This statement by AOC is extraordinary in the very literal sense of that word:
David Axelrod: "Do you want to be a Senator? Do you want to be President?"
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: "You know, people—it’s funny because people ask that and they assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. My ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country."
"And it doesn’t... like, I don’t care if I’m a bartender, or if I’m in the House, or if I’m in the Senate. My goal is to change the country. And in some ways, I think having that kind of focus almost makes you more powerful because you’re not as afraid of losing.
"Because presidents come and go, elected officials come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever. You know? Passing the Green New Deal is forever. Changing the lives of millions of people is something that stays after you’re gone. And that’s what I’m here for."
Amy Klobuchar is running to be Governor of Minnesota:
U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar declined Friday to embrace Gov. Tim Walz’s suggestion that Minnesota could try to redraw its congressional districts to create an advantage for Democrats if their party wins full control of state government in November.
It’s the latest sign that Klobuchar intends to chart a more moderate course than Walz if elected governor. In an interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune, Klobuchar said it isn’t clear if a move to redraw the state’s congressional boundaries before the 2030 census would even be legal.
[…]
Her comments about redistricting came after Walz shared an article on social media about the mid-decade race to redraw congressional boundaries and wrote: “Minnesota is going to have a trifecta next year… just saying.”
[…]
Klobuchar expressed frustration when asked about Walz’s post, saying Democrats shouldn’t assume they are going to pull off a sweep in this year’s elections before they have earned it. While she noted she’s supported Democratic redistricting in Virginia and California, Klobuchar said Minnesota could face legal and procedural hurdles if it pursued a similar effort.
[…]
Beyond redistricting, Klobuchar has been framing her campaign around a plan to govern closer to the political middle.
She’s put distance between herself and Walz, saying she would have acted more quickly to stop fraud in the state’s social services programs and made some different spending decisions when the state had a $17.5 billion budget surplus.
The senator told the Star Tribune on Friday she is open to revisiting programs created by DFLers in 2023 to evaluate how they’re functioning and whether they need fine-tuning.
There’s no doubt that Klobuchar is ambitious. As soon as she announced her run for Governor, her normally fairly quiet BlueSky account began to fill up with pictures of her in every corner of Minnesota. She’s running a traditional campaign for a seat in a state where paramilitary goons murdered two citizens in cold blood a few months ago. Yet she worries that redistricting might not be “legal” and she scolds Tim Walz for his confidence that the DFL is going to carry Minnesota.
This is not the energy that Democrats need now. The legalistic, cautious, incrementalist approach that Klobuchar represents doesn’t meet the moment, it doesn’t excite the base, and it doesn’t show the non-voters that we need to motivate that Democrats will fight for anything. It’s also incredibly self-centered: hey, those other states can redistrict, but I’m not going to put in the effort. The last governor, who is also in my party, was a pretty good guy, but here are my nitpicks about how he governed.
Obama famously advised that politicians should campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Klobuchar is campaigning in prose, and she’ll govern in back issues of the Minnesota Reporter.
I realize that comparing AOC’s comments about her political aspirations to Klobuchar’s interview probably isn’t completely fair to Klobuchar. But we need more of the former and less of the latter. We’re in the wilderness here, we’re under attack, and slight changes in the tax code and “working hand in hand” with local businesses isn’t what we’re looking for. And shitting on the last DFL governor, and moving to the center in a cycle where she and every other DFL candidate with a winnable race is almost certain to be elected is unnecessary at least, and shitty at worst.
