AOC deserved the Oversight job

Democrats need to cultivate smart progressive talent, not freeze it out

You don’t really need more than old guy solidarity and a lazy belief in seniority to explain House Democrats picking Gerry Connolly (D-Old) over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as leader of the opposition on the Oversight Committee.

But I do think it was a bad call, and it was especially bad form for Nancy Pelosi, the party’s officially-retired-but-seemingly-actual leader to be working the phones so hard on behalf of Connolly.

Ocasio-Cortez is, yes, very left-wing. And as you might imagine, I do not think it would help Democrats as a whole for the party take up all of her policy ideas. In particular, if you go back in time to the feverish days of 2019-2020, she was advocating for some unsound ideas rather than pushing back on them.

But she’s a smart person, she has chilled out in office, and I think she’s been a model citizen and politician in terms of constructively articulating her disagreements with the Biden administration over Gaza. To the extent that you can fault her political judgment in the recent past, it’s that she was a Biden Defender in the post-debate crisis. That was incorrect, but if you think about how prominent leftists in the caucus could play a productive role, excessive party loyalty is exactly the direction in which Democrats should prefer them to err.

The aspiration to lead the Oversight Committee is, similarly, exactly the sort of ambition Democrats should encourage on the left.

Frontline members benefit more than anyone when Trump and his colleagues have their reputations dragged down, their corruption highlighted, and their scandals exposed. But frontline members also need to court crossover voters and demonstrate capacity for bipartisan dealmaking. They need strong oversight work, but they don’t necessarily want to be the ones doing the strong oversight work, getting bogged down in the hyper-partisan trenches. AOC, with her leftist credentials and meaningful social media followings, is precisely the sort of person frontline Democrats should want doing that work.

Connolly is a fine member, and if his health holds up, I’m sure he’ll do a fine job. But nobody knows who he is, and he’s not particularly skilled in new modes of communication. Worse, his elevation is going to keep the party stuck in the dynamic it’s been mired in since Bernie Sanders lost the nomination in 2016, where young progressives see rolling up your sleeves and beating Republicans as cringe and irrelevant. AOC asked for a job where her entire role would be fighting Republicans over issues with low policy content and advancing a progressive agenda by making them look bad in ways that help Democrats win tough races. That’s exactly the right job for a rising star on the left!

I don’t want to exaggerate the stakes in this kind of decision. But the caucus is asking for trouble here, and Hakeem Jeffries needs to think of some better ways to deploy the star player on his left flank.

AOC has the right approach

People who want me to take the anti-AOC side of this debate keep bringing up her loyalty to Biden in the July Days. And I get it — it’s good oppo.

But while obviously my first choice view would be for her and the entire Squad to decide they agree with me about everything, my second choice really is for them to do exactly what AOC has been doing. If the post-debate vibe hinted at a leftist coup against Biden, that wouldn’t have been constructive or helped anyone. Was it opportunistic to exploit Biden’s political weakness to try to score policy wins, like this rent control proposal? Yes, it was. And I’m glad that in the end, Democrats made the candidate swap instead. Harris lost, but she kept it close and House and Senate seats were saved by the swap. But again, short of agreeing with me about everything, erring on the side of partisan solidarity is exactly what I want left-wing members doing.

The Freedom Caucus spent the Obama years acting as an ideological thorn in the side of House Republican congressional leadership, and it was a huge fiasco for the Republican Party. But in 2017, they transformed themselves into something more like Trump’s Strongest Soldiers.

That’s the right way to do politics.

Those of us who are more moderate than AOC can try to convince her that we are correct on the merits of various policies, but oftentimes, we are just not going to reach agreement. Where we actually should be able to reach agreement, though, is that in a world where the tipping point Senate seats are in North Carolina or Texas or require you to beat Susan Collins in Maine, the best way to advance progressive causes is through pragmatic politics. That means finding creative ways to drum up left-wing support for mainstream Democrats.

It also means erring on the side of defending party leaders in their weak spots. In terms of The Groups vs The Veal Pen, AOC has been shifting more and more toward a “help Democrats win” model and away from a “pick fights with other Democrats” model. And, of course, an Oversight gig is the ultimate “go fight Republicans” job.

Oversight is for partisan brawlers

Back in Pelosi’s heyday, one of her key lieutenants was Henry Waxman, who represented a very safe-seat in the fancy parts of Los Angeles. He did a lot of good, substantive policy work on bills like S-CHIP, and also some bad stuff blocking transit expansion and housing in LA. He was also considered, by the standards of the era, extremely left-wing.

And during Pelosi’s rise to power, first as Minority Leader and then as Speaker facing off against George W. Bush, Waxman was the top Democrat on Oversight.

He was smart, creative, and hard-working, an effective communicator who was media-savvy in the media environment of the time. He came up with the catchphrase “culture of corruption” to weave together various Bush-era scandals into a tarnishing of the entire Republican brand. And he started this work at a time when it was tough, because Bush was extremely popular. Trump’s numbers were just sort of bad throughout his first term, so all opposition politics was on easy mode. But 9/11 made Bush incredibly popular.

And effectively opposing a popular president is tricky. There will always be people who say you should fight, fight, fight, regardless. But you don’t actually win a fight by leaning into every punch. Fighting with a popular president is risky, and it’s especially risky for the members with the most on the line — they need to duck a lot of fights, and leadership needs to help make sure they’re able to do that. But you can’t duck all the fights. A president goes from popular to unpopular in part due to deliberate efforts to pick risky fights and generate some wins. Leading those fights is an ideal role for ambitious safe seat members, because they can afford to take the risks. And in doing so, they perform a genuine service for the safe seat members. Waxman could swing at 10 pitches and strike out twice, ground out five times, and hit two singles and a home run. A frontline member has the luxury of just talking about the home run — only dingers — and frontline members getting wins is how progressive policy change is possible.

Pelosi, I’m sure, sees Connolly as a Waxman-like figure in the sense that he’s a safe seat guy she likes and trusts and has served with for a long time. Connolly’s mustache even reminds me of Waxman’s. But Connolly has no profile and no constituency outside his district.

I often wish contemporary progressives would seek out the wisdom of the ancients on various political matters. In terms of media savvy and blowing up stories, though, the learning has to go in the opposite direction.

It’s a fallacy of Squad-dom to think that going viral on social media is sufficient to win elections — you need to pick smart fights and say smart things. But being viral and compelling in the modern media environment is an important part of the job. And while Connolly is more literally similar to Waxman, AOC is much more a contemporary Henry Waxman kind of figure. And, yes, that includes the fact that she’s on the left wing of the caucus. If you transported Waxman’s policy views from 2005 to the present day, they’d be banal, but he was a progressive champion at the time — as was Pelosi before she became leader.

Put your stars in the game

I’ve written before about the Spirit of 2006, a sense we had in the mid-aughts that the cool, progressive thing to be was a partisan fighter.

This is a pretty natural dynamic: If you’re in the center politically, you have mixed feelings about the parties, but if you’re to the left of the average Democrat, you don’t. Except the vibe over the past decade has been the opposite, and being progressive is all about things like Sanders refusing to put a D next to his name. That’s a bad dynamic, and Democratic Party leaders need to try to find ways out of it. The way to win is to cultivate partisan centrism on the right flank of the party and a fighting spirit on the left.

AOC has been trying to say yes to that mission for years, and it’s disappointing that party leaders refuse to take her up on it.

She’s clearly an extremely talented and charismatic politician, someone who dramatically outperforms in terms of getting people to pay attention. She seems to implicitly recognize that her style of politics would not win a presidential election and is quietly aware that her own district has shifted quite a bit to the right over the past four years and that there is a limited appetite for hard-left politics, even in Queens.

But she’s still got her causes that she’s passionate about, she’s got a national audience, and she’s got incredible skill as a political communicator. Turning that passion and talent toward amplifying the idea that Donald Trump is bad and it’s really important to fight Republicans is the absolute best thing for her and for the party. It’s what left-wing Democrats and moderate Democrats can agree on, and it’s a message that those on the left are better-positioned to deliver, especially in the rougher moments. Parking the Oversight job in the hands of an establishment graybeard (or mustache, as the case may be) is a blown opportunity. I hope the next time a job doing high-profile partisan work becomes available, Jeffries finds a way to reward AOC with a bigger opportunity.