More smackdowns, please
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) brought some heat to her stumping in Nevada for Joe Biden this week. This, this is what I’m talking about. Behold:
But what little coverage AOC’s appearance drew missed the fire. Las Vegas Sun:
“For women and gender diverse people, it is life and death,” said Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., during a discussion about reproductive rights Thursday in Las Vegas. Ocasio-Cortez later appeared in downtown Las Vegas for a rally to support Biden’s reelection campaign. “It’s not hyperbole. It’s reality.”
And Axios? Axios felt the need to both-sides Democrats, placing more emphasis on dissension in the ranks than on her message: AOC holds first 2024 rally for Biden as progressives rage over Gaza.
This is what Democrats fight in convincing progressive voices and younger voters that their vote is their voice, that their vote is their power, that their power matters, and that Democrats have their backs. If there is media bias, it is against progressives’ most powerful voices. Democrats themselves are uneasy about putting up a public fight. Several members of Nevada’s mostly Democrat Congressional delegation were absent fron the event.
“A Biden-Harris campaign spokeswoman acknowledged the absences and said ‘scheduling’ issues were to blame,” the New York Post reported.
This week, Rep. Jaime Raskin (D) of Maryland urged readers of The New Republic not to count out “self-deprecating” liberals. Don’t be fooled by their “essential modesty.” Except reticence in this environment is a liability.
“[B]attle-hardened post-Trump liberals have proved tough as nails and ready to fight all necessary battles for freedom and democracy in these days of resurgent authoritarianism,” Raskin wrote:
Ordinarily a live-and-let-live philosophy, liberalism fights hard when it’s up against the ropes. And here we are—in the fight of our lives ever since Florida Man came down the escalator to run a new nationwide grift. The good news is that the post–Donald Trump networks of liberals and progressives are ready for battle, strategically focused, and plentiful in the land.
“Tough as nails and ready to fight.” Is that Democrats’ secret weapon? The problem is few voters on the sidelines see a polite magazine essay as “fighting.” As Dr. Strangelove once said, “Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn’t you tell the world, EH?”
Dispirited and disengaged voters want to see Democrats fighting for them, as Anat Shenker-Osorio found in recent focus groups:
If my colleagues and I took a shot everytime someone in these groups decried the Democrats as doing nothing on the fascism front, we’d have cirrhosis.
As one disaffected Democratic white woman from Arizona said in April, “I don’t think any of them care really. Even if Democrats won the House, the Senate, the presidency, they’ve had it before — didn’t do anything then.”
Again,
A laundry list of accomplishments doesn’t lodge in people’s brains the way a good story with heroes and villains does. Democrats aren’t telling one. It’s not voters’ fault that they don’t know what they don’t know. It’s a challenge Democrats are struggling to meet. And the kitchen table? The kitchen table is on fire.
AOC preaches as though the table is on fire. More of that, please.
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