Tim Murphy at Mother Jones writes—Turns Out, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Huge in Iowa:
[...] The centerpiece of Ocasio-Cortez’s visit was a three-hour long climate summit at Drake University on Saturday. People heard from speakers such as Zina Precht-Rodriguez, an organizer at the Sunrise Movement, and the writer and activist Naomi Klein. Panelists discussed chicken farming and water quality and renewable energy while sitting in front of big watercolor panels painted by the artist Molly Crabapple—workers in orange vests putting up solar panels, workers in orange vests working on wind turbines, workers in orange vests…farming, maybe? I could go on about the content of the thing, but the content wasn’t what was revelatory; what was remarkable was the fact that it was happening at all.
“Four years ago when I was running around Iowa and New Hampshire and going all over this country, I talked about climate change, and people nodded their heads and I said, yeah, it’s a serious problem,” Sanders told the crowd in Des Moines. “I was on a national debate [and] a moderator said, ‘What do you think is the great national security crisis facing this country?’ And I said climate change. People kind of didn’t fully appreciate that answer. But the point is that over the last four years, as I go around the country today, people do understand.”
This is a meaningful shift in the United States, driven in large part by a revitalized activist movement. But it’s also a shift in how Sanders approached the issue. Four years ago, Sanders wasn’t avoiding the issue of climate change. (He was talking up “fossil fuel billionaires,” and pushing a climate agenda of his own.) But he wasn’t running on it quite like this, with three-hour summits where people who aren’t running for any office at all talked about the poultry industry, and corporate consolidation of pig-farming, and electrification of freight rail. He wasn’t doing a full weekend of events on the theme, in a state where corn and beef are king. No, this was something new, because in the time since the last campaign ended and this one began, the kinds of idealistic young lefty activists his campaign had counted on in 2016 had latched onto something else entirely and built it into a new organizing force.
And it was being shepherded, to a large degree, by the woman on stage with him—a former campaign organizer who’d protested at Standing Rock, then went and ran for Congress, and then almost immediately introduced the Green New Deal. She is Sanders’ most powerful surrogate in 2020 precisely because her career is the story the movement wants to believe about itself.
Ocasio-Cortez also just happens to be uncommonly good at this, adept at inverting the arguments that have traditionally been wielded against people with politics like hers. “When it comes to a Green New Deal people say—always, always, always with this question of ‘how are you going to pay for it?’” she said. “As if we’re not paying for it now.” She rattled off a list of recent, headline-grabbing shocks—the California wildfires, Hurricane Maria, decreasing crop yields.
“Coal miners are being denied their pensions while coal barons are being bailed out by the federal government,” she said. The message of Bernie 2020 is that you’re already paying for it.
Later that day, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders spoke to a crowd of a few thousand at a field house in Coralville, near the University of Iowa campus. Sanders gear was in abundance, but he wasn’t the main draw for everyone. Caleigh Stanier, a high school junior, told me she came for Ocasio-Cortez, not Sanders. [...]
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QUOTATION
“But as soon as a man, through lack of character, takes refuge in doctrine, as soon as crime reasons about itself, it multiplies like reason itself and assumes all the aspects of the syllogism. Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.” ~~Albert Camus, The Rebel, 1956
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—Republicans don't do bipartisanship:
While the Broders of the world continue their partisan game of calling for Democrats to be bipartisan, it's obvious to anyone paying attention that they really only intend for a unilateral Democratic capitulation. It was obvious from the moment President Obama took office that his sincere desire to work across the aisle would only be taken advantage of, and that it would be seen as a sign of weakness. After a year of Democrats negotiating down their health insurance plan until it most resembled Romneycare or the 1993 Republican plan, for which the Republicans gave it not a single vote and now call for its repeal, nobody any longer should be buying into the myth of bipartisanship.
While the president continually calls for bipartisan cooperation, the Republicans continually make clear that they will not compromise, will continually try to move the goalposts, and that despite the Democrats having not investigated any of the many horrendous crimes of the Bush-Cheney administration, there now is nothing about the Obama administration the Republicans won't obsessively investigate. As I've been saying for some time, it shouldn't surprise anyone if they send a fact-finding team to Kenya to search for the "real" birth certificate.
The Democrats need to stop buying into a myth that means but their own destruction.