The Democrats' Fear of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - Consortiumnews

The Democrats’ Fear of Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez
Primaries are a way to replace passive liberals with
progressive boat-rockers, writes Norman Solomon.

By Norman Solomon
NormanSolomon.com

             E arlier   this month, both Politico and The New
             York Times     reported that freshman Democratic
             Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was ruffling the
             feathers of fellow congressional Democrats. Chief
among the reasons for the tension? Ocasio-Cortez’s apparent
support for progressive primary challenges against centrist
Democrats.

It’s one of the most significant ideas the young New York
congresswoman has brought with her to Washington.

That’s because turning the Democratic Party into a truly
progressive force will require turning “primary” into a
verb. The corporate Democrats who dominate the party’s power
structure in Congress should fear losing their seats because
they’re out of step with constituents. And Democratic voters
should understand that if they want to change the party, the
only path to do so is to change the people who represent
them. Otherwise, the leverage of Wall Street and the
military-industrial complex will continue to hold sway.

These days, with fingers to the wind, incumbents often
give lip service to proposals that have wide public support
nationwide, such as Medicare for All (70 percent) and higher
taxes on the wealthy (76 percent). But big gaps remain

between what most congressional Democrats are willing to
fight for and what their constituents actually want.

Primary Wonders

Credible primary challenges or even just the threat of them
can work wonders. Instead of merely asking a member of
Congress to do the right thing, activists can convey a much
more persuasive message: Do the right thing or we’ll replace
you with someone who will.

Alexandra Rojas, executive director of Justice Democrats (a
group that played a major role in Ocasio-Cortez’s election
victory),   emphasizes   that    “safe”   Democratic   districts
shouldn’t stay safe for just any Democrat. The goal is to
“hold representatives who throw diverse working-class voters
under the bus accountable.”

Justice Democrats Communications Director Waleed Shahid
wrote in a Jan. 6 mass email that “real on-the-ground
organizing work” can bring “a new generation of progressive
leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the Democratic
Party.” He added: “We believe there are leaders just like
Alexandria in every district who just need a little bit of
encouragement and support.”

While largely ideological, the battle lines are also
attitudinal and behavioral. Democrats need to replace
passive liberals with real progressive boat-rockers. That’s
how Northern California Rep. Ro Khanna has distinguished
himself from the longtime incumbent he defeated in 2016,
Mike Honda. And attitude was a big reason why, in Boston
last year, Ayanna Pressley was able to win a primary victory
over senior Rep. Mike Capuano.

Both Honda and Capuano hardly legislated as centrists, both
leaned left and earned antiwar credentials, but they lost to
challengers who insisted that just checking progressive
boxes wasn’t enough. There’s a crying need for highly
assertive leaders who think and act outside the box. During
his first two years in office, Khanna has repeatedly put
forward wise alternatives to Democratic leadership on
domestic issues as well as foreign-policy matters ranging
from Syria, Yemen and Korea to U.S. relations with Russia.

Incumbent Advantage

Yet Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley were the only two candidates
to oust Democrats from Congress in primaries last year, a
fact that underscores how difficult it is to win a primary
against an entrenched incumbent. It also reflects the
routinely unmet need to devote sufficient advance planning,
time and resources to the mission.

What’s needed is rigorous long-term organizing to make
“primarying”   an     effective   weapon    identifying   which
incumbent Democrats to confront and then implementing
visionary yet realistic campaigns to beat them. That’s what
Ocasio-Cortez did to defeat the fourth-ranking Democrat in
the House, Joe Crowley, last summer.

There are numerous other signs that traction awaits such
efforts.    Earlier       this     month,    for   instance,
HuffPost reported that despite the popularity of third-term
House Democrat Kathleen Rice among her constituents, “new
polling suggests white, suburban women in Rice’s own
southwestern Long Island district could turn on the Democrat
if she refuses to back a Green New Deal, the umbrella term

for the sweeping policy to combat climate change and
overhaul the economy.”

In December, Politico reported that Ocasio-Cortez was
assisting plans for a progressive to run against Rep. Hakeem
Jeffries, an African American who just ascended to the
fifth-highest     leadership    post    among    House    Democrats.
Jeffries has been more attentive to serving corporate
power than the interests of voters in his Brooklyn district.

Even more important than the fractures in the mutual-
protection racket among congressional Dems is the momentum
toward   wider    challenges    among   grassroots       progressive
activists. Their willingness to challenge incumbents in the
2020 primaries will likely extend to new arrivals on Capitol
Hill, especially Democratic “Blue Dogs” such as Harley Rouda
in California and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia.

Meanwhile, some Democrats who’ve been in office for a long
time are now conspicuously vulnerable to primary challenges
from the left. Soon after the midterm election, the
Washington Post’s David Weigel flagged several incumbents in
Democratic districts whose centrism and insulation make them
prime targets in 2020: Jim Cooper from Nashville, Stephen
Lynch from Boston, and Illinois Reps. Dan Lipinski and Danny
Davis. He also mentioned south Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, who
actually supported Republican Rep. John Carter against
progressive      challenger    MJ   Hegar   in   2018.   Last   week,
Hegar came out in support of the Justice Democrats’ efforts
to primary Cuellar.

In every region of the nation, progressive activists are
aiming to normalize what was once a rarity ? credible

primary campaigns by genuine progressives against corporate
Democrats in Congress. There are certainly plenty to choose
from.

On the primary-as-a-verb wish list of many activists is
the hawkish new chairman of the House foreign affairs
committee, Eliot Engel, whose New York district includes
portions of the Bronx and Westchester County. After 30 years
in Congress, he might seem nearly impossible to defeat.

Conventional wisdom assumed the same about Joe Crowley.

Norman Solomon is the national coordinator of the online
activist group RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders
delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National
Convention and is currently a coordinator of the relaunched
Bernie Delegates Network.