[D66] AOC Is Making C-SPAN Fun

[A.O.]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/02/c-span-aoc-ocasio-cortez-hearings

02.08.2019

    United States

    Politics Film and TV

AOC Is Making C-SPAN Fun

By
    Branko Marcetic

The internal workings of American politics are usually boring as hell.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is making them compulsively watchable — and
going after billionaires’ control of our political system in the process.

New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez greets fellow lawmakers
ahead of the State of the Union address in the chamber of the US House
of Representatives on Tuesday. Win McNamee / Getty


What might politics look like if elected officials — instead of being
what too often seems like a collection of dead-eyed, factory-made
automatons who speak from the same snooze-inducing, flavorless script —
actually appeared passionate, engaged, and interested in looking after
the interests of the people they represent?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be showing us.

One of the refreshing things about Ocasio-Cortez’s time in the national
spotlight has been not just the fact that she talks about the issues
facing the US in a direct, easy to understand, even entertaining way,
but that she does it in the service of taking on the rigid power
structures that control people’s lives.

She did this before she was even sworn in to Congress, famously tweeting
about the way she and other freshmen are marched around during their
orientation to be lectured by lobbyists and CEOs. What was apparently an
unseemly but accepted norm in Washington’s political culture was
suddenly outed to the rest of us because someone in the political class
finally realized how creepy the whole thing was.

Ocasio-Cortez appears to be doing something similar with her newly won
position on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which
yesterday held a hearing on H.R.1, the House Democrats’ expansive
anti-corruption and voting rights package. Watch this clip from
yesterday’s session, in which Ocasio-Cortez plays a “lightning-round
game” with the witnesses, in which she pretends to be a “bad guy”
(“which I’m sure half the room would agree with anyway,” she adds with a
smile) who’s trying to “get away with as much bad things as possible,
ideally to enrich myself and advance my interests.”

    ‘We have a system that is fundamentally broken.’ — Rep. @AOC is
explaining just how f*cked campaign finance laws really are
pic.twitter.com/sCwpkRzcHB

    — NowThis (@nowthisnews) February 8, 2019

In less than five minutes, and with the witnesses replying with barely
more than a “yes” or “no,” Ocasio-Cortez gets across to the viewer:

    just how openly corrupt the current political system is (“you’re
going to help me legally get away with all of this”);
    the lack of meaningful safeguards against corporate capture (“Is
there any hard limit that I have in terms of what legislation I’m
allowed to touch … based on the special interest funds that I accepted?”
“There’s no limits”)
    how vulnerable the office of the president is in particular to
moneyed influence (“Every person in this body is being held to a higher
ethical standard than the president of the United States”)
    and that the very people serving with her on this august committee
are most probably compromised by these interests too (“We have these
influences existing in this body, which means that these influences are
here in this committee shaping the questions that being asked of you all”)

That she does it all through the medium of a classroom game and with a
sense of fun makes the whole thing even more remarkable to watch.

There are many reasons behind today’s widespread political
disengagement, not least the suspicion that most of the people the
public votes for aren’t really fighting for them. But even when
politicians genuinely are fighting for their voters’ interests, they do
so in the same, deathly boring, “serious” fashion that one can
appreciate in the abstract, but few would willingly subject themselves
to. Televising congressional proceedings was an important democratizing
victory, but it was undercut by the fact that, short of salacious events
like the Kavanaugh hearings, no one really wants to watch most of these
people do their jobs. There’s a reason the public has gravitated to
figures like Trump, despite the terrible goods they sell; meanwhile,
even a charismatic figure like Obama was dull as chalk when he wasn’t
giving a major speech.

Ocasio-Cortez has shown she can bring the style that’s made her a force
of nature on social media to a committee hearing and, more importantly,
do it in a way that makes clear to the public just how easy it is for
the rich — or “bad guys,” to use her words — to control the political
system. Here’s hoping someday she’ll get a chance to do the same on an
issue like climate change, too.

About the Author

Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer. He lives in Toronto, Canada.