Republicans did their best to make the most of the 90 seconds Joe Biden reserved for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during Night Two of the Democratic convention, warning voters the liberal congresswoman would have outsized influence in his administration, even if not at the gathering to celebrate his nomination.
Ocasio-Cortez seconded the nomination of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders during Tuesday evening’s virtual roll call that culminated in Biden’s nomination. But the congresswoman was otherwise given short shrift by the Biden campaign during the four-day convention celebrating the former vice president’s coronation. That did not stop the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign from casting the Democratic rising star as the true face of the party who would stamp out Biden’s promises of national unity.
“Joe Biden thinks AOC’s plans are ‘brilliant,’ and as her prime role as an advisor to his campaign and featured speaking slot show, she would have a prominent role in a Biden admin,” the RNC said in a press release issued after the congresswoman’s remarks. “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her radical agenda are the future of the Democrat Party.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks, though brief, provided plenty of fodder for the Republicans.
As she nominated Sanders, who won enough delegates in the primary to have his name placed in nomination at the convention, Ocasio-Cortez celebrated “a mass people’s movement working to establish 21st-century social, economic and human rights, including guaranteed healthcare, higher education, living wages, and labor rights for all people in the United States … striving to recognize wounds of racial injustice, colonization.”
As Biden prepares to accept the Democratic nomination formally on Thursday, he is enjoying a lead over President Trump in national polls and battleground state surveys — margins that have solidified amid the coronavirus and slumping economy. The former vice president has built that advantage, in part, on casting himself as a political unifier who has shunned the polarization and leftist policies advocated by the Democratic Party’s younger firebrands such as Ocasio-Cortez.
Biden has achieved that success by refusing to support policies such as government-run, single-payer healthcare. He also has an opportunity to build a winning Electoral College coalition because his campaign minimized Ocasio-Cortez’s convention exposure and sidelined attempts by her and other liberals to infuse the Democratic Party platform with left-wing policies on issues such as energy exploration and U.S. foreign policy toward Israel.
That willingness to play intraparty hardball is frustrating Republican attempts to paint Biden as a Trojan horse for Ocasio-Cortez and her aggressive, liberal colleagues. It could be why the RNC lumped Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a liberal pragmatist who could face a primary challenge from Ocasio-Cortez in the future, in the same “divisive” category as the congresswoman, as proof that Biden “wants to divide America.”
“Trump hasn’t figured out a way to brand Biden in the same way he did Hillary Clinton,” a Republican strategist said, referring to the president’s very effective “Crooked Hillary” moniker from the 2016 campaign.
Some Republicans believe the best way to convince swing voters in battleground states of Ocasio-Cortez’s looming control over a Biden White House is to press the message that the nominee is in cognitive decline and will not have the fortitude, or awareness, to push back on liberal demands for aggressive change.
“It goes hand in glove with the charge that, at this stage in his career, Joe Biden isn’t capable of standing up to the leftists in his own party,” a Republican insider said. “They have to stay focused on that and drive every AOC idea through that portal.”
