Slate had an article last week with this exact question.
Jonah Goldberg of NRO had a theory that she knows exactly what she’s doing, that her fans and supporters will flock to her defense after these errors, elevating her status while simultaneously painting conservatives as petty and “obsessed”.
Little too tinfoil hat for me, but it’s food for thought.
“This is a super crazy conspiracy theory…but we should consider it anyway!”
I wouldn’t call it super crazy, the-moonlanding-was-faked territory. It’s plausible, just not likely.
Don’t see how a politician would make gaffes on purpose. They make plenty anyway without even trying.
It’s the same sort of thing in the early days of Trump, where people were wondering how he could say so many ill-conceived things, or things that were just flat wrong. Is he trolling? 4D chess? Or could he really be that… lacking, to put it politely? It was hard to believe he could consistently stumble with accuracy on even basic things.
So it’s the same thing with Cortez. Take the “chambers of government” quip. There’s no easy out. Either she meant to say “Branches of government”, in which case she believes the three branches of government are the House, the Senate, and the presidency (which is bad), or she believes in a fictitious entity called the “chambers of government”, and then ascribed to this fictitious entity the House, the Senate, and the presidency.
So you scratch your head and try to piece it together. You try to reconcile the paragraph above with the fact that she’s a popular New York congresswoman granted one of the levers of political power. And I’d certainly suggest that the more charitable theory is that she’s savvier with social media and image than we give her credit for, baiting her opponents into quibbles while elevating her support.
'Cause the alternative ain’t pretty.
The alternative, which required very little head scratching on my part, is it was a turn of phrase similar to “the halls of power”. Why the hell would you jump to a "mythical entity " unless you were determined to make it look worse than it is? The House, Senate and the Presidency is where governing happens. Why pretend that is somehow befuddling?
Right. In context, she was talking about Dems taking control of the three entities that are elected - president, Senate and House. You’re in the middle of an interview - quick, what term do you use to group all three? She obviously wasn’t talking about the executive/legislative/judicial groups.
She makes it sound like it’s an actual thing. She educates us about which governmental bodies comprise the three chambers of government.
However, Googling “chambers of government” from November 1990 to November 2018, I was able to dig up some uses of it in general terms (“he ascended from City Council to higher chambers of government”) or in relation to state elections (“Democrats control both chambers of New York government”), so if I’m being charitable, she simply extended the latter concept to the federal level (Governor = President here I’m assuming), which nobody else has ever done in at least 30 years according to my search.
Hey, as good as any to hang a hat on.
Ok, let your imagination fly: what mythical entity/actual thing do you think she might have been describing? Some underground lair with big chambers? Some kind of Harry Potter reference? Be as uncharitable as you want.
Are you looking at the exact quote, or what someone told you to think it was?
“If we work our butts off to make sure that we take back all three chambers of Congress — uh, rather, all three chambers of government: the presidency, the Senate, and the House.”
Her point was not to “educate us,” it was to talk about taking control of the three elected entities. Reading that gaffe as indicative of her not knowing about the judicial branch requires you to have an agenda. The three entities she listed are real, actual things.
The problem conservatives are going to have is that when an old white guy makes a gaffe like this, it comes across as a befuddled old man to millennials. When AOC does it, it makes her more relatable to them.
I can’t speculate. She certainly never addressed it as far as I know. Instead, she immediately pivoted to slamming those who were criticizing her, to thunderous applause. Or Twitter hearts in this case.
Right. So you think it’s a real head scratcher choice between whether an odd turn of phrase meant something rather obvious or it means some crazy thing you are incapable of articulating.
As I said, the conservative movement needs to hate to continue to exist and AOC provides them with someone to hate. If you scratch the surface of that hate you quickly see that it is based on very little.
That is a compelling and not at all emotional argument you just made.
Really? Have you no other outlet to smear right-wingers?
Do you really believe of all the boogeymen politicians and pundits can conjure on which to channel hate, they would settle on a figure like her? Yes, America loves when you gang up on young female underdogs, their “hate” campaign is sure to convert many.
This is just poorly thought out hackery.
Please don’t lob softballs like this.
I don’t think her misstatements are why right-wingers hate her. Many people made fun of Sarah Palin and GW Bush for misspeaking, and some of those people also hated them, but the misspeaking isn’t why, is it? That kind of nitpicking is something we do to someone we already distrust.
I still think it’s as simple as this. She’s part of the Democratic Socialists of America, which is very unusual for a Congressperson; and she’s hot. Very few politicians look good, like runway model good, in a pantsuit. She does. The right wing skews male. The male of the species is hormonal, emotional, & kind of manipulable in general. In order to prevent the young men who are the right wing’s necessary future voting base from following her on pure instinct, she has to be mocked, and the idea that she is stupid has to be reinforced, and reinforced more often than positive news about her appears before impressionable male eyes.
Edited to add: A hottie who’s a mainstream neoliberal might get some flack from the right for being a Dem. A common-looking DSA socialist could be profitably ignored, lest alternatives occur to the base. But a DSA hottie? Code Red, man.
We haven’t reached that point yet. There aren’t enough working people, in part because many aren’t educated enough. (Of course, the ridiculous demands of HR, wanting tons of experience and “perfect resumes” doesn’t help.) Furthermore the population of most of the western world is getting older. We’ll need more workers.
Well, they actually did. What’s not to believe?