AOC Bows To Nancy Pelosi, But It Doesn't Make Much Difference

On Tuesday, AOC said,

". . . I saw some Republican members of Congress saying, ‘Oh, well, if we have this shutdown, it’s because of AOC,’” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Well, if that’s the case, my office is open and you are free to walk in and negotiate with me directly, because what I’m not going to do is tolerate 4 million uninsured Americans because Donald Trump decided one day that he wants to just make sure that kids are dying because they don’t have access to insurance. That’s what’s not going to happen.”

I read this as saying, in effect, "Yes, I'm driving the shutdown, and Republicans may as well negotiate with me directly." One person who was not amused at this was Nancy Pelosi: Her reply to the reporter's question about AOC's remarks was barely suppressed rage. "Why are you saying such a ridiculous thing?"

"She’s wonderful, she’s a real team player, and the rest of that," she told the reporter. "You started by saying Republicans say that she’s directing this. She is not, Hakeem Jeffries is, and this takes a lot of experience, a lot of unity from the caucus in terms of the point of view, and that’s what this is."

AOC implicitly walked the remarks back by yesterday evening:

Ocasio-Cortez made it clear in an interview with NBC News that Democratic leadership is driving the party’s strategy.

“They’re saying this stuff about me in the press, and the fact of the matter is I can tell you, in the seven years that I’ve been here, they [Republican leaders] have never given me a single phone call, because they know what the truth is,” she said. “They know that the people that they need to be negotiating with, and who they are negotiating with, are Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer,” the House and Senate Democratic leaders, both of New York.

But this doesn't change the situation on the ground, which even Chris Cilizza, formerly of CNN and the Washington Post, who now claims to be "independent" on YouTube, understands:
He says,

I think Alexandria Ocasio Cortez may be the thing, the codex that explains why we are where we are in a government shutdown. To go forward, we need to go back, back to March. In March, Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, from New York, announces that he is going to vote to keep the government open. He doesn't want to run the risk of allowing Elon Musk and his DOGE people to have a chance to cut even more federal workers by closing down the government, so he's gonna keep it open, he's not gonna get any concessions from the Trump administration.

. . . Now, Schumer probably figured he was gonna take some flak for that, but I do not think he thought he was gonna take the amount of flak from the left that he took. . . . And one of the voices that was most promenent in speaking out against that was Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. . . . Chuck Schumer, . . . who is up for reelection in 2028 to a fifth term, looks at the landscape, and he says, "All right, well, we need to get something from Republicans this time around and Donald Trump. So I'm going to say we need to get the extension to these health care subsidies for Obamacare."

I think Schumer knows it's very unlikely he's going to get that. Trump is in control, Trump thinks a shutdown is fine for him. . . . Chuck Schumer has been in the Senate since 1998. . . . He is currently 74 years old. He'll be 76ish in 2028. . . . Schumer hasn't said whether he wants to run for another term or not, but I think he absolutely wants to keep that possibility open. . . . He doesn't want the narrative to be in 2028 that he retired to run away from certain defeat in a Democratic primary. He wants there to be a credible, plausible opening for him to run for another term.

. . . He looks at the situation, he looks at the outrage from the left. . . and he says, "If I don't get something big and deliverable for Democrats out of this showdown, I'm screwed politically, I will lose this race. So I am going to go forward with this shutdown, and I'm going to keep my Democratic caucus in line, and I'm going to make sure we don't give the Republicans the seven votes they need to keep the government open." He does all of this in large part because of the worry about Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. . . . But the thing is, AOC is 35 years old. She is 40 years Chuck Schumer's junior.

In the end, although Cilizza doesn't go that far, Schumer's problem is the clock, and what is true of Schumer is even more true of Pelosi. What Cilizza has said here is that Schumer is letting AOC set his priorities, but she's forced him into a game he's bound to lose. Whatever he holds out for from Trump, anything he could potentially point to as an important deliverable, Cilizza thinks he won't get it -- but Schumer's the one who's going to lose, not just to Trump, but to any primary oppenent in 2028.

Meanwhile, AOC is 35. This is just as much Pelosi's problem, or even more so. We must assume Pelosi threw a behind-the-scenes tantrum and forced AOC to walk back her implicit announcment that she was running the shutdown, but that doesn't change the fact that Schumer is at the end of his career, and although Pelosi has formally retired as Speaker, she's continuing to run the House through Jeffries, who is little more than a ventriloquist's dummy. I asked Chrome AI mode about this, and it answered,

A narcissist's refusal to acknowledge the passage of time is a defense mechanism rooted in a fear of losing their inflated sense of self. To a narcissist, the physical decline and diminishing social influence that come with aging are existential threats to their core identity, which is built on a fantasy of superiority. They may use a range of tactics to deny reality and cling to a distorted, timeless past where they felt most powerful.

But if we're talking about refusal to acknowledge the passage of time, we're right back to where we were with Joe Biden. Somehow all the senior Democrats are living in a fantasy world where they're still powerful, and they're refusing to acknowledge that things have changed.

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