The US political scene going into 2020: AOC

The notion that Hill denizens are brilliant 4-D chess players is pure myth, the product of too many press hagiographies of the Game Change variety and too many Hollywood fantasies like House of Cards and West Wing.

The average American politician would lose at checkers to a zoo gorilla. They’re usually in office for one reason: someone with money sent them there, often to vote yes on a key appropriation bill or two. On the other 364 days of the year, their job is to shut their yaps and approximate gravitas anytime they’re in range of C-SPAN cameras.

  Matt Taibbi

This could be why we're in the dire straits we find ourselves in 2018.

[What] the subject elected officials have the most trouble staying away from is each other. We’ve seen this a lot in recent weeks with the ongoing freakout over newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Lest anyone think any of the above applies to “AOC,” who’s also had a lot to say since arriving in Washington, remember: she won in spite of the party and big donors, not because of them.

That doesn’t make anything she says inherently more or less correct. But it changes the dynamic a bit. All of AOC’s supporters sent her to Washington precisely to make noise. [...] She is there to be a pain in the ass, and it’s working.

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The Beltway press mostly can’t stand her. A common theme is that, as a self-proclaimed socialist, she should be roaming the halls of Rayburn and Cannon in rags or a barrel.

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The mortification on the Republican side has come more from media figures than actual elected officials. [...] A group of GOP House members booed her on the floor, to which she replied, “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas.”

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[T]he real problem most of Washington has with “AOC”: her self-generated popularity and large social media presence means she doesn’t need to ask anyone’s permission to say anything.

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[S]he almost certainly gains popularity every time one of those nitwits takes a swipe at her.

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Which brings us to elected Democrats, who if anything have been most demonstrative in their AOC freakout. We had Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) saying, “We don’t need your sniping in our Democratic caucus.” Recently ousted Sen. Claire McCaskill expressed alarm that she’s “the thing” and a “bright shiny new object.”

This is in addition to the litany of anonymous complaints from fellow caucus members, some of whom felt she jumped the line in an attempt to get a Ways and Means committee assignment. There were whispers she did this through some online-pressure sorcery she alone could avail herself of thanks to her massive Twitter following (nearly every news story about Ocasio-Cortez mentions her 2.47 million Twitter followers).

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“She needs to decide: Does she want to be an effective legislator or just continue being a Twitter star?” said another Democrat.

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All of which brings us back to the issue of Washington’s would-be 4-D chess players.

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They all think the pronouncements of their own party leaders, and donors, and high-profile commentators at the Times and the Post or CNN, have extraordinary importance. They think this for the obvious reason that most of them owe their political careers to such people.

Ocasio-Cortez does not.

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I have no idea if Ocasio-Cortez will or will not end up being a great politician. But it’s abundantly clear that her mere presence is unmasking many, if not most, of the worst and most tired Shibboleths of the capital.

Moreover, she’s laying bare the long-concealed fact that many of their core policies are wildly unpopular, and would be overturned in a heartbeat if we could somehow put them all to direct national referendum.

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Take the tax proposal offered by Ocasio-Cortez, which would ding the top bracket for 70 percent taxes on all income above $10 million.

The idea inspired howls of outrage, with wrongest-human-in-history Alan Greenspan peeking out of his crypt to call it a “terrible idea,” Wisconsin’s ex-somebody Walker saying a 5th grader would know it was “unfair,” and human anti-weathervane Harry Reid saying “you have to be careful” because voters don’t want “radical change quickly.”

Except polls show the exact opposite. Almost everyone wants to soak the rich. A joint survey by The Hill and Harris X showed 71 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of Independents, and even 45 percent of Republicans endorse the Ocasio-Cortez plan.

Is it feasible? It turns out it might very well be, as even Paul Krugman, who admits AOC’s rise makes him “uneasy,” said in a recent column. He noted the head of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers estimated the top rate should be even higher, perhaps even 80 percent.

After WWII, it was higher than that - up to 94% for many years.

Now we see: once a popular, media-savvy politician who doesn’t owe rich donors starts asking such questions, the Potemkin justifications for these [supply side] policies can tumble quickly.

There is a whole range of popular policy ideas the Washington political consensus has been beating back for decades with smoke and mirrors, from universal health care to legalized weed to free tuition to expanded Social Security to those higher taxes on the rich.

Which is why AOC is so roundly despised by the entrenched pols.

If they were smart, they’d ignore her.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.