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NY Times, Sept. 18, 2019
How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Learned to Play by Washington’s Rules
By Catie Edmondson
WASHINGTON — Less than two weeks after being sworn in last year,
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young progressive star fresh
off an upset of one of the top Democratic leaders in the House, put her
fellow Democrats on notice that she would soon be coming for them, too.
Appearing in a promotional video for Justice Democrats, the insurgent
liberal group dedicated to unseating entrenched Democratic lawmakers
that helped sweep Ms. Ocasio-Cortez to power, the Bronx firebrand urged
her supporters to recruit candidates to run against her new colleagues.
She was flanked by the group’s three co-founders, two of whom had just
taken top jobs in her office. There were even whispers that she might
try to oust Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, a rising star
regarded by many Democrats as a future speaker of the House.
But after nearly nine months, with her eyes now wide open to the
downsides of her revolutionary reputation and social media fame, Ms.
Ocasio-Cortez has tempered her brash, institution-be-damned style with
something different: a careful political calculus that adheres more
closely to the unwritten rules of Washington she once disdained.
“I think I have more of a context of what it takes to do this job and
survive on a day-to-day basis in a culture that is inherently hostile to
people like me,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview.
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Gone from her Washington office are her original chief of staff and her
communications director, two Justice Democrats co-founders who were
intent on waging their divisive brand of politics from their offices on
Capitol Hill. No longer an unabashed ambassador of the combative group,
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has carefully managed her involvement with it.
And she never did go after Mr. Jeffries, now the chairman of the House
Democratic Caucus, the same position held by former Representative
Joseph Crowley last year when Ms. Ocasio-Cortez set her sights on
ousting him. Instead, on Tuesday she announced that her first
endorsement of a primary challenger to an incumbent Democrat would be
Marie Newman, who is making a second run at ousting Representative
Daniel Lipinski of Illinois, a conservative-leaning Democrat who is
regarded by many of his colleagues as something of an outlier because of
his opposition to abortion rights and his vote against the Affordable
Care Act. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is not the only Democrat to break with Mr.
Lipinski and support Ms. Newman, nor is she the first.
Deciding on the endorsement, she said, was in part a product of having
learned to balance her twin roles as a dissident and a member of Congress.
“It’s not just about being an activist,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “It
forces you to grow. So it doesn’t mean you don’t endorse activists, but
it also requires an assessment for a capacity of growth and how you
navigate a space like this.”
When she first arrived on Capitol Hill, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and her team
made it clear they planned to use their perch inside Congress as a
platform for their divisive, outsider brand of politics. On her first
day of orientation, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez joined protesters camped outside
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office agitating for the Green New Deal.
“It could have made people mad, they could have put me on the dog
walking committee,” she joked later that week on a Justice Democrats
conference call promoting the organization’s candidate recruitment
campaign. “They still might.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez may have meant it as an offhand quip, but her comment
underscored a reality on Capitol Hill that she and her team were slow to
fully appreciate: the extent to which power and the ability to get
things done in the House were dependent on personal relationships and
respect for the hierarchy. The first-term congresswoman enjoys rich
public support outside the halls of Congress, particularly on the social
media platforms where progressive activism thrives. But the approach
that she and her cohorts champion — pulling the institution to the left
in part by threatening the careers of any Democrat who fail to embrace
their ideas — quickly alienated many of her colleagues, and has made it
difficult for her to get anything done.
And in private conversations, many of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s Democratic
colleagues routinely complain that in her zeal to build her social media
celebrity and political brand, the first-term congresswoman is too quick
to cast aspersions on her fellow lawmakers, painting them as apologists
for the status quo.
“In many ways, I feel like I walk around with a scarlet letter, because
many members who just have any primary, whether I know about it or not,
tend to project that onto me,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview.
“In many ways, I feel like I walk through that body as a symbol of
someone who should not be there and a threat to the way power is organized.”
She said she has gone through a “loss of innocence and naïveté,”
realizing that it was impossible to separate the legislative work of
serving in Congress with the politics of re-election campaigns.
“They are frankly much closer in that dynamic and much closer in
overlapping than a lot of people tend to realize,” she said.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has cut back on her appearances on behalf of Justice
Democrats and has begun bolstering her fellow incumbent freshmen
lawmakers, like Representative Joe Neguse of Colorado, a member of
Democratic leadership whom she will support at a fund-raiser in Boulder
this week. In April, she rallied around some of her colleagues who
flipped districts President Trump won in 2016, encouraging her Twitter
followers to donate to their campaigns. She diligently reached out to
the so-called majority-makers on her committees — the centrist freshmen
who flipped Republican-leaning seats — to win them over.
Her aides, however, continued to carry the Justice Democrats flag
without restraint, tweeting out their support when the group challenged
incumbents, to the dismay of Democratic aides and lawmakers. A flash
point came in July when Saikat Chakrabarti, then her chief of staff,
ignited a firestorm by accusing centrist Democrats of enabling “a racist
system” after they blocked an effort to defund immigration enforcement
as part of an emergency border aid package. In a post on Twitter, he
compared them to “new Southern Democrats,” a reference to
segregationists. It was a remarkable breach of protocol for an unelected
aide.
Mr. Jeffries used the House Democrats’ official Twitter account to
deliver a biting warning shot in a now-deleted tweet that singled out
the chief of staff. Two weeks later, Mr. Chakrabarti announced he would
leave the office entirely. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s new chief, Ariel Eckblad,
a former aide to Senator Kamala Harris of California, is well-versed in
the workings of Capitol Hill and is widely seen as a sober-minded
replacement. Corbin Trent, who had been handling communications for both
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign and her congressional office, a highly
unusual arrangement, has returned to the political side.
The rift was an escalation of a feud that began days earlier when
Maureen Dowd, The New York Times columnist, asked Ms. Pelosi about the
fury from the Bronx Democrat and three other progressive freshmen over
the border aid package. The speaker noted that the group had failed to
persuade any other Democrats to join them in voting against the House’s
version of the bill.
“All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world,”
Ms. Pelosi said then. “But they didn’t have any following. They’re four
people, and that’s how many votes they got.”
“In many ways, I feel like I walk through that body as a symbol of
someone who should not be there and a threat to the way power is
organized,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said.CreditErin Schaff/The New York Times
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez fired back by saying that it was she and the
progressive activists who revere her, not Ms. Pelosi, who wielded the
real power in the party, and later complained that the speaker was
“singling out of newly elected women of color.” Mr. Chakrabarti followed
up with a tweet questioning the speaker’s leadership.
The break ultimately led to a private, one-on-one meeting with Ms.
Pelosi in the speaker’s Capitol office last month, where Ms.
Ocasio-Cortez appeared ready to call a truce, telling reporters, “I
think the speaker respects the fact that we’re coming together as a
party and a community.”
Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for Justice Democrats, said Ms.
Ocasio-Cortez’s challenge came from the fact that she leads a movement
“bigger than one district and Washington.”
“Navigating her role as a legislator and a movement maker is basically
what her career is about,” Mr. Shahid said in an interview. “We’ll
continue to have that theory of change with one foot in D.C. and one
foot in the movement. It’s really hard to do that.”
For Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, the process continues to be bumpy. Even with Ms.
Eckblad at the helm, her office still operates in some ways more like an
upstart campaign on a shoestring than a congressional office. A
replacement for Mr. Trent has yet to be hired, and another aide who
routinely rankles rank-and-file aides and lawmakers with combative
comments — like when he claimed his fellow congressional aides were
elitist “careerists” — is still in place.
And while it is not clear how many more Justice Democrats Ms.
Ocasio-Cortez will endorse, she said she was still “very wedded” to the
insurgent theory of change that propelled her to Congress.
“Change by nature takes friction,” she said. “It’s just a question of
how we move through it.
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