It’s blindingly obvious that whoever is writing incoming Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tweets is not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. AOC has a social-media Cyrano de B. This wouldn’t be too worthy of notice under most circumstances because we generally expect statements of public figures to be laundered through the paid-publicist machine and to come out uncontroversial and anodyne. But AOC doesn’t stick to Congressperson boilerplate on social media. She is the new master of the sick burn, the withering putdown and the curare-tipped rejoinder. Yet at the same time, in interviews she continues to embarrass herself.
In-person AOC does not speak like this. On Twitter, she’s Christopher Hitchens. In person, she’s Billy Madison. In person, she thinks the unemployment rate goes down when people take multiple jobs. She thinks funeral costs should be included in the overall price tag of health care. She thinks that when the U.S. was founded, it rejected capitalism.
Fine. The guy who has been writing Orrin Hatch’s Twitter jokes is probably not Orrin Hatch. But AOC has chosen as her social-media spokesperson someone whose I.Q. is so many points above hers that it’s setting her up for an epic face plant. Someday, someone’s going to quiz AOC in person on something that she supposedly said on social media, and she’s going to draw a complete blank. I can only hope that when it happens her interviewer closes out by saying, “I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”