Medicare for All would cost in excess of $3 trillion a year. One of its leading advocates once wore a $3,000 suit for a photo shoot. Loud voices in conservative media are making a bigger deal of the second number in their assessment of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—and don’t get them started on her gaffes. Their fixation on personal trivia is typical of the country’s minute-by-minute politics. But as the candidate herself said on the campaign trail, her supporters won’t “get everything [they want] tomorrow.” Her platform, “democratic socialism,” is a long game. The right is obsessed with the short one.
Ocasio-Cortez is riding a wave of hype, which itself is a measure of political power these days. Her social media following—particularly on Twitter and Instagram—is in the same league of 2020 presidential hopefuls like Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and (sure) Beto O’Rourke. She is leveraging it smartly, by live-streaming her orientation on Capitol Hill and fielding non-ideological questions while cooking. “The videos seem designed to be accessible to everyone,” the New York Times noted—with “everyone” including those new to politics and especially civics. That their guide is not just a Democrat, but a socialist-leaning millennial ascendant in the political scene, should be of some alarm to the right.
Not that it is. Her ideology is a secondary concern to her opponents. First are her finances: She was a campaign volunteer and bartender earning less than $30,000 not long ago, and now she is acclimating to new life circumstances in an exorbitant city. She worried on the record about how she would find lodgings in Washington before receiving her House salary in January. Ask some of the twentysomething newcomers to the capital, a couple of whom may someday work the front desk in Ocasio-Cortez’s office—they’ve been there.
Yet Fox News called her modest background into question, when it highlighted a disclosure with the House clerk showing that she possessed between $15,001 and $50,000 in a checking account. Her communications director said last week that the total has been drawn down to $7,000 since the document was filed in April. Her campaign attributed part of the previous, higher number to money handed down after her father passed away. But it’s all part of the narrative that Ocasio-Cortez is much better off than she has led the public to believe.
Other contributing evidence has been her wardrobe. She wore a pricey outfit for a photo shoot three months ago with Interview magazine, which the Times pegged at $3,500 total. After Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA dinged her for it, she indicated that the wardrobe was lent to the magazine for the story—a normal practice in the industry. Then there was the tweet from media reporter Eddie Scarry last week, about a different getup: “that jacket and coat don’t look like a girl who struggles.”
Even when the topic turns nominally to politics, her beliefs are a lower priority than her gaffes. In early October, she told a group of her supporters that regardless of the current election, they wouldn’t “get everything [they wanted] tomorrow—as much as I would love that. I would like to get inaugurated January 3, January 4 we’re signing health care, we’re signing this, we’re signing de-incarceration.” She was criticized for saying “inaugurated” when members of Congress are technically “sworn in.” She was misinterpreted as claiming that she personally had the power to sign bills into law. She did no such thing. It went viral anyway.
Last weekend, Ocasio-Cortez stumbled over her words during a live-streamed video and said that Democrats needed to take control of all “three chambers of Congress,” before trying to steady herself with all “three chambers of government,” which she identified as “the presidency, the Senate, and the House.” It was apparent what she meant: These are the three bodies of elected government at the federal level, of course, and they comprise two of the three branches. She didn’t use the word “branch,” herself. But viral she went once again. Schoolhouse Rock this is not.
Ocasio-Cortez is guilty of having made far more curious statements, like implying that the National Park Service is an example of socialism. And this leaves aside her favored government policies, which, as a bundle, are to the left of the Democratic mainstream. She favors canceling all college student-loan debt—which liberal-leaning New York Times columnist and budget expert David Leonhardt criticized as a handout to the upper-middle class. She supports creating a special House panel on climate change—which the incoming chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, New Jersey Democrat Frank Pallone, opposes. She wants a federal jobs guarantee with a minimum wage of $15 an hour—which liberal economists Dean Baker and Paul Krugman, among others, say is a bad idea. Her preferred health care system, Medicare for All, would be the largest transfer of costs onto the government in American history: the elimination of private health insurance and the creation of an estimated $30-trillion program over 10 years. The progressive Center for American Progress isn’t sold on the idea.
If there is this much disagreement between Ocasio-Cortez and the center-left, imagine how much room conservatives have to run. Instead they’re jumping in place, flailing their arms for attention. The reason why, as a representative op-ed from Vox argues, is that “[t]hey’re really worried about her policies.” The stronger explanation is less sophisticated. Just since Friday, the president of the United States has joked in public about Antonin Scalia’s sex life with his widow, called the incoming House Intelligence Committee chairman “Adam Schitt” (née Schiff), and continued his food fight with CNN reporter Jim Acosta.
These are not times for substance on the right, unless the substance in question is a designer fabric worn by the wrong person.
