Three weeks into her turn in the national spotlight, some of the shine is coming off Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young democratic socialist activist with a megawatt smile whose shocking primary upset of heavyweight congressman Joe Crowley upended the Democratic Party in New York. Over the past few days, the former bartender and organizer has struggled to articulate a coherent position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, walking back earlier references to an Israeli “occupation” of Palestine and demurring that she is “not the expert on geopolitics on this issue.” This wavering has provoked winces from her far-left backers and glee among Republicans all too happy to portray Ocasio-Cortez both as in over her head and as a symbol of the radicalism of the modern Democratic party.
It has also reinvigorated the dark mutterings of that party’s establishment forces, still smarting from Crowley’s embarrassing June loss. It started with a couple brief flare-ups online: Ocasio-Cortez accusing Crowley of mounting a third-party challenge against her—due to a quirk of New York election law, Crowley will still appear on the general election ballot—and Crowley scolding her for fostering party disunity. Now, former senator Joe Lieberman has waded into the conflict in a column published in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday evening, in which he encouraged Crowley not only to remain on the ballot, but to campaign and try to win.
“Because the policies Ms. Ocasio-Cortez advocates are so far from the mainstream, her election in November would make it harder for Congress to stop fighting and start fixing problems,” Liberman wrote. “Nancy Pelosi has tried to put distance between Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and House Democrats… She knows that if Democrats are to regain a majority, it will be by winning swing districts with sensible, mainstream candidates. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is making that task harder across America.”
Lieberman is correct, of course, that Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist policy leanings are for now outside the mainstream of American politics, and that a Democratic party remade in her image would struggle to compete with Republicans nationally. It is also true that Ocasio-Cortez makes a bad party figurehead: Many would call her lack of political polish and straight-shooting tone virtues, but they also leave her vulnerable to frequent gaffes. (Hmmm, where have we seen this before?) There’s a reason most politicians try to stick to boring, smiley platitudes in interviews, and it’s not because voters are crazy about it.
But Lieberman is laughably wrong to think that what ailed Crowley’s Democratic Party in New York is, in his memorable phrase, “a small percentage of primary votes.” He scolds the voters of the 14th District for picking a candidate who may make it more difficult for Democrats to win races in, say, Nebraska. But who says the voters of the 14th should care?
Ocasio-Cortez smashed Joe Crowley by double digits, and it wasn’t because the Bronx is a hotbed of Communist activity. She hit her opponent early and often on specific local issues, calling him out for sending his kids to school in D.C. rather than his own district, attacking his purported conflict of interest in running for re-election while serving as chairman of the Queens County Democratic Party, accusing him of putting the interests of real-estate developers above those the working-class voters in his district. The issue of how a block of houses on 82nd Street should be rezoned doesn’t matter much nationally, but it apparently mattered to the people of the 14th. All these attacks caught Crowley completely flat-footed. Why are we focusing on this, he all but said, when our real focus should be on defeating Donald Trump?
It was in this context that Ocasio-Cortez’s radical policy message resonated and that Crowley’s more pragmatic stances rang hollow. What Crowley learned—what Lieberman apparently has not learned yet—is that what happens in voters’ backyards can affect their choices just as powerfully as what they detect happening far off in D.C. It’s a message establishment types in both parties should take to heart, or resign themselves to a life of retrospectively scolding voters for many elections to come.
