← Back to context

Comment by Uehreka

8 months ago

You know AOC was a bartender before running for congress right? While most reps are lawyers, many come from a diverse range of backgrounds, there probably is in fact someone in congress who used to manage a supermarket. This diversity of backgrounds is generally seen as a good thing when it comes to understanding the impact of upcoming legislation.

22 comments

Uehreka

Reply
GauntletWizard  8 months ago

AOC was an intern for Ted Kennedy before being strategically placed in a "bartending" position as part of her background grooming. Her family owned multiple New York Brownstones in the rich part of the city. She has as much claim to humble background as Trump.

  • mikeyouse  8 months ago

    Source for any of those claims? It's pretty well known after a few weird political fights that she grew up in a tiny house in Yorktown and that her dad died when she was a freshman in college and that her mom was a house cleaner. [her childhood home: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DhCMERUXUAAY68Z?format=jpg&name=...]. Hard to square with her family "owning multiple brownstones".

    Trump's dad gave him millions of dollars to start businesses and then left him somewhere near a billion when he died.

    I think those are two pretty different upbringings!

    • puetzk  7 months ago

      > https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/about > > After high school, Alexandria attended Boston University, and graduated with degrees in Economics and International Relations (and tens of thousands of dollars in student loans). During this period she also had the opportunity to intern in the office of the late Senator Ted Kennedy.

      She was indeed a congressional intern, but then her father died and family finances got rough, and a year later Ted Kennedy died (August 25, 2009) so she lost the job in his office.

      > Following the financial crisis of 2008, tragedy struck when her father passed away suddenly from cancer. The medical bills and other growing expenses placed their home at risk of foreclosure. Alexandria pulled extra shifts to work as a waitress and bartender to support her family,

      Her father seems to have been in the business of home remodeling and renovations. I haven't found any source for "owned multiple brownstones", but a little bit of house-flipping or some rental properties wouldn't be weird to see in that kind of business. Being a landlord with a mortgage doesn't necessarily mean huge wealth, and it it's easy to believe a combination of cancer treatment bills/being unable to work/2008 housing crisis could take a situation like that from comfortable to house-poor to foreclosure on upside-down loans in an awful hurry.

ivape  8 months ago

I understand that but she is pretty much in the mold of Hilary at this point (career politician). It's bartender to straight Congressional aid or something like that and I believe straight to national politics. So, by 27 she is already in the stratosphere (earlier even, in terms of being in the circuit) and no longer down to earth. Talk about going to mars. She's supposed to represent the Bronx, and I can assure you she knows nothing about walking in the Bronx. You need to get robbed in the Bronx a few times before representing it lol.

I don't know, for both the politicians and CEOs, I sort of wonder like when do you get to say "okay I got enough out of regular life to now manage regular life for others"?. Thirty? Fourty? Fifty? So Elon is 55, but we see that simply being fifty is not enough. I'm open to having the wrong line of thinking here.

  • Uehreka  8 months ago

    I’m not sure where you get this impression of AOC. From her Wikipedia article:

    > After college, Ocasio-Cortez moved back to the Bronx and took a job as a bartender and waitress to help her mother—a house cleaner and school bus driver—fight foreclosure of their home.

    That sounds pretty “real Bronx” to me.

    As for her campaign:

    > Ocasio-Cortez began her campaign in April 2017 while waiting tables and tending bar at Flats Fix, a taqueria in New York City's Union Square. "For 80 percent of this campaign, I operated out of a paper grocery bag hidden behind that bar,"

    I don’t think there’s an age when you are “ripe” to become a politician. I think that in order to be good at it, you have to maintain contact with ordinary people and listen to their concerns. Elon sucks at it not because he’s 55 but because he thinks he knows all the answers and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.

    • hattmall  8 months ago

      You are skipping the part where she moved out of the Bronx at 5 and grew up in Westchester for the entirety of her schooling, graduated cum laude from BU and worked in DC. She only moved to the Bronx to leverage her Puerto Rican heritage after having her political ambitions shaped. When "after college" did she even move to the Bronx? Her registration in 2016 was still Westchester.

      I like her, but to pretend that she's just some up-start from the Bronx to go against the grain is absolutely false. She was selected, groomed, and installed because she fit a profile and she is a very manufactured candidate.

      1 reply →

    • ivape  8 months ago

      Yeah I get it, Jensen Huang worked at Dennys too (I sound nippy, but I'm not trying to be). I just don't think these people stayed in those environments long enough, but her upbringing definitely sounds "for real". If you are out into national politics before 30 you are out of any normalcy imho. Some people are bartenders for a lot longer if you catch my drift.

      3 replies →

  • lukifer  8 months ago

    It’s a problem with representation generally. The political theorist Benjamin Studebaker uses an analogy of getting into a hot air balloon: there are ways you can be of service to those below, giving them an overhead view, maybe warning them of danger, etc. But the further up you go, the less you have skin the game, and the less the little ant-people can truly be real to you.

    Rather than trying to force a round peg into a square hole, I’d say this a case for refactoring bicameralism: one house of professionalized legal specialists and technocrats, another house chosen by rotating lottery for short stints of public service by random citizens (sortition).

  • DoctorOW  8 months ago

    > I can assure you she knows nothing about walking in the Bronx.

    Huh? You think a bartender in the Bronx wouldn't walk while living there?