If you heard something about a blogger trashing 29 year old Representative-elect Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for her clothing, Greg Fallis has an explanation for you:
Remember, ‘it’ is the misleading bullshit conservatives throw in front of us to distract us. It’s NOT about her clothes. When we respond to bullshit by discussing the clothing options of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we are falling for the misleading bullshit. It’s sabotage. It’s creating a narrative designed to undermine Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It’s suggesting she is a fraud, that she’s not who she says she is, that she doesn’t belong in a position of power, that she can’t be trusted. That she’s phony. I’m going to say it again; it’s NOT about her clothes. We do her a disservice when we let folks like Eddie Scarry distract us by talking about her clothes.
Repeat his attack — and similar attacks — for a decade and some of that narrative will infiltrate the public consciousness. After a few years, people will begin to distrust AOC without quite knowing why; they’ll begin to dislike her without knowing quite why. This is exactly what conservatives did to Hillary Clinton. It’s what they’ve done to Nancy Pelosi. It’s what they’ve consistently done to all effective Democratic women leaders.
They’ve started on AOC even before she’s been sworn in. Why? Because she scares the absolute shit out of them. She’s young. She’s young AND she’s conventionally attractive. She’s a young, attractive woman AND she’s of Puerto Rican descent. She’s a young, attractive, working class Latinx AND with less than US$200,000 in campaign funds, she won a primary against a long-term Democrat with campaign funds of nearly $3.5 million and who was the Chair of the Democratic Caucus of the House of Representatives. She did it through hard work combined with intelligence and passion. And that scares them.
Right now, we can think of Ocasio-Cortez as a faux-pinpoint of light. Faux, because we really know little about her, but because she’s a fresh face that has had little time to indulge in subterfuge, we think we have some understanding of her.
We don’t. But this is not a condemnation, nor even a warning. This observation applies to most novice legislators.
The goal, if we take Fallis seriously, is to smear that pinpoint so that it’s seems harder and harder to get a read on Ocasio-Cortez. She may be full of ideas and ideals and energy, but, hey, her dress, and ya know she is just a girl.
This is the time, if a citizen hasn’t already done so, to formulate standards on which to judge legislators. Too often – which I can say because I often belong in this group – we simply vaguely watch and, at some point, our gut comes back with an answer, with little regard as to the integrity of the inputs, as to whether or not we like someone.
I think it’d be wise to come up with important categories, ranging from ideology to leadership qualities to ethics, and then be ready to pursue measurements for each category and each legislator we’re interested in. If, in the end, your gut doesn’t agree with your brain, then it’s time to sit down and figure out what you’ve missed in your rational approach, or which news source is feeding you bad information for your gut to process.
