excerpts:
even her haters call her a “generational talent,” a disparagement candy-wrapped as a compliment, the implication being that the astonishing rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was somehow encoded in her DNA
“Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office,” she said at the start of her journey to Washington
Months before AOC became the new face of the Democratic Party, she was working in a bar where she was expected to look “hot,” riding the 6 train, fretting about health insurance, and not really sure what she wanted to do with her life
Her victory on June 26, 2018, over her mainstream Democratic opponent, Joe Crowley, was a marker delineating the moment after which American politics would never be the same. It established AOC’s prodigious political gifts while showcasing a new sort of Democratic candidate and a new way of recruiting them. Barack Obama, previous holder of the “generational talent” title, may have resembled Ocasio-Cortez in some ways...Brown-skinned, good looking, with his own misadventures in the postcollegiate wilderness, he challenged political convention even as he titillated its guardians
With more than 20 million followers on Twitter and Instagram combined, and the ability to raise $20 million mostly in small-dollar donations in a single campaign cycle, she has amassed so much power that she is a human incendiary device
At the very beginning, before she had been elected to anything, Ocasio-Cortez revealed her mission in what would become her mantra. “We can only accomplish great things together,”
Her father, Sergio, who had died when she was a sophomore at Boston University, had told her she was special, destined for greatness, capable through intelligence and grit of attaining her dreams, and her education had reinforced that notion. But upon graduating in 2011, she saw that it didn’t matter how smart she was, what she knew, how ambitious or imaginative her ideas were. It didn’t matter that she’d won science prizes; been chosen to give speeches; immersed herself in economics, music, and literature; and graduated cum laude. Sandy, as she was sometimes known back then, was a petite young Puerto Rican woman with bills to pay. She moved into an apartment in the Parkchester development in the Bronx that had belonged to her father, with $25,000 in student loans and no health insurance. Up in Yorktown Heights in Westchester, her family relied on food stamps
“AOC, I think, had a Mary Poppins understanding that you follow a particular pathway, and bingo! You’re successful,” says Ernesto Nieto, a co-founder of the NHI. When she foundered, she felt she was to blame. Facing the disparity between how she saw herself and how the world saw her “was not very pleasant,” Nieto adds. “That’s the journey for a lot of Latinos. The same doors are not there for us as for somebody else.”
