The Democrats should give their new darling a couple of speech writers before she goes too far on camera.
In a Facebook Live interview with Mic’s Jake Horowitz, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democratic nominee for the 14th district of New York, (which includes the Bronx), was grilled on her positions. Her statements on poverty, the Democratic party, and foreign policy were at best poorly worded.
While Horowitz tried to get her position on a number of questions, Cortez seemed to dodge most of them, but when asked why Joe Lieberman was wrong to protest her presence in the party, answered, “Because I got elected.”
She won a primary. She hasn’t won the election yet; Ocasio-Cortez has yet to prove that she can win a seat in Congress. That in itself was a misleading answer. Either she meant that she was elected as the candidate, or she was arrogant enough to assume that because she is the Democratic nominee, she has already won the election.
Ocasio-Cortez’s hiccup over foreign policy and Israel was also addressed somewhat, with Horowitz asking what her “tenets of [her] foreign policy” were. She answered,
“So I think a lot of what we’re dealing with right now has to do with the fact, in my opinion, that we have not centered humanitarian approaches to foreign policy. I don’t know how much we have prioritized perhaps, as much as we should, crises of human rights. And not only human rights, but also how we approach things like famine, how we approach things like extreme poverty. Which, as we see, poverty, extreme poverty is a form of, to me, … to me extreme poverty is a form of violence.”
Poverty is a problem, extreme poverty is a problem. Violence is also a problem. The two may be intertwined in some way, but they are not the same. One can’t just take words and use them to mean anything that one wants. But apparently Ocasio-Cortez is willing to give it a try.
