The three astronauts of Apollo 11 escaped orbit only with the help of an army of engineers and scientist and technicians supporting them from terra firma. The cosmic achievement belongs as much to the astronauts as it does to the seamstress who fabricated the space suits, to the telescope crews who tracked the lunar module on its voyage, to the human calculators who did the math by hand. Author Catherine Thimmesh estimates that the great leap for mankind took 400,000 people working around the clock, to say nothing of the more than 530 million worldwide who watched and prayed.
On the other hand, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won an upset election. It took a lazy incumbent who wouldn’t campaign and something like two-dozen staffers with clipboards.
Somehow the millennial thinks its comparable to the moon landing.
“We’ve done what we thought was impossible,” Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said standing before the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Friday. “We went to the moon. We electrified the nation. We established civil rights. We enfranchised the country. We dug deep and we did it. We did it, when no one else thought that we could. That’s what we did when so many of us won an election this year. That’s what so many of us did.”
It should be noted that Ocasio-Cortez is refreshingly different than a lot of other politicians: young, charismatic, and optimistic. But she’s also the same as so many of them: Full of herself.
Ocasio-Cortez didn’t travel through space. She knocked off Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y. Even that wasn’t incredibly impressive. As Tim Carney noted in this space earlier this year, the district she won had fewer registered voters, roughly 353,000, than the rest of New York’s 27 districts. It was a “rotten borough” where few can vote and turnout is bound to be low.
The fresh-faced legislator understands how to make a splash to be sure. The millennial politician could learn some humility if she learned some history. Now that would truly be an achievement.
