That’s the biggest problem; the Democrats’ own left wing is too rebellious. They do a godawful combination of making their own party members look bad when they don’t agree, and then throwing ammunition to their enemies when their own party members don’t call them out on it.
If AOC and her ilk would just shut up for six months and let Biden run the Democratic party messaging, I suspect we’d see better results in polling and policy views.
What was the most damaging thing to Democratic Party messaging that AOC said in the last six months?
The liberals I know aren’t interested in tearing down capitalism though they’re keen on raising taxes on the rich and spending more on social safety nets. The leftist I know don’t want to work within the system they want to tear it down and start anew.
Hasn’t the roadblock to Biden’s agenda been almost entirely from Manchin and Sinema, two of the most conservative dems? What has AOC done to screw it up?
By this measure, there are no leftists of any significance in American politics.
What I’m saying is that you have both sides going rogue- Manchin/Sinema opposing things from the right-side (of the Democrats), and then you have people like AOC coming out with their own (not Party sanctioned, mind you) stuff like her “Green New Deal” or all her tweets about various issues.
So which is the Democrat position? Neither? Both? Biden? The average of all three?
That’s what I’m talking about- the Republicans sing from the same hymnal, from the Niobrara County, WY dog catcher to the Senators and Presidential candidates. Meanwhile, nobody really knows what the Democratic party is about, because every time someone tries to do that, somebody from somewhere within their own party pitches a fit/pulls a stunt/goes rogue in their commentary.
It’s entirely understandable that the average person would be a bit confused. The press loves all this infighting, and gives it more coverage than it probably should, which both makes the Democrats look fractured and ineffectual, as well as confusing who’s actually in charge.
In what way are “people like AOC” going rogue? AFAICT, Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, AOC, “the squad”, Jayapal, and about 95% of the Democrats in the Senate and House are on one side, and Sinema, Manchin, and maybe 3 or 4 House Democrats are on the other.
They exist. Also, too, many people are saying they have been upity in the past.
Lat I heard, the problem for Democrats was that Sinema/Manchin signed off on the 1.2 trillion ‘infrastructure’ bill, but won’t vote for the 3.5 trillion reconciliation package without it being much smaller, while the left flank of the Democrats won’t vote for the 1.2 trillion unless they also get the 3.5 trillion, thus putting both bills in jeopardy.
Which I personally think is great, since those bills are horrible and come at a terrible time when we absolutely should not be printing and spending money on stuff that isn’t absolutely crucial, given rising inflation and supply chain shortages.
That’s all part of the negotiation. There haven’t been any votes yet. But these bills have always been tied together, per Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer… and Manchin/Sinema didn’t object to this until the last week or two. That put a stop to everything, since Manchin and Sinema apparently weren’t even providing any information about what they wanted, at least until last week. Now negotiations are back on, and it seems likely to me that they’ll reach an agreement and pass both bills.
So, the problem is that AOC has ideas, and talks?
Yeah, we need to stamp that shit out pronto.
I’m not really in favor of the 3.5T bill, but I think as a matter of political strategy the progressive wing was smart to not vote for the 1.2T bill. The only way you really exercise power is by hard ball tactics like that, something the Tea Party realized within the GOP caucus over a decade ago.
The reality is the 3.5T bill represents a lot of Biden’s platform, and probably represents things a majority of his voters expect/want him to get done–particularly the climate change stuff (I’m actually very much in favor of addressing climate change, and have been for 20 years, going back to when I was deeply in with the GOP–but I don’t agree with it being part of a gigantic 3.5T spending bill covering lots of other things that I disagree with); Manchin / Sinema are definitely the ones obstructing the party’s larger agenda. That isn’t intrinsically bad behavior, each of the two parties has different factions in it. The core issue Democrats have is they beat Trump and won the Senate but they lost a lot of very winnable Senate races in Maine, Iowa, North Carolina that would’ve defanged Manchin/Sinema’s power to do this stuff. If you don’t have the votes you don’t have the votes. The Democrats have 50 votes on procedural issues giving them control of the Senate, and they have 50 votes likely on using reconciliation to raise the debt limit and to pass normal reconciliation bills. They don’t have the votes for things a lot of Democrats want–like nuking the filibuster or the 3.5T bill. No amount of teeth gnashing changes that.
Her problem isn’t having odeas, it’s the kind of ideas she has. And talking isn’t the problem, it’s what she says when talking that is. She and her ‘squad’ are preaching nonsense ideas that were known to be destructive decades before she was born.
Yeah, big shock, conservative poster doesn’t like liberal ideas. Thanks for your input, but I’m 100% not interested in the right wing take on AOC. I was asking why another poster who’s on the left had a problem with her. Your response is entirely irrelevant to that question.
FWIW I don’t think AOC is bad for Democrats. Time and time again the GOP tactic of running against the “most unpopular Democrat among far right Republicans”, is not very effective when that person isn’t on the ballot. AOC would have a hard time on a Presidential ticket, but unless she appears on one it isn’t an issue. The GOP has had many failed Congressional ad campaigns based around anti-Pelosi attacks. I was saying this back when I was a Republican, you can’t nationalize Democrats who aren’t on the ballot. The kind of inside baseball Republican voters who care enough about politics to know who the Democrat leader in the House is or who AOC is, are already your votes, the voters you are trying to persuade are just not moved by blasting people who serve in elected positions that aren’t on their ballot.
I actually think that while her ideology is too far left to package as the mainstream Democratic message, her actual style and strategy is much more what Dems should be doing than what they have ran with for 30 years.
I think AOC has demonstrated incredible talent in political communications, doubly so considering her age and inexperience. I think she’s even beyond Obama’s skill at the same age. Who knows how good she’ll be when she’s 40 or 50! The party is very lucky to have her. And if anyone has followed her closely, they’d see that her rhetorical style has changed very significantly since she first ran, as she’s better understood how legislation and party functioning works.
“We”? 
Isn’t this thread about the Canadian infrastructure bills going through Congress?
And I agree with iiandyiiii - AOC is an amazing speaker. That the right holds her up as something dangerous and scary shows how amazing she is. On the opposite side, we have MTG, Boebert, Gym Jordan, and Gaetz. The four of them combined struggle to put together one sentence.
That’s not what I’m saying at all.
What I’m saying is that it’s not effective for the Democratic party to have AOC saying one thing, Bernie Sanders another, Joe Biden a third, and Kyrsten Sinema a fourth. It’s not WHAT any of them are saying, it’s the fact that there’s not a coherent message.
The public gets somewhat confused as to what the actual Democratic party is about, and if the answer is all of that and none of that, then that’s even more confusing.
And worse, for people who aren’t squarely in one party’s camp or the other (the people who count; everyone else can be relied on to vote one way or the other), that makes the Democratic party look scattered, weak, and ineffectual. Which is something the Republicans do a surprisingly good job of avoiding.
This is just how the Democratic party is. It’s always been like this.
And mathematically, we’re about as united as we’ve ever been as a party. Something like 95% of Democrats in Congress are all on the same page as far as this legislation goes.