SASHA STONE: AOC Crashes and Burns in Munich.
AOC makes the same mistake Kamala Harris always has. She tries to sound presidential and forgets to be herself. It’s okay to say you don’t know things or to laugh or to show humility, as Gretchen Whitmer attempted to do. But truth be told, both women came off so empty-headed that one can’t help but wonder why they’re there at all.
Mark Halperin says she did enormous damage to her political career.
AOC got her first real lesson in what it’s like to swim in the deep end. It was a good indicator that she is not ready to run for president. Unless someone else magically appears, it’s Gavin Newsom vs. Kamala Harris.
I did have to laugh at this paragraph in the Times story:
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez argued that efforts to make clips of “any five-to-10-second thing” from her remarks go viral online, especially in the conservative ecosystem, had been done to “distract from the substance of what I am saying.”
Now imagine that on repeat by every major news outlet in the land for ten years, and then she’ll get a tiny taste of what it’s like for Trump or any other politician on the Right.
Tellingly, the Gray Lady is doing major damage control for AOC: The New York Times Tries Impotently to Fix AOC’s Munich Disaster.
Elsewhere in his piece, [the NYT’s Kellen] Browning notes that Ocasio-Cortez was worried that, having been “microscopically dissected,” her message “was being lost in all the commotion.” But what she said was “her message.” One could dissect her words for the next ten years straight, with the best of intentions, and still one would not glean anything coherent or useful from them. This wasn’t the fault of “conservative social media” or “rocketing” or “speculation”; it was the fault of Ocasio-Cortez herself, who went to a security conference, was asked questions about security, and fell flat on her face at the first hurdle. The “commotion” doesn’t enter into the equation. What AOC said didn’t mean anything because AOC doesn’t know anything. Her ideas weren’t lost in translation. She didn’t “stall,” as Kellen Browning pretends she did. She wasn’t afflicted temporarily by madness or dehydration or anesthesia. She had no clue what she was talking about, so what she was talking about had no content.
Browning’s X homepage right now is absolutely loaded with AOC-friendly tweets, as if he’s her personal fixer at the Times. I know we frequently refer to journalists as “Democratic Party operatives with bylines,” but Browning is really living up to the meme right now.
