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POLITICS 01/08/2019 02:26 am ET Updated 1 hour ago
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Hits Back At Sean Hannity With A Radically Honest Correction
The newly minted congresswoman takes on the Fox News host.
By Ed Mazza
Sean Hannity tried to slam the “radical platform” of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Monday night. But if the Fox News host was hoping to put her on the defensive, it didn’t work.
The newly minted lawmaker isn’t backing down from her agenda, even as Hannity misconstrued it. Instead, she offered a couple of corrections:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Verified account
He’s almost got it!
Just a few corrections:
* Single-payer healthcare
* Ending unjust wars
* 70% *marginal* tax rate on multimillion incomes
On Sunday night, Ocasio-Cortez defended the term “radical.”
“I think that it only has ever been radicals that have changed this country,” she said in a “60 Minutes” interview with Anderson Cooper. “Abraham Lincoln made the radical decision to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the radical decision to embark on establishing programs like Social Security.”
Cooper then asked if she considered herself a “radical.”
“Yeah,” she said. “You know, if that’s what radical means, call me a radical.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/al ... 6c11ef3d62
PufPuf93 » Mon Jan 07, 2019 4:57 pm wrote:AOC is dyno-might!
Cordelia, here is a longer clip from th Anderson Cooper interview.
I think any tension between Pelosi and AOC is a figment of media and the entrenched folks imagination.
I am impressed with Pelosi currently. That has not always been the case. Pelosi has an aggressiveness regards Trump that she lacked with GWB.
to both.
Hope this turns into a long and uplifting thread at RI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ1LAoHVFgA
Cordelia » Tue Jan 08, 2019 8:16 am wrote:
I recognize I’m prejudiced and jaded due to my own Washington experiences, but still in the frame of mind that Government and media continue working hand in hand to create tensions and the public is manipulated w/agendas planned well in advance. I’m not optimistic about Pelosi and don't trust the plays being staged in Washington right now, so in the spirit of the thread, I’ll bow out...
Peace
PufPuf93 » Tue Jan 08, 2019 9:20 am wrote:"I support all the items in the graphic in SLAD's last post
The New Right-Wing Horror Show: Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a Smarter, More Beautiful, Charismatic (Woker, Socialist) Trump?
Even when they try to ignore her, they lose. Is there anything conservatives can do to overcome the socialist-leaning, social-media-savvy freshman congresswoman from New York?
Tina NguyenJanuary 7, 2019 6:28 pm
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with Ilhan Omar on Capitol Hill, January 4, 2019.
By Andrew Harnik/AP/REX/Shutterstock.
Last week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offered a master class in the aggressive yet disarming use of social media that has defined her early political career. An anonymous account tweeted a video of a cheerful, college-aged Ocasio-Cortez dancing on a rooftop, intended to depict her as a “clueless nitwit.” The recently inaugurated congresswoman, recognizing an opportunity, responded by politicizing the social-media skirmish, accusing her sternest critics in the Republican Party of believing that “having fun should be disqualifying or illegal.” She later went a step further: “I hear the GOP thinks women dancing are scandalous,” she tweeted, along with a video of her grooving outside her new office on Capitol Hill.
Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet immediately went viral, thanks to the potent combination of shameless dancing, millennial nostalgia-bait “Lisztomania,” and a throng of friendly digital-media companies that promptly agreed that conservatives had, indeed, “lost it.” Multiple Web sites declared that Ocasio-Cortez was the target of a “smear campaign.”
The charge spread rapidly online, despite Republicans’ insistence that nobody really cared. “No one thinks this is scandalous,” tweeted Rep. Dan Crenshaw, himself a burgeoning conservative media darling, adding that the Breakfast Club-inspired dancing “was actually pretty good.” Non-politicians went further, claiming that the mainstream media was trying to distract voters from Ocasio-Cortez’s more radical policies (a 70 percent marginal income tax on the wealthy, for instance) by ginning up imaginary right-wing haters. “There is literally no evidence that any human Republican shamed AOC over her dancing video,” wrote the Daily Caller’s Benny Johnson, in response to an article bashing conservatives for obsessing over the video. Fox News media reporter Brian Flood lamented the “slew of misleading stories claiming conservatives were outraged over it, despite virtually no supporting evidence.”
It appears Republicans have finally learned, after nearly seven months of lobbing relentless attacks at the 29-year-old for largely superficial reasons—like whether she went to a fancy high school, or if she was just some Instant Pot liberal who wears designer clothes—that criticizing Ocasio-Cortez only makes her stronger. Republicans first recognized the obsession with A.O.C. had backfired in November, after a conservative journalist commented on the clothes she wore in Congress. “I personally think that stuff is wrong, and you shouldn’t do it—because it negates your argument, and it only kind of solidifies her status,” media critic Stephen L. Miller told me at the time. But even then, it was too late—the newly minted congresswoman had already been elevated to a position of Trump-like power within the Democratic Party, capable of resetting the political agenda with a tweet, or triggering her own media spin cycle. No wonder, then, that conservatives pulled their punches on the dancing video, and protested so forcefully when they were accused of taking the bait. If earlier tussles with Ocasio-Cortez had been counterproductive, the prospect of attacking her for an innocent homage to a classic 80s movie would have been catastrophic.
As Ocasio-Cortez has become a social-media force, garnering awkward imitators among her progressive colleagues, the right has constantly worried that she may be demonstrating some of the no-fucks-to-give political sangfroid displayed by Donald Trump: ill-informed but aggressively charismatic, adept at overcoming traditional political gatekeepers through social media, impervious to the dissonance between political promises and fiscal realities, and, most importantly, an avatar of our populist moment. Trump himself was able to use that relentless outreach to pitch once-controversial ideas to the public: build a border wall, renege on international trade deals, and unilaterally withdraw America from its foreign wars. On a recent 60 Minutes segment, Ocasio-Cortez clamored for universal health care, free public-college tuition, and an ambitious plan to transition America to green energy that simultaneously addressed the country’s mounting income-equality gap. Like Trump, Ocasio-Cortez didn’t appear overly bothered with the details or the reality of such a platform. She was just the messenger. “It only has ever been radicals that have changed this country,” she told Anderson Cooper, adding that she was happy to be called “radical” herself.
But perhaps Ocasio-Cortez’s most Trumpian political skill is her ability to deflect. Trump was able to portray his left-wing critics as cogs in an elitist, anti-working-class machine. Similarly, Ocasio-Cortez has (often appropriately) characterized criticism of her politics as personal attacks driven by an obsession with her age, race, and gender. (Republicans themselves continue to walk straight into these blunders, as demonstrated when a G.O.P. strategist called her a “little girl” on Fox News last weekend.) She has used her popularity and charisma to effectively grant herself immunity from inaccuracies, big and small. “If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees,” she told Cooper. “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.” Shortly after the interview aired, she took to Instagram to tell her followers that if she’d made any flubs on television, it was because the format was difficult for a novice like herself to master.
This had been evident to a growing section of the right-wing commentariat for the past several weeks, particularly as Ocasio-Cortez began using Instagram in a novel way to reach out to constituents. What should terrify them more, however, is that her talents are encouraging fellow Democrats to embrace her increasingly progressive views. “There was a time in this country where the top marginal tax rate was over 90 percent; even during Reagan’s era in the 1980s it was around 50 percent,” former Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro told George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. (“And woosh goes the Overton Window,” as Washington Post political reporter Dave Weigel wrote on Twitter.)
For now, those visions have run up against political reality: when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the formation of a select committee on climate change, for instance, many of Ocasio-Cortez’s activist-driven demands were not included. The committee would not focus on enacting the Green New Deal, which called for the country to run solely on renewables, nor would it have subpoena powers or “the authority to vote on legislation and send it directly to the House floor for a vote.” But outsiders’ demands, it appeared, were slowly trickling in. “There’s some fabulous proposals in the Green New Deal, and I’m excited about all that. You may see some similar language. Clearly, the focuses are going to be the same,” said committee chairwoman Kathy Castor.
The immediate changes that Ocasio-Cortez and her democratic-socialist allies are demanding may not take place at the pace they envision. But if anything could fuel their momentum in this charged partisan climate, it would be the increasingly desperate, consistently lame attacks coming from the far right. As the “Lisztomania” clip reached peak virality, the Daily Caller posted a widely mocked video of Ocasio-Cortez dancing to the Soviet national anthem (“That feeling when you’re first in line for bread,” read the caption), and on Sunday, the popular fringe Web site the Gateway Pundit published an article accusing the congresswoman of embroidering her past by lying about her nickname (“Yorktown Elitist and Bronx Hoaxer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Went by ‘Sandy’ Well into College at Boston U”). The base, after all, cares little for optics, and even less for restraint as a political strategy. When conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson tweeted a version of the video that was uploaded in November, modified to depict Ocasio-Cortez dancing to lyrics calling her such a fucking ho, his followers ate it up. If the right truly fears that Ocasio-Cortez will turn America into Venezuela, where even more sunny socialist proposals led the formerly wealthy country down the path to complete economic collapse, they might want to stop helping her look so cool.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/01 ... cans-react
“Call me a radical”: Ocasio-Cortez reveals how much the Democratic Party has changed
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is more in line with the party’s base than establishment Democrats might think.
Zack BeauchampJan 7, 2019, 3:23pm EST
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on election night 2018.
Rick Loomis/Getty Images
In January 1996, the centerpiece of President Bill Clinton’s State of the Union address was a declaration that “the era of big government is over.” 23 years later, the brightest young star in the Democratic Party is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who wants to nationalize the health insurance industry and pass a Green New Deal that would zero-out US carbon emissions in the next 12 years.
When Anderson Cooper labeled this a “radical” agenda in a Sunday night interview with the Congress member, she proudly embraced the label.
“I think that it only has ever been radicals that have changed this country. Abraham Lincoln made the radical decision to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the radical decision to embark on establishing programs like Social Security,” she said. “If that’s what radical means, call me a radical.”
Much of the interview is a tap-dance on the grave of Clinton-era liberalism. The Clinton administration was deeply concerned with budget deficits; Ocasio-Cortez told Cooper she didn’t need a plan to pay for her proposals. Clinton passed welfare reform to end black Americans’ alleged “dependence” on the welfare state; Ocasio-Cortez called President Donald Trump a racist, condemning deployment of the “historic dog whistles of white supremacy.”
Ocasio-Cortez is, of course, not the president, or even the Democratic Party’s leader. If anything, though, that makes the contrast more striking: Here is a first-term member of Congress who doesn’t yet have the power to set her party’s agenda, and yet has captured the imagination of the party rank-and-file and the national media.
The contrast between Ocasio-Cortez and Bill Clinton points to a very interesting, and largely misunderstood, division in the Democratic Party. For some time now, the Democratic voting base has been much more aligned with the Congress member than the former president, embracing more progressive positions on everything from taxes to immigration to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the party’s elected ranks, and especially its leadership, hasn’t moved nearly as much.
This gap, between a more progressive party base and the more cautious establishment, is part of what makes candidates like Ocasio-Cortez so popular. They are giving Democratic voters what they want, which is an unapologetic and aggressively progressive party.
It’s not always clear what being “more progressive” actually means. Many of the plausible Democratic 2020 presidential candidates, ranging from Sens. Cory Booker to Elizabeth Warren to Bernie Sanders, have different visions for the party’s future. The fight between so-called “liberals” and “leftists,” which rages on my Twitter feed daily, is a fight to define just exactly what it means to be “progressive” in a post-Clinton era.
But regardless of which factions win this fight, it’s clear that Clinton-style centrism is dead in the water. Its advocates in the party are older and out of step with the party’s base. Elected Democrats may not fully realize it yet, but the era of small-government liberalism is over.
The voters have shifted, the elected officials haven’t (as much)
The progressive shift in the Democratic voting base in the past 20 years is clear and profound. The Atlantic’s David Graham laid out some of the most striking data in a November summary:
On economics, three-quarters of Democrats say that the government doesn’t do enough to help poor people, up from half in 1994. Two-thirds say that government should regulate business more, again up from half in 1994. Conversely, in 1994, two-thirds of Democrats believed that people could get ahead if they were willing to work hard. Now only half do. The percentage of Democrats who believe that corporations make too much money is up 12 points. But the movement is not uniform. While the portion of Democrats who say that the government should do more to help the poor, even if it requires taking on debt, rose from 58 percent in 1994 to 71 percent in 2017, it is still below the peak of 77 percent, in 2007.
There’s also dramatic movement on race, which may more than anything reflect the exodus of conservative whites as the Democratic Party becomes more minority-heavy. The percentage of Democrats who say that the government needs to do more to fight racism has risen from 57 to 81 since 2009. In 1994, four in 10 Democrats said that racial discrimination was the main reason black people couldn’t get ahead; in 2017, more than six in 10 did. White voters have moved especially dramatically, as Thomas Edsall notes: On both of these indicators, white Democrats are actually further left than black ones.
The party’s elected officials, though, don’t wholly reflect that shift. The following chart, from VoteView, charts the two parties’ DW-NOMINATE scores (a political science metric of officials’ ideology based on voting record) from the 19th century to 2015. The Democratic Party’s average, in dark red, shows relatively limited movement between the mid-’90s and mid-2010s:
VoteView
The contrast with the Republican line in the chart couldn’t be clearer. Both Republican voters and elected officials have become increasingly conservative, even reactionary and nativist, in the past several decades. The Democratic base is not a mirror image of the Republican base — it’s not nearly so radical — but it has clearly tilted to the left over the same time. The difference is that the party’s elected officials haven’t really followed suit.
When I chat with rank-and-file Democrats, the kind of people who tend to reliably turn out in party primaries, they seem quite aware of this discrepancy. You frequently hear a hunger for politicians who are unapologetically progressive, who counter Republican radicalism with boldness, rather than the more cautious approach you get from a lot of elected Democrats.
This effect appears to have opened up space for more forthrightly progressive candidates to win primaries. In July 2018, YouGov asked self-identified Democrats whether they wanted candidates for the midterm elections to be “more or less like Bernie Sanders.” Fifty-seven percent said they wanted more Sanders-esque candidates; a scant 16 percent said less.
The actual makeup of party primaries is starting to reflect the base’s interest in more aggressive candidates. An October Brookings report sorted the Democratic primary field into three categories: Moderate, Establishment, and Progressive. It found that the percentage of “Moderate” candidates fell in half between 2014 and 2018, while the percentage of “Progressives” went up by around 60 percent.
This doesn’t mean a Sanders/socialist takeover of the party is imminent. It is very far from clear that Democratic voters are more interested in Ocasio-Cortez’s democratic socialism then, say, Elizabeth Warren’s welfare-state capitalism. The fight to define “progressivism” is still ongoing.
But the reason this battle between progressive factions is happening in the first place is because there’s been a rupture with the past. The official party is somewhat out of step with its voters, still more Clintonite than many voters would like. This has opened up space for a shift in a progressive direction, making some kind of change inevitable. The only question is where the party ends up.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... atic-party
JackRiddler » Tue Jan 08, 2019 11:20 am wrote:Support the same things as her! Fight for these things as though they mattered!
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