AOC Groans When Asked About Biden Presidency: ‘In Any Other Country’ We Would ‘Not Be in the Same Party’
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez expressed some distaste with the idea of a Joe Biden presidency in an extensive profile out Monday.
David Freelander, writing for New York magazine, interviewed the congresswoman from the Bronx about her status as the party’s young agitator. The cover story takes a dive into Ocasio-Cortez’s influences, including her admiration for Bernie Sanders, who she recently endorsed for president.
Unlike Sanders, Joe Biden isn’t a candidate who inspires the freshman Democrat. When asked about her role in Congress under a Biden presidency, Ocasio-Cortez told New York:
“Oh God,” she said with a groan. “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.”
She doesn’t harbor much sympathy for the moderate side of the party either, apparently casting the broad ideological ground of elected Democrats as a weakness:
She said the Congressional Progressive Caucus should start kicking people out if they stray too far from the party line. Other caucuses within the Democratic Party in Congress require applications, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out. But “they let anybody who the cat dragged in call themselves a progressive. There’s no standard,” she said.
The same goes for the party as a whole: “Democrats can be too big of a tent.”
At the end of the piece, Ocasio-Cortez hints at the crucial difference she sees between Sanders, a political outsider who has been calling for a revolution since he was first elected to Congress decades ago, and Biden, whose message in the 2020 Democratic primary is a return to the Obama era.
“This whole primary,” she went on, referring to the one Biden and Bernie are in, “is going to be about the soul of the Democratic Party. I think it’s a referendum on whether we think everything was fine before Trump. People who live in a lot of privilege, who think of public programs as charity, they often think there was nothing wrong before Trump. They think Hillary was the problem. But it’s much deeper than that.”
Read the full cover story here.
