AOC warns Biden risks ‘collapse of support’ unless he meets progressive demands

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Radical New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believes that President Joe Biden’s key to electoral victory in 2022 and potentially 2024 is embracing even more left-wing radicalism.

Speaking with local station NY1 this week, the lawmaker suggested that the president should focus less on the concerns of moderate, “middle-of-the-road” independent voters and more on the concerns of radicalized “progressives.”

“We need to acknowledge that this isn’t just about middle of the road, increasingly narrow band of independent voters. But this is really about the collapse of support among young people, among the Democratic base, feeling like they worked overtime to get this president elected and they aren’t necessarily being seen,” she said.

“Progressives” who, for instance, want him to eliminate their student loan debt.

“It is Biden’s power and ability to cancel student debt, and nobody else’s,” the congresswoman stressed to NY1.

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In fairness to Ocasio-Cortez, Biden did promise while on the campaign trail to deal with student loan debt once he took office. But in fairness to the president, he wound up reneging on some controversial ideas like this, presumably to avoid suffering damage in the polls.

This strategy clearly hasn’t worked. Polling averages tracked by RealClearPolitics show Biden hovering around a paltry 41 percent job approval rating, down by nearly 15 percentage points from the record high he’d enjoyed in January 2021.

Ocasio-Cortez for her part appears to believe this decline is a consequence of the president not behaving radically enough and that he must make up for it by pushing through radical legislation (by, for instance, eliminating the filibuster) before the November election.

“I do think that time for the administration is running out. And we do not have much more time to wait because these falling poll numbers,” she said to NY1.

The problem is that the president’s record is already stacked with radicalism, from his attacks on the oil/gas industry to his use of authoritarian mandates, his full capitulation to the radical transgender lobby and his embrace of racial essentialism:

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Instead of boosting his poll numbers, however, these actions have pulled them lower and lower, and this seems to be no coincidence.

New York magazine notes that the president had campaigned on “steer[ing] clear of the faddish slogans and radical demands that had seized his party’s base and focus[ing] relentlessly on practical benefits desired by the working-class voters who had deserted Democrats for Donald Trump.”

But being a leftist magazine, NY mag blames his fall from grace on him not spending enough money.

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“When Democrats were racing the $2 trillion, entirely deficit-financed American Rescue Plan to Biden’s desk in March, he was widely seen as both moderate and effective. Now that they are spending endless months bickering over a fully financed plan of roughly the same size, he is seen as liberal and ineffective,” the magazine reads.

FYI, the president had sought during just his first year in office to spend $12 trillion:

His spending habits and attacks on the oil/gas industry have spurred devastating consequences, including gross inflation and spiked gas prices.

Yet the president continues to double down on the exact sort of “green” policies that “progressives” like Ocasio-Cortez crave:

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A Rasmussen poll published earlier this month found that a 70 percent majority of likely U.S. voters “believe the U.S. government should encourage increased oil and gas production to reduce America’s dependence on foreign sources of oil and gas.”

Only 18 percent — presumably the “progressive” base that Ocasio-Cortez believes Biden should focus on — disagreed.

Vivek Saxena

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