Progressives would do well not to pin their hopes and dreams on congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and not just because she’s the kind of person to mistake obvious political satire for a targeted smear job.
The rising Democratic star has shown she is ignorant on a great many issues, including her own campaign platform, which obviously is not a good look for a would-be standard bearer.
Consider, for example, how she responded this week when she was asked on “The Daily Show” to explain how she intends to pay for her Democratic Socialism-friendly policies, including her Medicare for All agenda.
“If people pay their fair share,” Ocasio-Cortez responded, “if corporations paid — if we reverse the tax bill, raised our corporate tax rate to 28 percent … if we do those two things and also close some of those loopholes, that’s $2 trillion right there. That’s $2 trillion in ten years.”
She should probably confer with Democratic Socialist-in-arms Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., whose most optimistic projections ($1.38 trillion per year) place the cost of Medicare for All at roughly $14 trillion over a ten-year period. Two trillion in ten years obviously puts Ocasio-Cortez a long way away from realistically financing a Medicare for All program, which is why she also proposes carbon taxes. How much she expects to raise from this tax she didn’t say.
Ocasio-Cortez capped her explanation with this embarrassing flub:
No, I don’t know.
The national defense budget was not increased by $700 billion last year. Rather, Congress approved $700 billion in total national defense spending for fiscal year 2018, as the Washington Examiner’s Katelyn Caralle noted.
It’s unclear whether Ocasio-Cortez spoke in reference to a 2017-2018 fiscal year increase or a 2018-2019 increase, but it doesn’t really matter. Neither period saw anything resembling a $700 billion budget increase. The FY18-FY19 budget increase was $16 billion.
It’d be one thing if this sort of sloppy and ignorant response were a one-off for Ocasio-Cortez, but she’s making a habit of this.
Earlier this month, she failed spectacularly in her response to a simple question about her position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Later, when she defended her disastrous performance, she laughed that the “alt-right” went “haywire” over her obvious ignorance on the issue. Because when I think of people who might be upset to hear a congressional candidate accuse the Israeli’s of occupying Palestinian territory, I, too, think of wannabe Nazis.
[More: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets party colors 100 percent wrong: WATCH]
Ocasio-Cortez will likely go on to defeat her Republican opponent, Anthony Pappas. She will likely flourish in New York’s 14th Congressional District. She may even have a long and promising career ahead of her in the House.
But progressives and their allies in the press may want to think twice about making such an abjectly ignorant person the face of their party. After all, one political party has done exactly that already, and I’m not sure it is going to work out for them in the long-run.
