AOC's Warning for Democrats: 'We're in Trouble' [View all]

[brooklynite]

The Atlantic

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinks President Biden got played by Senator Joe Manchin — and that the president’s nostalgia for a bygone era of backroom dealmaking could prove disastrous for Democrats in the midterms.

Sitting in her campaign office, she says this matter-of-factly, as if bucking the explicit orders of her party’s leaders — up to and including the president of the United States — is not that big of a deal. But it is.

“As a younger member of Congress, the first vote I ever cast was for Barack Obama, who was called a socialist and all of this stuff. All of this rhetoric that we see today has been the political reality my entire life. And so I never felt a nostalgia for something that never existed in my lifetime,” she told me. “I feel like our politics has fundamentally changed — whether it’s for better or for worse is for people’s determination — but I was never under the illusion that we can bring Manchin along.”

Ocasio-Cortez was one one of only six Democrats (including Representative Jamaal Bowman of the Bronx) — to vote against Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill last November. She reasoned — correctly, it turned out — that severing the infrastructure spending from Biden’s much larger Build Back Better proposal would allow the bigger bill to be killed, in the closely divided Senate, by the defection of two conservative Democratic senators, Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.