Former President Barack Hussein Obama isn’t the only leftist luminary who’s given the cold shoulder to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young Democratic Socialist who will represent New York’s 14th congressional district come next year.
Apparently, Hollywood’s leftist elite, for whom Obama was the Second Coming and Hillary Clinton a Joan of Arc, aren’t giving her the time of day.
But that hasn’t stopped her from pushing the Democratic Party even further left than it has already gone, and concomitantly, appealing more to the young.
Beyond that, fundraising is going well for the Democrats despite the party’s obvious radical turn and ties to extremists.
Question: What will Ocasio-Cortez’s out-and-out socialism do to the party’s future?
Hollywood Snub?
Whatever her popularity on the talk-show circuit — Ocasio-Cortez has been the toast of the town, appearing for instance, on Meet The Press — Hollywood’s political elites aren’t yet on board.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the young ideologue appeared in Hollywood this week, “but she isn’t meeting with traditional Hollywood power brokers for now.”
In a break with tradition, Ocasio-Cortez, who labels herself a democratic socialist, has no plans to meet with any of the entertainment industry’s Democratic political power brokers while she is in town. She will not be having coffee with Carl Reiner. There will be no sitdown with Jeffrey Katzenberg or David Geffen. No $5,000-a-plate dinner at Robert Iger’s mansion in Brentwood.
“None of our clients are meeting with her,” says Marie Lloyd of the political and philanthropic consultancy Gonring, Spahn & Associates, which counts Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg as clients. And none of the other political operatives or members of the industry’s donor class reached by phone were aware of any meetings scheduled with Ocasio-Cortez. Some weren’t even aware she was coming to town.
Yesterday, she appeared at a luncheon with Occupy ICE radicals, and tonight, a Unitarian Church is hosting an “Evening With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”
And that’s about it for Ocasio-Cortez in Hollywood.
The question is, what happened?
As THR explained, failing to gain traction in Tinseltown reflects “a schism that has developed within the Democratic Party between the establishment wing and a more progressive wing comprised of many members who supported Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 party primary. Ocasio-Cortez, a former campaign organizer for Sanders, clearly falls into the latter camp.” THR continued,
The current divide within the Democratic party cut extremely close to home for one of the entertainment industry’s biggest names. Last month at a rally in Anaheim organized to support a pro-union ballot initiative, which was attended by hundreds of Disneyland workers, Sanders stopped just short of calling out Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger by name over what he sees as Disney’s woeful labor practices. “I want to hear the moral defense of a company that makes $9 billion in profits, $400 million for their CEOs and have a 30-year worker going hungry. Tell me how that is right,” Sanders said. Since then Ocasio-Cortez has made several public appearances with Sanders.
Then again, one expert told THR, the Hollywood Left will, in the end, join the Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez cause, its patent craziness aside.
Dan Schnur, the former director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC, says the industry may be hedging its bets: “This is ground zero for Hillary Clinton, whom they supported twice, and so it’s worth assuming that the next time Ocasio-Cortez comes to town they will be throwing rose petals at her feet. But right now it might be a little too much and too fast for a risk-averse community.”
Two Portents
Whatever Hollywood does, two things are clear. Ocasio-Cortez and candidates like her are driving the Democratic Party down the road to flat-out socialism, and it’s not unwelcome, at least according to DNC chieftain Tom Perez, a radical himself.
Ocasio-Cortez “represents the future of our party,” Perez recently told liberal radio-show host Bill Press.
And consider this: The number of chapters of Young Democratic Socialists of America on American campuses has increased 280 percent.
YDSA chapters zoomed from 15 to 57 since 2016, The Daily Caller reported. Callow college kids are being radicalized.
As well, the leftward drift of the party hasn’t hurt fundraising. Donations to the ActBlue website, a money machine for the radical Left, surged past $1 billion for this election cycle. Predicting a $1.5 billion haul by year’s end, USA Today reported, the figure is quite remarkable, given that ActBlue required “nearly 12 years — from its founding in June 2004 until March 2016 — to raise its first $1 billion.”
In addition, Bloomberg reported, Democratic candidates are outraising their GOP counterparts: “In the second quarter of this year, non-incumbent Democratic House candidates raised more than three times the amount they did in the same period in 2014. That works out to an average of $151,000 per candidate, compared with $101,000 in 2014.”
Photo: Thomas Wolf via Wikipedia
