Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is surprisingly Trump-like

What do President Donald Trump and Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have in common? For starters, they both have a gift for driving their critics crazy.

Add Ocasio-Cortez Derangement Syndrome, the point at which rage against a political figure causes one to lose all sense of reason, to the list of other “syndromes” that have spread like Ebola in the polarized political conversations of the past couple of decades, mostly in response to Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump.

At 29, New York Democrat OcasioCortez is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. She also generated excitement in the political media by unseating seasoned 10-year incumbent Democrat Rep. Joe Crowley in the primary, then won the seat in the midterms.

A former Bronx bartender, self-avowed Democratic Socialist and an organizer for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, Ocasio-Cortez immediately became a symbol among Democrats of where the party needs to go — young, female, Hispanic — and conservative commentators have made a pincushion out of her ever since.

That mainly has been because of her being green, which describes not only her environmental positions but also her lack of experience in the national news spotlight.

After she misspoke in one online video interview, for example, saying that Democrats need to win all “three chambers of Congress” in 2020, she immediately corrected herself to say, “all three chambers of government: the presidency, the Senate and the House,” which still didn’t get it quite right.

“Yikes,” tweeted Sarah Palin to her millions of followers. (The tweet was immediately rebuked by a flood of responses that recalled many Palin gaffes, including the former GOP vice presidential candidate’s use of the nonexistent word “refudiate” so many times that the Oxford American Dictionary finally gave in and added it.)

But Ocasio-Cortez has shown that she knows how to generate entertaining and informative social media messages to connect with her followers. During the orientation week for congressional freshmen, she took her Instagram viewers along on, among other events, a walking tour her new Capitol Hill environs and a how-to on her black bean recipe.

As a result, she demonstrated the value of social media by showing the world that she wasn’t all that easy to hate. Even the conservative blog RedState, which declared in one recent headline that “Mocking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Not Only Fun But It Is The Right Thing To Do,” actually complimented her use of live video captions so that the hearing impaired could follow along.

But she also arrived on Capitol Hill with the same sort of norm-busting attitude with which Trump challenged his own party’s establishment. She shocked Washington Beltway culture by joining a protest pushing for a “Green New Deal” at Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s office while Pelosi is campaigning to be returned to speaker of the House by the new Democratic majority.

Pelosi deserves to be speaker as an architect of the Affordable Care Act that helped lead to her party’s recent midterm success. Democrats used its very popular patient protections to win seats and take control of the House. She also has a formidable reputation these days as the body’s best Democratic fundraiser and vote counter.

But she also represents the long-standing strategy of campaigning to the political center to peel off as many swing voters as possible to win elections. Trump shattered that tradition by continuing to campaign almost exclusively to his conservative base.

Ocasio-Cortez, who worked for Vermont Sen. Sanders’ 2016 Democratic presidential campaign, counts herself with the new generation of Democrats who put more importance on firing up the party’s left-wing base than wooing swing voters.

Yet she brought relief to many when she announced support for Pelosi on her social media platform. “Right now, out of the field,” she said, “I would say that she is the most progressive candidate.”

Elsewhere, other restless Pelosi critics on the Democratic side appeared to be folding one by one after receiving reassurances from Pelosi that she would work for their priorities. Trump, we are again reminded, is hardly the first transactional politician to come to Washington. Pelosi knows how to cut deals too.

What Trump’s election and OcasioCortez’s popularity with young progressives show us is how unimportant Washington’s political norms appear to be at this moment in history. When people are desperate for change in their present conditions, the norms don’t matter all that much.

But we also see a vast impatience on both political sides with a continuation of business as usual by an aging establishment. The challenge for Democrats is in how well they manage to reconcile that impatience in the approaching 2020 presidential race without snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory.