02 July 2018 - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Beats Top-ranking Congressman in Congressional Primary
Make Way for Young Democratic Leaders
The Editorial Board (The New York Times, 30/06/2018)
Whatever its larger meaning or impact, Representative Joseph Crowley’s stunning loss to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in last Tuesday’s primary election already has set off one tremor within the Democratic Party: It has thrown House leadership into chaos.
Mr. Crowley is chairman of the Democratic caucus, making him the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House. He also was the heir apparent to the minority leader, Nancy Pelosi. Ms. Pelosi, now 78, has herded Democratic cats for nearly 16 years and has made clear her desire to stay put if the party wins back the majority in November. But she’s expected to face a serious challenge to her rule after the election, whether or not the party reclaims the majority. A swelling segment of Ms. Pelosi’s caucus — especially younger lawmakers — feel it is time for a change, and at least 20 Democratic candidates have pledged not to support her for leader if they win their races.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the intersectional remix of Latino roots and socialist politics
Ed Morales (The Washington Post, 29/06/2018)
“Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office,” began the now-legendary campaign ad for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, released just four weeks ago. What followed was a powerful, viral video, called “The Courage to Change,” that addressed racial and gender identity and meshed seamlessly with one about her social class position. “I wasn’t born to a wealthy or powerful family — mother from Puerto Rico, dad from the South Bronx. I was born in a place where your Zip code determines your destiny.”
Ocasio-Cortez, whose parents moved from working-class Parkchester in the Bronx to Yorktown Heights in middle-class Westchester County, N.Y., for better schools, won second place in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, got a degree at Boston University in economics and international relations, and after years of channeling her millennial political fever, pulled off the biggest political upset of the year, trouncing Joseph Crowley, the King of Queens, running as a democratic socialist but on the Democratic Party ticket, and bent on shutting down the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement as cable news flashed images of crying children separated from their parents at the U.S. border with Mexico.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Legacy of the Bernie Sanders Movement
Benjamin Wallace-Wells (The New Yorker, 27/06/2018)
Twenty-seven thousand people cast votes on Tuesday in the Democratic primary in New York’s Fourteenth Congressional District, and most of them voted for a twenty-eight-year-old left-wing political newcomer named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Just nine months ago, Ocasio-Cortez had been tending bar at a Mexican restaurant near Union Square. Her incumbent opponent, the longtime congressman Joseph Crowley, has represented the area since Ocasio-Cortez was in elementary school, and was, until now, widely seen as a future contender to become House Speaker.
Last month, Crowley’s victory looked so assured that he sent a surrogate to a debate with Ocasio-Cortez rather than attend himself. Crowley had been handpicked for his seat in Congress years ago by Thomas Manton, the last great boss of the Queens Democratic machine. But the Fourteenth District—a collection of mostly working-class neighborhoods straddling Queens and the Bronx—is now half Hispanic and just a fifth white. Crowley’s loss to the daughter of working-class Puerto Ricans confirmed a change in outer-borough political power that has both been inevitable and long delayed. But it was more than that, too. During her campaign, Ocasio-Cortez called for Congress to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, pledged her support for a federal jobs guarantee and Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-all program, called for aggressive antitrust regulation that would break up the tech giants, and ran with the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America. For a while this spring, the midterms looked increasingly predictable and contained: it would be a partisan fight between Donald Trump and his opponents, waged in a fixed number of swing districts. Ocasio-Cortez’s victory suggests that the map may be larger than that.
Ocasio-Cortez on why she’s a Democratic Socialist
Mark Moore (The New York Post, 01/07/2018)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the former waitress who defeated long odds to knock off Queens Rep. Joe Crowley in a stunning primary election victory last week, said being a Democratic Socialist is just “part of what I am.”
“It’s part of what I am. It’s not all of what I am. And that’s a very important distinction,” she said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. “I’m an educator, I’m an organizer, and I believe that what we’re really seeing is just a move for health care, housing and education in the United States.”