Just after I published my May 4, 2024, blog posting that reflected on the political accomplishments of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, popularly known as "AOC," The New York Times ran an opinion piece by Gaby Del Valle, which addressed the same topic.
In the hardcopy version, Del Valle's column was published under the following headline: "Meet Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Veteran Political Operator," a title that I didn't much like, to tell you the truth. Online, the column is more simply presented: "The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez You Don’t Know." Del Valle's thoughts on AOC appeared in the Sunday, May 5, 2024, edition of The Times.
My point, in my earlier blog posting, was that Ocasio-Cortez got elected in her Congressional District, and stirred such positive feelings across the country, because she did what all our elected officials are supposed to do. She "represented" the people who elected her, and that is, in fact, what our elected officials are supposed to do. They are supposed to be "representatives."
What Del Valle celebrates in her article is, really, the same thing I was trying to highlight, though the headline that called Ocasio-Cortez a "Veteran Political Operator" could have been misleading, and that is why it struck me as "wrong," somehow. AOC has been a breath of fresh air in our politics because she has made her focus not going along with "leadership," or advancing a partisan agenda, the kind of activities associated with those "veteran political operators" we generally love to hate, but by actually trying to do what the people she represents want her to do. Del Valle is suggesting that Ocasio-Cortez is, actually, helping to change our national politics, since we have, in many ways, actually lost sight of how "representative" self-government is supposed to work.
I encourage those reading this blog posting to click this link, to see if The New York Times' paywall will let you read the entirety of Del Valle's column. If you're blocked, though, here are the concluding paragraphs, which give you a pretty good idea of what Del Valle has to say:
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez [is] the Democratic Party’s most charismatic politician since Barack Obama and its most ardent populist since Bernie Sanders. Crucially, she can offer voters something more substantial than a hollow rebuke of Trumpism. Last month, when the journalist Mehdi Hasan asked her how she’d respond to “a young progressive or Arab American who says to you, ‘I just can’t vote for Biden again after what he’s enabled in Gaza,’” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said a vote for Mr. Biden didn’t necessarily mean an endorsement of all his policies. “Even in places of stark disagreement, I would rather be organizing under the conditions of Biden as an opponent on an issue than Trump,” she said. It was a shrewd political maneuver, designed to distance herself from Democrats who support Israel unconditionally, while meeting voters — some of whom have lost family members in Gaza — where they are. She was, in effect, acknowledging their pain and attempting to channel their righteous anger into a political movement.
There are, of course, limits to this strategy. Some on the left see Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Mr. Biden as a betrayal of progressive values, particularly in the wake of the climbing death toll in Gaza. The moderate Republicans who turned out for Mr. Biden in 2020 might shrink from a Democratic Party led by someone they consider an outspoken progressive. But for every moderate or leftist voter lost with a strategy like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s, the Democratic Party may be able to win someone new — from the pool of disillusioned Americans who feel shut out of the political process....
If she ever runs for higher office, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez might be able to galvanize voters of color who, despite leaning left, do not regularly show up at the polls. She could contrast her commitment to issues that matter to a large number of voters, like raising the minimum wage and protecting reproductive rights, with Republicans’ endless culture wars. And she could frame herself as one of the few Democrats who opposed unconditionally spending billions on an unpopular war while Americans struggled to afford groceries and gas.
She could take the message that catapulted her into Congress — as a tireless champion of the underclass — to the national level. In some ways, she already has. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez hit the picket line with striking United Auto Workers members in Missouri and requested a hearing on the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, nearly a year before Mr. Biden visited the community. These are constituencies the Democratic Party has been losing, perhaps because they’ve written them off as Republican voters, if they bother to vote at all. But in the same way Ms. Ocasio-Cortez isn’t afraid to collaborate with conservatives when it helps her policy agenda, she has shown up for people whom other Democrats have abandoned — and voters may remember that when they cast a ballot in 2028 (emphasis added).
There are several ways for our politics to go bad, undermining genuine representative government. Here, perhaps, is a top three list - three ways that our representative government can end up failing us: (1) Elected representatives can start using their positions for personal advantage, meaning, almost certainly, that they will tailor their advocacy, and their votes, to what wealthy special interests want, instead of focusing on what the people who elected them want; (2) Elected representatives can also become mere cogs in a "partisan" machine, again insuring that monied interests count more for them than the people who elected them; (3) Finally, elected representatives can stop trying to "make a deal," and to find workable compromises that a majority of elected representatives might be able to agree to, but seek to eliminate the opposition, as opposed to achieving their policy goals by finding policies and programs that can appeal across the multitude of differences within our society.
"Representing" the people who put you in office, and for whom you act, is how elected officials make our system of representative government work. When it's not working, then claims by aspiring "dictators," who claim that "I, alone, can fix it," become more credible.
AOC is clearly one of those elected officials who is trying to make the system work the way it's supposed to. The fact that I initially bridled at the headline calling her a "veteran political operator" is a testimony, as I think about it, that there aren't nearly enough elected officials taking her approach. In fact, AOC is just the kind of "veteran political operator" we need in government!
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