On the menu today: On Tuesday, New York Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lost an election; the Democrats’ youth movement in Congress is wildly overstated; and remembering another young Democratic Latino rising star who changed from the candidate of tomorrow to the candidate of yesterday in the blink of an eye.
AOC and the Democrats’ Underwhelming ‘Generational Transition’
My week began with Hugh Hewitt gloating about the Cleveland Browns advancing ahead of the New York Jets in the 2025 NFL Draft order, and predicting that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be “drafted” to be the next Democratic presidential nominee:
Hugh: I’m going to get you to go out on a limb early here, because in 1968 Republicans won a fractious, fractured violence-filled upheaval of an election when Richard Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey. And they came back four years later with George McGovern. So, who are the Democrats going to nominate in 2028? Based on that predicate.
Jim: Okay, the only thing I like about that predicate, Hugh . . . you know what happened right after 1968? The Jets won the Super Bowl, so—
Hugh: There you go! If they if they’re going to find the George McGovern of 2028, who is the George McGovern? I think I know who it is.
Jim: [Gavin] Newsom?
Hugh: It’s AOC. They are really going to go AOC she’s bored in the House. She’s in the minority. She can raise the money, it’s going to be 100 percent AOC — are you a skeptic?
Jim: Yea, but I think there’s going to be a — you see the reaction to Brian Thompson. There is just this inchoate rage amongst liberals right now . . .
Hugh: it’s going to turn into a Draft AOC movement soon.
Now, 2028 is a long way off, and on Tuesday, AOC lost an election — House Democrats had to decide whether she or northern Virginia representative Gerry Connolly should be the next ranking member of the Oversight and Accountability Committee. At 35, AOC is less than half the age of 74-year-old Connolly, but House Democrats preferred him over her, 131 to 84. (That’s a 60.9 percent to 39.1 percent split.) Connolly is undergoing chemotherapy and immunotherapy for esophagus cancer.
Axios wrote that Connolly withstood “a generational revolt.” But just last week, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries boasted, “House Democrats have clearly been in the midst of a generational transition.”
Eh, are they? Mike Lillis, writing over at The Hill:
On Wednesday, the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee confirmed the ranking member positions for the senior lawmakers of four top committees — Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, Financial Services, and Appropriations.
That puts Reps. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), 75; Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), 73; Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), 86; and Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), 81, in some of the most prominent seats to confront the incoming Trump administration next year.
None of them faced competition from younger members.
And the trend will continue on Monday, when the Steering and Policy panel is scheduled to fill out its committee roster, which will keep a number of veteran lawmakers in the ranking member spots they currently hold.
That list includes Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), 76, at the top of the Homeland Security Committee; Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.), 71, as ranking member of the Small Business Committee; Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), 76, on the Science, Space and Technology Committee; and Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), 71, on the Foreign Affairs Committee.
All of those members of Congress are close to a decade older than the actresses that starred in The Golden Girls when they started filming that program back in 1985. Good thing the Democrats are putting the Joe Biden era and his style of geriatric, sclerotic leadership behind them, huh?
Now, part of the reason it’s easy to get a “Democrats are turning to younger leadership” narrative going is that it only takes a few new committee chairs to create the impression of a trend.
But the House has 21 standing committees (meaning permanent until the next time they reorganize them), four joint committees with the U.S. Senate, a Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and a Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump. All those committees collectively have 104 subcommittees. With 211 Democrats slated to be in the chamber when the next Congress begins, if no member doubled up on chairing a committee or subcommittee, your odds of chairing a committee or subcommittee would be just under 50 percent. Of course, there’s a bit of a gap between bragging to your constituents that you’re the ranking member on, say, the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, versus being the ranking member on the Joint Committee on Printing. (Next week’s hearing: “What does ‘PC Load Letter’ mean?”)
AOC’s Amen Corner in the progressive media are complaining that she’s been unfairly snubbed by her fellow House Democrats again.
At The New Republic, Kate Aronoff calls AOC’s defeat “so depressing . . . for the couple dozen journalists and political junkies who pay attention to that sort of thing. Pelosi and the old guard’s continued opposition to younger talent seems breathtakingly counterproductive in the face of the Democratic Party’s numerous challenges right now . . . these elections are just a sad reflection on how committed the party’s top brass are to maintaining their cozy patronage system.”
Alexander Sammon, fuming in Slate:
As Democrats try to shine a light on wanton corruption in the Republican Party and in the economy broadly, it’s pretty obvious which one of these representatives has a bigger megaphone to explain what’s going on. Ocasio-Cortez has 8.1 million followers. Connolly has 4,600.
On the optics, it’s even harder to justify. Pelosi, who is undergoing hip replacement surgery, is . . . well, a stalwart member of the oldest guard who now appears to be score-settling over a feud with Ocasio-Cortez that is six years old. Pelosi’s penchant for backroom sabotage was easy to cheer when she was pushing fellow octogenarian and likely loser Joe Biden out of the presidential race; it’s harder to justify when an eminently qualified rising star — who, whether Pelosi likes it personally or not, is widely known to be a cornerstone of the party’s future — pushes for a simple promotion.
Let me call a time out here and ask . . . is AOC a cornerstone of the Democratic Party’s future?
For years, major media publications have been telling us that. A few years ago, GQ called her “the voice of a generation” and “the most talented political communicator of her generation.” Is it fair to expect the “the voice of a generation” to do more than win reelection in a House district that scores a D+28 advantage in the Cook Partisan Voting Index?
If you really are the “most talented political communicator of her generation,” shouldn’t you to be able to persuade most of your colleagues to make you the ranking member on a committee?
One of the advantages if doing a job like mine for a (sigh) long time is you start to recognize the same recurring patterns. It wasn’t that long ago that the ranks of the Democratic Party were brimming with excitement about another young wunderkind Latino elected official who was a whiz at social media.
From the moment he was selected to give the keynote speech at the 2012 Democratic convention until his disappointing, short-lived 2020 presidential campaign, you could rarely find a rising star that shined brighter than Julian Castro; if I had a dime for every time Castro was called “the Latino Obama,” I could probably retire. (Castro could be genuinely funny; watch him jabbing NBA star and television analyst Charles Barkley for snide comments about San Antonio, or poking fun at himself in a video of his phone’s Siri calling him, “Mr. Presidente.”)
But when it came time for Castro to persuade a Democratic electorate that he was ready to be the next commander in chief, as I put it, “The candidate of tomorrow suddenly finds himself the candidate of yesterday without ever having been the candidate of today.” By the time the 2020 presidential campaign rolled around, Castro wasn’t even the most popular or buzz-generating Texas Democrat; Beto O’Rourke had lapped him.
A lot can change between now and when the Democrats start casting ballots for their next presidential nominee in January 2028. But color me skeptical that AOC will transform herself into the kind of candidate who can win a majority in what I suspect will be a crowded presidential field. As I wrote after that gushing GQ profile of her:
It is not hard to see why other Democrats, like former governor David Paterson, dismiss AOC as “a phantom of the media,” with little or no real political influence beyond her ability to generate headlines. The AOC playbook is to propose some headline-grabbing, controversial pipe dream that will never become law, bask in the applause of progressives, introduce a bill or amendment that will never get adopted in legislative chambers with narrow Democratic majorities, and then move on to the next issue. Progressives never seem to get annoyed that so few of her proposals become reality.
In this sense, no, AOC isn’t serious, she doesn’t want to be, and her fan base doesn’t want her to be serious, either. Asked about whether she wants to run for president someday, she responds, “I admit to sometimes believing that I live in a country that would never let that happen.” She laments, “so many people in this country hate women. And they hate women of color.” But that’s the most ideologically and personally convenient scapegoat. Winning the Democratic nomination, never mind the general election, would require building a broad coalition of support beyond the progressive wing of her party. A serious run for president would require AOC to stop being the progressive idealist dream candidate and telling her fanbase to accept half a loaf instead of none. Reality is messy; in her current role, AOC gets to live in the glittering illusion of the ideal.
So yes, AOC plays a role akin to that of Jennifer Lawrence or Meghan Markle — the glamorous young woman who makes provocatively progressive statements in gushing, glossy magazine profiles. The more interesting question is whether AOC wants to play any role beyond that. It’s a lot easier to be a celebrity than to be a political leader who gets into messy negotiations and makes compromises.
In fact, AOC faces at least three problems that Castro didn’t.
- She’s never run anything bigger than a congressional office. Castro could at least to point to his time running the Department of Housing and Urban Development and his time as mayor of San Antonio.
- She’s extreme. In response to the shooting of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, AOC said, “For anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience of denied claims as an act of violence against them.” Except a denial of a health-insurance claim is not an act of violence, pulling a gun on anybody over a health-insurance dispute is not an act of self-defense, and the shooter never even had UnitedHealthcare as his insurance company.
- She’s kind of dumb. Last month, on Joy Reid’s MSNBC program, Ocasio-Cortez fumed, “Let’s be very clear, a Tulsi Gabbard nomination is a pro-war nomination, globally, point blank, period.” This is like arguing Trump isn’t erratic enough, or that Kamala Harris doesn’t laugh enough, or that Joe Biden is too young to remain president. Gabbard’s been an odd duck from the start, and may well be a bad fit for the job for which she’s been nominated. But the bizarro-world contention that Gabbard is pro-war is another demonstration that AOC, so beloved by the progressives, is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
AOC may want to run for president. But how are you going to persuade a majority of Democrats to nominate you as their presidential nominee against JD Vance or some other Republican, if you can’t even persuade 40 percent of your House colleagues to make you the ranking member on the Oversight Committee?
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, Joe Biden exaggerates the number of hostages his administration has gotten released, and Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg are contemplating moves into governor’s mansions.