AOC: 'In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party'
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview published Monday that Democrats nationwide can cultivate “too big of a tent,” asserting that she and her party’s 2020 frontrunner, former Vice President Joe Biden, would be in different political parties in any other nation.
Asked for a profile by New York Magazine about what role she might play as a member of Congress should Biden capture the White House, the freshman House Democrat from New York responded with a groan.
“Oh God,” she said. “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.”
A spokesperson for the Biden campaign did not immediately return a request for comment.
The remarks by Ocasio-Cortez represent a fresh repudiation of Biden, who spent decades in the Senate before serving as vice president. He is widely seen as the standard-bearer in the 2020 race for moderate Democrats and has voiced opposition to progressive legislation championed by Ocasio-Cortez and her allies.
The congresswoman — who has endorsed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the party’s nominating contest — previously launched what was widely viewed as a thinly veiled attack against Biden’s climate change proposals at an event in Washington in May.
“I will be damned if the same politicians who refused to act then are going to try to come back today and say we need to find a middle-of-the-road approach to save our lives. That is too much for me,” Ocasio-Cortez said, after Reuters had reported that Biden was crafting a “middle ground approach” to combating the global threat.
For his part, Biden has praised Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the left-leaning “squad” of freshman congresswomen as “brilliant” and “really smart,” but warned their political ideology was not representative of most elected Democrats.
“They are the exception rather than the rule,” he told MSNBC in July. “If you listen to the guys and women in your business, they say, ‘That’s the majority of people who got elected.’ We need that kind of energy, but that’s not the majority of Democrats who got elected last time.”
Ocasio-Cortez also offered criticism in Monday’s story for congressional Democrats, accusing her party’s lawmakers of too often working to appease the interests of their most conservative members. She has frequently broken with House Democratic leadership since assuming office in January 2019.
“For so long, when I first got in, people were like, ‘Oh, are you going to basically be a tea party of the left?’ And what people don’t realize is that there is a tea party of the left, but it’s on the right edges, the most conservative parts of the Democratic Party,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“So the Democratic Party has a role to play in this problem, and it’s like we’re not allowed to talk about it. We’re not allowed to talk about anything wrong the Democratic Party does,” she continued. “I think I have created more room for dissent, and we’re learning to stretch our wings a little bit on the left.”
Ocasio-Cortez said the Congressional Progressive Caucus, of which she is a member, should expel lawmakers without adequate liberal bona fides, charging that “they let anybody who the cat dragged in call themselves a progressive. There’s no standard.”
The broader Democratic Party, as well, “can be too big of a tent,” she said.
