“What’s funny about that is they assume my ambition is positional. They assume my ambition is a title or a seat. My ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, elected officials come and go, single payer healthcare is forever.”
So you want someone stupider, or at least better at seeming like they don’t think? I don’t think I take your meaning. Politicians are meant to be ‘calculating’, it’s a famously viperous workplace. I prefer one that thinks, and I don’t mind if you can tell when they’re doing it.
People should be less obsessed with optics, and more oriented towards what politicians do.
Maybe you just don’t follow politics much, but this critique of AOC isn’t new and we’ve been getting on her about it for years. Instincts matter in politics, a lot. Getting through a presidential primary is hard.
Just try and notice how your now defending the things that we specifically went out of our way to remove from our politics as progressives, because it’s coming from someone you identify with as being in your team.
Look, politicians don’t need cheerleaders. They need critics who can make them stronger, and if AOC does want to run, shes got some real issues that have been piling up shell need to address. And yes, this developed tendency to become more and more couched hlin her language, to become more and more politically calculating, it’s a real problem.
You’re not wrong. But I also think this point of view is perceived as a kind of auto-fellatio.
I think the negative reaction from us, the great unwashed, is due to people being so sick of political processes devolving into a meta-game that revolves primarily around the ability to think cynically and act tactically.
Meanwhile we’re out in the world, dealing with fallout from actions in that sphere that don’t make any kind of sense to the material reality of most people. People with rent to pay and groceries to afford and gas to pump.
Playing 4-D chess with the law of averages, playing the long game, and cornering other narcissistic kitten-eaters in saying and supporting things that, on their face, sound horrible… We’re just not sophisticated enough to understand it’s part of the process. We have problems that need solving right now and whatever tactical victory that moves an abstract chess piece forward doesn’t seem to do anything to remedy that.
I take your points, but we’re in the pre primary stage. If that’s not the time to be critical if the details, when do we get to be?
Also, it’s a political forum. It’s supposed to be a safe space for auto fellating in these topics. And maybe I misread or over read, but that auto fellating thing, it’s the critique I’m making of AOC too. She become too calculating, too much like Pelosi.
I also think AOC can fix these issues, but they were issues she had 2 years ago too. and they aren’t issues her cohort shares, they are unique to her.
Bernie takes hard interviews. Ilhan takes hard interviews. Khanna takes hard interviews.
AOC only goes for softball safe space media opportunities any more. And she’s weaker because if it. She can fix that issue and strengthen her game in this regard, but that’s on her.
Fair enough points, I can take them at face value. I just grew up very disillusioned with leftist infighting generally, so I tend to see any leftward scrutiny with a jaundiced eye. In a first past the post system, the side that is least critical of their candidate is going to mainly win I feel, and though I know the value of being critical too well, living in this system makes me of two minds about it.