Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez broke her Fox News embargo to go on Brett Baier’s show in support of the compromise coronavirus legislation being advocated for by Nancy Pelosi, toward the end of the interview, Baier began increasingly attempting to bait AOC into directing fire at Joe Biden or Democratic leadership more generally. For the most part, AOC did an admirable job of not rising to the bait, and instead pivoting back to her message that swift action is needed to respond to this pandemic, and that people need to put partisanship aside.
I am what you might call a moderate Democrat and an AOC skeptic. Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are my models for excellency in political leadership. My political views are not all moderate. They tend to be very progressive, often radically so. However, I believe firmly in keeping an eye on the bottom line. I think it is more important to achieve actual progress over maintaining the purity of the progressive vision.
Because of my political philosophy, I have a fair amount of disdain for certain elements on the left whom I see as counterproductive. I’m not a fan of Cenk Uygur and the Young Turks, or Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress, and other leftist organizations, which formed in connection with Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The model of change for these organizations is to create a platform that serves as a purity test. The platform includes Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, among other things. What JD/BNC would like to do is to force as many politicians as possible to adopt their entire platform, and then primary the rest. They were very active in 2018, but not very successful. Their candidates badly underperformed average Democratic candidates.
However, one of their few successes was AOC. She was recruited by them and successfully primaried Joe Crowley. I had lived in a neighborhood withing AOC’s district for about 15 years before that election. I liked Joe Crowley, and thought AOC’s attacks were over the top and unfair.
I also didn’t like some of the shenanigans AOC and her people were pulling last year, particularly in terms of the disrespect toward House leadership. The worst actor in the whole affair was AOC’s chief of Staff, Saikat Chakrabarti. In June 2019, he tweeted out, about Blue Dog Democrats: "They certainly seem hell bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the 40s.” This led to some words of admonishment by Pelosi, to which AOC took umbrage.
Chakrabarti was at the top of JD/BNC and then followed AOC to Washington. His political philosophy was that we need to burn the Democratic Party down so that a new, more progressive party can rise from the ashes. I think that’s a foolish approach, and worried that AOC had bought into it hook, line, and sinker.
However, Chakrabarti was forced to resign as AOC’s Chief of Staff shortly after this incident, and I find that AOC has been much more conciliatory and constructive since then.
I found AOC’s position on the pending Democratic proposal to respond to the Coronavirus to be responsible, and her presentation effective. However, Baier did, finally, get AOC to say that she thought part of the reason that the youth vote was not turning out at higher rates was voter suppression. She cited long wait times for voting at certain polling stations in Michigan for evidence of her claim.
I don’t think she meant to imply that the DNC was suppressing the youth vote. The DNC is not responsible for opening and closing voting stations in Michigan. Closing polling stations has been a tactic employed in some states in order to attempt to suppress votes by young people and minorities. However, I don’t think there is necessarily evidence for that in Michigan. I certainly think it would be better if AOC had said something to Baier like: “I came on your show today, because I genuinely think this is a time for uniting. I am not interested in any sort of intra-party fights right now. I think we all need to focus 100% on mitigating the damage that this virus is already wreaking on this country.”
I cringed a bit at her response, because I knew how it would be used to stoke division. But I really don’t think that is what AOC wanted or where her head was at. She was there to deliver a unifying message in support of Nancy Pelosi, and got pulled off track a bit by Baier.
Brainwrap wrote a diary accusing AOC of going on Fox News to spew nonsense about voter suppression being responsible for Sanders’s loss to Biden in Michigan. I was sort of surprised to see a reaction like that to AOC’s interview from someone like Brainwrap. I have always found him to be a very unifying voice, and a real rock star when it comes to the issue of healthcare.
I get where the frustration comes from. There has been some really destructive talk that has come from some people who claim to be the most progressive among us, but we can’t allow ourselves to get to trigger happy and snap at people who are actually trying to play a constructive role.