By Jay Willis
GQ (7/2/18)
It took the right-wing pundit class all of four days to decide how it planned to attack Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old Bronx native who won her New York City congressional district’s Democratic primary on the strength of some really, really good policy ideas. Their chosen approach, however, might be characterized as a novel one. You should know, says this basic-cable talking head, that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—and this is a Certified Politics Bombshell, so please make sure you’re in a place where you can audibly gasp—grew up in a house.
Oftentimes, the surest sign of a viable political strategy is the extent to which its successful deployment makes your opponents nervous.
Look at this dwelling! Feast your eyes on the scale of its opulence! Why, it has a roof, and trees, and several windows! Its walls completely enclose the living area so as to protect its habitants from the elements! By golly, I bet if you were granted access to the home’s interior, you might even find a refrigerator in which Ocasio-Cortez’s family could store perishable food for consumption several days beyond its purchase date! How, he might ask, can someone be poor if they also eat food?
Set aside, for a moment, the fact that Ocasio-Cortez attended Boston University, which is neither “Ivy League” nor “Brown University.” (Set aside, too, how creepy it is to post on social media a Google Street View image of whatever now exists at the site of someone’s former home as a gotcha argument.) Cardillo’s implicit assertion is that because a cherry-picked aspect of her childhood does not comport with his lazy, pernicious stereotypes about the lives of working-class people of color, she must therefore be an inauthentic liar.
The candidate responded, in order, by correcting his mistakes and putting him in a blender. …
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