to making sure their audience sees Ocasio-Cortez and her
peers — specifically, congressional “Squad”-mates Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and
Ayanna Pressley — as the socialist enemies of (white) America that President
Trump insists they are. But a perhaps more remarkable, or at least more subtle,
kind of critique came Wednesday from one of the nerve centers of center-left
media, in the form of Catie Edmonson’s New
York Times story, “How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Learned to Play by
Washington’s Rules.”
This significant development
apparently came as news to Ocasio-Cortez, who picked up on another narrative
running throughout the article. Starting with that authoritative headline,
which begs the question of who was doing the teaching, Edmonson’s piece reads
like a disciplinary tool disguised as a straight report. A series of normative
statements are passed off as givens.
We learn that AOC — pictured
above the text in a thoughtful, reserved pose, hands folded, eyes fixed on a
distant horizon — arrived on Capitol Hill as “a Bronx firebrand” with a
“revolutionary reputation,” “social media fame” and a “brash,
institution-be-damned style.” Cut to nine months into Ocasio-Cortez’s tenure in
office, and according to Edmonson, AOC has purportedly Learned Her Lesson,
having adopted “a careful political calculus that adheres more closely to the
unwritten rules of Washington she once disdained.” In other words: She’s
becoming part of the system.
The evidence for this
newsworthy shift, which Edmonson was merely chronicling in her report, consists
of a couple of quotes from AOC, a smattering of broad comments from others and
a hearty dose of extrapolation based on the congresswoman’s recent staffing and
scheduling choices.
Here are two excerpts from
Edmonson’s piece containing Ocasio-Cortez’s own words about her evolution on
the job, which don’t exactly amount to a slam-dunk confirmation of the
article’s driving idea:
“I think I have more of a
context of what it takes to do this job and survive on a day-to-day basis in a
culture that is inherently hostile to people like me,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said
in an interview.
… She said she has gone
through a “loss of innocence and naïveté,” realizing that it was impossible to
separate the legislative work of serving in Congress with the politics of re-election
campaigns.
“They are frankly much closer
in that dynamic and much closer in overlapping than a lot of people tend to
realize,” she said.
Edmonson also pointed to
Ocasio-Cortez’s apparent move away from the Justice Democrats, one of the
sponsoring organizations that boosted
her to victory at the polls in 2018. The congresswoman was not working
so many co-branded activities into her upcoming slate; she had also sacked two
key employees who were affiliated with the Justice Democrats, hired as her
chief of staff Kamala Harris’ former aide — a “sober-minded replacement,”
Edmonson notes. What’s more, she was opting to endorse less edgy Democrats like
Marie Newman and Colorado Rep. Joe Neguse, for whom AOC has been blocking out
time that, just a few months ago, she may have spent, say, helping Justice
Democrats:
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has cut back
on her appearances on behalf of Justice Democrats and has begun bolstering her
fellow incumbent freshman lawmakers, like Representative Joe Neguse of
Colorado, a member of Democratic leadership whom she is joining at a
fund-raiser this week for the Boulder County Democratic Party.
We also learn that certain of
Ocasio-Cortez’s aides “continued to carry the Justice Democrats’ flag without
restraint, tweeting out their support when the group challenged incumbents, to
the dismay of Democratic aides and lawmakers,” which didn’t
always work out so well for those aides.
In case it wasn’t already
obvious, Justice Democrats, along with AOC, are being disciplined in and
through the Times’ piece. Twice Edmonson characterizes the Justice Democrats’
and Ocasio-Cortez’s “brand of politics” as “divisive,” a term made all the more
impactful when nestled between other fringey, pugnacious adjectives:
When she first arrived on
Capitol Hill, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and her team made it clear they planned to use
their perch inside Congress as a platform for their divisive, outsider brand of
politics. On her first day of orientation, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez joined protesters
camped outside Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office agitating for the Green New Deal.
… Gone from her Washington
office are her original
chief of staff and her communications director, two Justice Democrats
founders who were intent on waging their divisive brand of politics from their
offices on Capitol Hill. No longer an unabashed ambassador of the combative
group, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has carefully managed her involvement with it.
But now, Edmonson concluded,
Ocasio-Cortez has finally gotten the message that Edmonson’s story works hard
to reinforce, framed as a “reality on Capitol Hill that she and her team were
slow to fully appreciate.” So that the reader may fully appreciate it, the
lesson is spelled out as “the extent to which power and the ability to get
things done in the House were dependent on personal relationships and respect
for the hierarchy.”
For her part, Ocasio-Cortez
disagreed with Edmonson’s take, calling out the subtext of the Times’ story in
a Twitter exchange with actor and former New York gubernatorial candidate
Cynthia Nixon:
Sorry @nytimes, if
you pushed aside your desperate desire for a taming of the shrew moment, you
would be reporting rather on @AOC’s
preternatural ability to play a sublime inside-outside game that moves her
agenda forward. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/us/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-washington.html …
There will always be powerful
interest in promoting the idea that the left is losing power 1 way or another.
The big way they try to dismantle the left isn’t to attack it, but to gaslight & deflate it.
Dripping condescension that I’m being “educated” should be a big red flag
The big way they try to dismantle the left isn’t to attack it, but to gaslight & deflate it.
Dripping condescension that I’m being “educated” should be a big red flag
Right on cue, Fox News was on
the case to cover the conflict as another sign of intra-liberal discontent. “Rep.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., suggested on Wednesday that The New York Times, often criticized
for having a liberal bias, was trying to attack the left in one of its stories
about her,” Fox News’ Sam Dorman wrote,
opting to leave the most prolific source of criticism about the media’s liberal
bias unnamed.
