The AOC Response

This morning’s earlier post on the comments by Spanberger has a counterpart, and it’s the last few minutes of AOC’s Instagram live from yesterday. It’s not available in easily embeddable form, but someone on Reddit captured it at this link. It’s in response to a question about Zohran Mamdani being the future of the Democratic Party.

Her response is basically:

• She’s more concerned about working with Mamdani on getting baby boxes to new mothers than she is about who’s the future of the party, about expanding access to childcare.

• People talk about who’s the future of the Democratic Party because they don’t want to talk about issues being the future of the Party, like guaranteed healthcare, or banning insider trading by politicians.

• She says that Mamdani is good at social media and speaking, but it’s also what he is saying.

• She takes on people who criticize Mamdani because he talks about programs or initiatives that might not happen — she says people are sophisticated and understand when you try. (This was the part of the Spanberger quote that infuriated me: it’s the “we’re going to fail so don’t try” mentality, which I think permeates a lot of the party establishment.)

• Earlier in the stream she said that she thinks more about what she can do for working class people than the future of the Democratic Party or other more theoretical questions.

• Of course she encourages people to vote in primaries for candidates they like, including those who don’t take corporate cash, for example.

That all said, the future of the Democratic Party has to be people like her who can go on a livestream for nearly an hour and talk about current issues and goals for the Party in clear, direct terms.