Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Graces The Cover Of Time Magazine
Whether they like it or not, Republicans’ most-loathed Democrat and the left’s most-terrifying congressional freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is a phenom, at least that’s what Time magazine has called her in their cover story of the New York representative.
Ocasio-Cortez will have her first Time cover for the magazIne’s April 1 issue, demonstrating, as its national correspondent Charlotte Alter notes in the story, that she’s the “second most talked-about politician in America, after the President of the United States.”
While critics have alleged she’s obsessed with the spotlight, Ocasio-Cortez, who shot to fame after beating 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary to represent New York’s 14th District last June, says she misses not being the center of attention.
“I miss being able to go outside in sweats,” she told the magazine. “I can’t go anywhere in public and just be a person without a lot of people watching everything I do.”
But her ability to capture national attention allows the political newcomer, who views herself as an activist who is more interested in “moral imperatives than on incremental policy wins,” to accomplish her biggest objective: winning hearts and minds. This, she believes, is how you transform a nation.
While detractors on both sides of the political aisle write her policies, like her Green New Deal proposal, off as fanciful, Ocasio-Cortez contends she’s thinking ahead and is more concerned with defining the Democratic Party’s agenda for the decades that follow.
“By the time legislation actually gets through, it is five years from now,” she says. “So everything we introduce needs to have 2025 or our kids in mind.”
Referring to the congresswoman, who represents parts of the Bronx and Queens, as the “Wonder Woman of the left, Wicked Witch of the right,” the Time feature shares Ocasio-Cortez’s story as a nerdy Bronx-born, Westchester County-raised child of Puerto Rican parents to a struggling Boston University alum who worked as an organizer and bartender while trying to keep her and her family afloat following the death of her father, the 2008 financial crisis and her own mounting school debt to Brand New Congress recruiting the political novice to run for office after receiving a letter from her brother about his sister’s might.
This month, Ocasio-Cortez also scored a spot on the cover of Rolling Stone, appearing alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and fellow freshman Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.) as the four Democratic “Women Shaping the Future.”
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