The Establishment didn’t know what to make of AOC. But he had a résumé - the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, constitutional-law professor at the University of Chicago - that the Democratic-consultant class could easily recognize and safely admire. Brown-skinned, good looking, with his own misadventures in the postcollegiate wilderness, he challenged political convention even as he titillated its guardians. Barack Obama, previous holder of the “generational talent” title, may have resembled Ocasio-Cortez in some ways. It established AOC’s prodigious political gifts while showcasing a new sort of Democratic candidate and a new way of recruiting them. 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. 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. “Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office,” she said at the start of her journey to Washington. But rewind five years and it becomes clear just how unprecedented her rise has been. Frame a thing as expected and it can be discounted.
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.
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