Believe it or not, New York magazine’s forthcoming biography of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., compares her to Oprah Winfrey, John F. Kennedy and a prophet.
SO WHAT
The mainstream media really is this out of touch.
THE QUOTES
“Take Up Space: The Unprecedented AOC,” out Tuesday in hardcover, includes the following eight descriptions of Ocasio-Cortez:
1. FEMINIST 5.0: “To say she is a feminist is to understate the facts. Ocasio-Cortez is the first politician in history to live fully out loud while female. And the degradations of womanhood are personal to her.”
2. PROPHET: “On the day of the House vote, Ocasio-Cortez stood up in the chamber, again wearing all white. She looked like a prophet or a medium tapping a deep well of popular fury.”
3. MODEL: “Ocasio-Cortez would have been well aware of her impact on others. Her rhetoric could be confrontational and her politics countercultural, but her appearance conformed to society’s conventions. With her wide-apart eyes, arched brows, and tawny complexion, she could have modeled for a skin-care line — and, in fact, later capitalized on these assets by shooting a makeup tutorial for Vogue.”
4. THIRST TRAP: “AOC’s beauty not only works as a draw and a point of fixation; it also drives and exacerbates the hatred of her critics.”
5. “WUNDERKIND” OF COLOR: “As a young woman of color, she bears symbolic representational weight. She is, crucially, our first female wunderkind politician. Being first, hacking a path through thickets of bias and improbability and amped-up expectation … that’s a serious burden, with steep costs.”
6. EVERYWOMAN: “On this night, and again during another session assembling Ikea furniture in July, she shone a bright light on her own complicated, multifaceted self. In that video, Ocasio-Cortez looks thin. Her trousers sag. She is wearing her glasses, and her hair is up in a sloppy, just-about-to-wash-my face bun. She is wearing an old moto jacket and is sitting on the floor of her unfurnished apartment eating a bowl of popcorn and drinking a glass of wine. For dessert, she has a small pack of fruit snacks, sent to her in bulk by Roberts’ mother. She has no agenda, nothing in particular to get off her chest. It really is as if she were exhausted and wanting to talk. ‘I’m alone today,’ she says pointedly at the camera.”
7. OPRAH MEETS JFK: “She offered the reassuring warmth of Oprah; the fire-and-brimstone of Jonathan Edwards; the inspiration of John F. Kennedy; the intimacy of an FDR fireside chat. It was exhausting and reassuring and scary and comforting and extremely weird.”
8. INSURRECTIONIST: “But after three years in government, Ocasio-Cortez feels like a symbol of her own brand of insurgency, armed not with guns or confederate flags but an insistence on an entirely new approach to taking and using power. She, too, stormed the Capitol, as an elected member of Congress, bringing with her a new generation and its communicative habits and ideological perspectives.”
THE MEDIA
In a December 2021 study, researchers Alexander Furnas and Timothy LaPira found that “Democratic elites,” including “media pundits,” are a lot more progressives than even Democratic voters.
