How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Learned to Play by Washington's Rules [nyt]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/us/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-washington.html

How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Learned to Play by Washington's Rules

By Catie Edmondson

    Sept. 18, 2019

WASHINGTON — Less than two weeks after being sworn in last year, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young progressive star fresh off an upset of one of the top Democratic leaders in the House, put her fellow Democrats on notice that she would soon be coming for them, too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/nyregion/joseph-crowley-ocasio-cortez-democratic-primary.html

Appearing in a promotional video for Justice Democrats — the insurgent liberal group dedicated to unseating entrenched Democratic lawmakers that helped sweep her to power — Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a Bronx firebrand, urged her supporters to recruit candidates to run against her new colleagues. She was flanked by the group's three founders, two of whom had just taken top jobs in her office. There were even whispers that she might try to oust Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, a rising star regarded by many Democrats as a future speaker.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/new-video-ocasio-cortez-joins-progressive-effort-oust-more-incumbent-n959121
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/us/politics/justice-democrats-ocasio-cortez.html
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/18/ocasio-cortez-hakeem-jeffries-2020-primary-1067107

But after nearly nine months, with her eyes now wide open to the downsides of her revolutionary reputation and social media fame, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has tempered her brash, institution-be-damned style with something different: a careful political calculus that adheres more closely to the unwritten rules of Washington she once disdained.

"I think I have more of a context of what it takes to do this job and survive on a day-to-day basis in a culture that is inherently hostile to people like me," Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview.

Gone from her Washington office are her original chief of staff and her communications director, two Justice Democrats founders who were intent on waging their divisive brand of politics from their offices on Capitol Hill. No longer an unabashed ambassador of the combative group, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has carefully managed her involvement with it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/us/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez.html

And she never did go after Mr. Jeffries, now the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, the same position held last year by Representative Joseph Crowley when Ms. Ocasio-Cortez set her sights on ousting him.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/us/politics/hakeem-jeffries-democrats-leadership.html

Instead, she announced on Tuesday that her first endorsement of a primary challenger to an incumbent Democrat would be Marie Newman, who is making a second run at ousting Representative Daniel Lipinski of Illinois, a conservative-leaning Democrat who is regarded by many of his colleagues as something of an outlier because of his opposition to abortion rights and his vote against the Affordable Care Act.
ImageMs. Ocasio-Cortez hinted that she might endorse a primary challenger against Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, but she has not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/us/politics/aoc-endorsement-marie-newman.html

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is not the only Democrat to break with Mr. Lipinski and support Ms. Newman, nor is she the first. Deciding on the endorsement, she said, was in part a product of having learned to balance her twin roles as a dissident and a member of Congress.

"It's not just about being an activist," Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. "It forces you to grow. So it doesn't mean you don't endorse activists, but it also requires an assessment for a capacity of growth and how you navigate a space like this."

When she first arrived on Capitol Hill, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and her team made it clear they planned to use their perch inside Congress as a platform for their divisive, outsider brand of politics. On her first day of orientation, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez joined protesters camped outside Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office agitating for the Green New Deal.

"It could have made people mad; they could have put me on the dog walking committee," she joked later that week on a Justice Democrats conference call promoting the organization's candidate recruitment campaign. "They still might."

https://www.facebook.com/justicedemocrats/videos/justice-democrats-national-launch-call/264202377611421/

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez may have meant it as an offhand quip, but her comment underscored a reality on Capitol Hill that she and her team were slow to fully appreciate: the extent to which power and the ability to get things done in the House were dependent on personal relationships and respect for the hierarchy.

The first-term congresswoman enjoys rich public support outside Congress, particularly on the social media platforms where progressive activism thrives. But the approach that she and her cohorts champion — pulling the institution to the left in part by threatening the careers of any Democrats who fail to embrace their ideas — quickly alienated many of her colleagues, and has made it difficult for her to get anything done.

In private conversations, many of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's Democratic colleagues routinely complain that in her zeal to build her social media celebrity and political brand, she is too quick to cast aspersions on her fellow lawmakers, painting them as apologists for the status quo.

"In many ways, I feel like I walk around with a scarlet letter because many members who just have any primary, whether I know about it or not, tend to project that onto me," Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview. "In many ways, I feel like I walk through that body as a symbol of someone who should not be there and a threat to the way power is organized."

She said she has gone through a "loss of innocence and naïveté," realizing that it was impossible to separate the legislative work of serving in Congress with the politics of re-election campaigns.

"They are frankly much closer in that dynamic and much closer in overlapping than a lot of people tend to realize," she said.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has cut back on her appearances on behalf of Justice Democrats and has begun bolstering her fellow incumbent freshman lawmakers, like Representative Joe Neguse of Colorado, a member of Democratic leadership whom she is joining at a fund-raiser this week for the Boulder County Democratic Party.

In April, she rallied around some of her colleagues who flipped districts President Trump won in 2016, encouraging her Twitter followers to donate to their campaigns. She diligently reached out to the so-called majority-makers on her committees — the centrist freshmen who flipped Republican-leaning seats — to win them over.

Her aides, however, continued to carry the Justice Democrats' flag without restraint, tweeting out their support when the group challenged incumbents, to the dismay of Democratic aides and lawmakers. In July, Saikat Chakrabarti, then her chief of staff, ignited a firestorm by accusing centrist Democrats of enabling "a racist system" after they blocked an effort to defund immigration enforcement as part of an emergency border aid package. In a tweet, now deleted, he compared them to "new Southern Democrats," a reference to segregationists. It was a remarkable breach of protocol for an unelected aide.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/13/us/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-democrats.html

Mr. Jeffries used the House Democrats' official Twitter account to deliver a biting warning shot in a tweet, also now deleted, that singled out Mr. Chakrabarti. Two weeks later, Mr. Chakrabarti announced he would leave the office.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's new chief of staff, Ariel Eckblad, a former aide to Senator Kamala Harris of California, is well versed in the workings of Capitol Hill and is widely seen as a sober-minded replacement. Corbin Trent, who had been handling communications for both Ms. Ocasio-Cortez's campaign and her congressional office, a highly unusual arrangement, has returned to the political side.

The rift was an escalation of a feud that began days earlier when Maureen Dowd, a columnist for The New York Times, asked Ms. Pelosi about the fury from Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and three other progressive freshmen over the border aid package. The speaker noted that the group had failed to persuade any other Democrats to join them in voting against the House's version of the bill.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/us/politics/nancy-pelosi-ocasio-cortez.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/us/politics/border-funding-vote.html

"All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world," Ms. Pelosi said then. "But they didn't have any following. They're four people, and that's how many votes they got."

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez fired back by saying that it was she and the progressive activists who revere her, not Ms. Pelosi, who wielded the real power in the party, and later complained about the speaker's "singling out of newly elected women of color." Mr. Chakrabarti followed up with a tweet questioning the speaker's leadership.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/outright-disrespectful-four-house-women-struggle-as-pelosi-isolates-them/2019/07/10/a33c63a8-a33f-11e9-b7b4-95e30869bd15_story.html

The break ultimately led to a private, one-on-one meeting last month with Ms. Pelosi in the speaker's office, where Ms. Ocasio-Cortez appeared ready to call a truce, telling reporters, "I think the speaker respects the fact that we're coming together as a party and a community."

"Very rarely does a member enter the House and exit the House as the same person," said former Representative Steve Israel, Democrat of New York. In freshman orientation, Mr. Israel said, representatives are asked what kind of member they want to be: an activist, a policy wonk, a political leader.

"You have to grapple with choosing a lane," he said, "and very often, you end up shifting lanes."

But Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for Justice Democrats, said Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has never been interested in staying in just one lane.

"Navigating her role as a legislator and a movement builder is basically what her career is about," Mr. Shahid said in an interview. "We'll continue to have that theory of change with one foot in D.C. and one foot in the movement. It's really hard to do that."

For Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, the process continues to be bumpy. Even with Ms. Eckblad at the helm, her office still operates in some ways more like an upstart campaign on a shoestring budget than like a congressional office. A replacement for Mr. Trent has yet to be hired, and another aide who routinely irritates rank-and-file aides and lawmakers with combative comments — like when he claimed his fellow congressional aides were elitist "careerists" — is still in place.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/7/9/20681088/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-dan-riffle-billionaire-policy-failure
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/14/heres-system-it-sucks-meet-hill-staffers-ocasio-cortez-has-tapped-upend-washington/

And while it is not clear how many more Justice Democrats Ms. Ocasio-Cortez will endorse, she said she was still "very wedded" to the insurgent theory of change that propelled her to Congress.

"Change by nature takes friction," she said. "It's just a question of how we move through it."
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 19, 2019, Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: Nearly 9 Months on the Job, a Firebrand Adapts to Washington's Rules. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe