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Everyone but Barack Hussein Obama seems to have gotten the message: The future of the Democratic Party is not a conventional, pro-abortion, pro-homosexual welfare statist. It’s a young woman of color and an out-of-the-closet democratic socialist unafraid, or perhaps unaware, that socialism is responsible not just for the current mess in Venezuela, but in its less charitable incarnations, upward of 100 million dead in the 20th century.
That woman is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Obama left her off his recent endorsement list of 81 Democratic candidates.
The Endorsements
Obama, still popular among Democrats, released his list of candidates on Twitter yesterday: “Today I’m proud to endorse such a wide and impressive array of Democratic candidates — leaders as diverse, patriotic, and big-hearted as the America they’re running to represent.”
“I’m confident that, together, they’ll strengthen this country we love by restoring opportunity, repairing our alliances and standing in the world, and upholding our fundamental commitment to justice, fairness, responsibility, and the rule of law. But first, they need our votes,” the wealthy “man of the people” said.
Mediaite reported that Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign has not responded to the snub.
Not that it matters. She’s going to be New York’s representative from the state’s 14th district. A Republican can’t win. Which means, as far she’s concerned, Obama can keep his endorsement, even if she won’t say it.
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Changing Party
But as The New American has reported, ideology isn’t the only explanation for the Democratic Party’s lurch to the left.
A Rasmussen poll showed that many Democrats think their party is too old and too white, given who is on the list of possible presidential candidates for 2020: a bevy of candidates two or three steps away from assisted living.
Younger Hispanics and blacks are taking aim at the old whites: Ocasio-Cortez is one of them, as are Representative Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.) and California State Senator Kevin de León, who took the state party’s endorsement away from longtime Senator Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein, who is 85, will win the election against de León, who placed in the state’s top-two primary system that keeps Republicans from even appearing on a statewide ballot.
Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, of New Jersey and California, are possible presidential candidates.
Meanwhile, as TNA reported, Ocasio-Cortez is backing three young black women against older incumbents, two of whom are white men, and one black.
“Lightning in a Bottle”
Now, the political reporters say, Ocasio-Cortez is radicalizing the party nationwide. In Massachusetts, for instance, she has energized support for Ayanna Pressley, who seeks to replace U.S. Representative Michael Capuano, a 66-year-old white reliably leftist Democrat.
Everyone associated with the Pressley campaign, from candidate down to volunteers, said the Ocasio-Cortez win was a key moment for the race…. What followed was a bump in donations, social media followers and also the belief that the upset was actually possible. Capuano has more money on hand than Pressley, but she’s raised over $700,000, a smaller gap than Ocasio-Cortez faced with Crowley. Polling in primaries is usually limited and questionable in its accuracy, but one survey released on July 23 had Capuano up 38-29, with a third of the sample undecided.
Capuano votes the right way on everything — if you’re a leftist. Indeed, he’s much further left than Crowley, whom Ocasio-Cortez defeated. “While Crowley was seen as part of a calcified and centrist Democratic House leadership by the left wing of the party,” Yahoo observed, “progressive Democrats would find little to criticize in Capuano’s record”:
He has supported Medicare for all since 2005, voted against both the Iraq War and creation of ICE, has a 100 percent score from Planned Parenthood and the endorsement of Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights icon from Georgia. Capuano also pushed back against the Obama White House as part of a lawsuit over a missile strike on Libya.
That might not matter, because he is facing a young black woman, the first elected to Boston City Council in 2009.
As the San Francisco Chronicle says, Ocasio-Cortez “shows SF liberals what the future looks like.”
“What’s so compelling is that how unapologetic she is about progressive politics,” a top progressive rainmaker told the Chronicle.
But there’s more to it than that, the Chronicle noted:
“She looks like us, she talks like us and she represents the values that we have,” said Rigoberto Marquez, an Oakland resident whose parents immigrated to the U.S. “You don’t see many people like that who are authentic like she is.”…
A lot of politicians, particularly those reared in the YouTube generation, talk about sounding authentic. But few can actually do it with the … authenticity … of Ocasio-Cortez. Her mother was born in Puerto Rico, and Ocasio-Cortez speaks with the authority of someone whose life resonates with people of color, who make up 70 percent of her district.
Message: The party is moving harder left, and young “persons of color” are the movers.
Photo: AP Images
