CNN’s Dana Bash Presses AOC About Her Future Plans: ‘Are You Going To Challenge Sen. Schumer in a Primary Race?’

CNN’s Dana Bash promoted her new series, “Being,” the first episode of which will interview Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), by playing a clip on CNN Newsroom with Pamela Brown that showed Bash pressing Ocasio-Cortez about her future political ambitions.

Brown mentioned the series and said to Bash that one common question about Ocasio-Cortez was whether she was “aiming for a bigger political platform soon?”

“We asked that question,” replied Bash, before introducing a short clip of the interview. “You tell me at the end if you’re satisfied with the answer.”

“Are you going to challenge Senator Schumer in a primary race?” Bash asked Ocasio-Cortez.

The congresswoman acknowledged that she knows it “drives everybody nuts” that she has avoided talking about her plans, “but the way that I really feel about this, and the way that I really approach my politics and my political career, is that I do not look at things and I do not set my course positionally. And I know there’s a lot of people who do not believe that. But I really, I can’t operate the way that I operate and do the things that I do in politics while trying to be aspiring to other things or calculating to other things.”

“So all that is to say, that I make decisions based on what I think our people need and our community needs, and so I’m not commenting on that,” she concluded, laughing.

Bash told Brown that one thing that she found “so fascinating” about Ocasio-Cortez’s answer was that it was very common for politicians who are aspiring for other offices to “try to position themselves in a very strategic way,” and sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.

“What she was saying is, I understand my role,” continued Bash. “My role is to break glass and get attention for the issues that I care about. I can’t do that if I’m thinking about the next step in my career.”

Bash also said that she had asked Ocasio-Cortez about running for president one day, and she had responded that she wants to be “careful” about how she answers that question “because she doesn’t want little girls to not dream big.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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