Poor ol’ AOC, she just can’t get any respect these days it would seem.
Just last week, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was called a “moron” by independent journalist Megyn Kelly, who also called the socialist former bartender a “Kardashian in Congress.” And now former New York Gov. David Paterson — a Democrat, nonetheless — brushed her off as little more than a “phantom of the media.”
“AOC are just three letters in the alphabet,” Paterson said in a WABC interview aired Sunday.
John Catsimatidis, host of “The Cats Roundtable,” asked the former governor about the drubbing left-wing candidates endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez took in Tuesday’s primary — nine of the eleven candidates backed the Working Families Party and four of the candidates backed by Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic Socialists of America-NYC lost to more moderate Democrats, according to the New York Post.
Asked if the losses represented “the rise and fall of AOC,” Paterson shot back, “I don’t know if there ever was a rise, John.”
“I think AOC, who defeated a congressman who was notably absent from his district a lot, so she outworked him and she beat him, and then she became this overnight, national success,” he said.
“But really, there’s no evidence that it had any coattails, not in this 2022 primary, but not even in the 2020 elections,” Paterson added. “I think she is really a phantom of the media, the media projects her.”
He was referring to then-incumbent U.S. Rep. Joe Crowley, the fourth-ranked Democrat in Congress at the time who suffered a major defeat to Ocasio-Cortez in June 2018.
Paterson also pointed to the governor’s primary race, which Ocasio-Cortez did not weigh in on, as further proof that New Yorkers are unimpressed with progressive left candidates — Gov. Kathy Hochul beat the progressive candidate Jumaane Williams by 50 points.
Further dismissing Ocasio-Cortez’s influence, Paterson suggested she really had little to do with Amazon backing out on its plan to build a new facility in Long Island City.
“She was given credit for stopping Amazon from coming into New York. It had nothing to do with her,” he said. “It had to do with the legislators being angry that Governor [Andrew] Cuomo had never told them that he was negotiating with them, and took all the credit for himself.”
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Tom Tillison grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills. Tillison also contributes to BizPac Review.
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