THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALTHURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2019 N AWASHINGTON — Less than
two weeks after being sworn in
last year, Representative Alexan-
dria Ocasio-Cortez, a young pro-
gressive star fresh off an upset of
one of the top Democratic leaders
in the House, put her fellow Demo-
crats on notice that she would
soon be coming for them, too.
Appearing in a promotional vid-
eo for Justice Democrats — the in-
surgent liberal group dedicated to
unseating entrenched Democrat-
ic lawmakers that helped sweep
her to power — Ms. Ocasio-
Cortez, a Bronx firebrand, urged
her supporters to recruit candi-
dates to run against her new col-
leagues. She was flanked by the
group’s three founders, two of
whom had just taken top jobs in
her office. There were even whis-
pers that she might try to oust
Representative Hakeem Jeffries
of New York, a rising star re-
garded by many Democrats as a
future speaker.
But after nearly nine months,
with her eyes now wide open to
the downsides of her revolution-
ary reputation and social media
fame, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has tem-
pered her brash, institution-be-
damned style with something dif-
ferent: a careful political calculus
that adheres more closely to the
unwritten rules of Washington
she once disdained.
“I think I have more of a context
of what it takes to do this job and
survive on a day-to-day basis in a
culture that is inherently hostile to
people like me,” Ms. Ocasio-
Cortez said in an interview.
Gone from her Washington of-
fice are her original chief of staff
and her communications director,
two Justice Democrats founders
who were intent on waging their
divisive brand of politics from
their offices on Capitol Hill. No
longer an unabashed ambassador
of the combative group, Ms. Oca-
sio-Cortez has carefully managed
her involvement with it.
And she never did go after Mr.
Jeffries, now the chairman of the
House Democratic Caucus, the
same position held last year by
Representative Joseph Crowley
when Ms. Ocasio-Cortez set her
sights on ousting him.
Instead, she announced on
Tuesday that her first endorse-
ment of a primary challenger to
an incumbent Democrat would be
Marie Newman, who is making a
second run at ousting Representa-
tive Daniel Lipinski of Illinois, a
conservative-leaning Democrat
who is regarded by many of his
colleagues as something of an out-
lier because of his opposition to
abortion rights and his vote
against the Affordable Care Act.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is not the
only Democrat to break with Mr.
Lipinski and support Ms. New-
man, nor is she the first. Deciding
on the endorsement, she said, was
in part a product of having learned
to balance her twin roles as a dissi-
dent and a member of Congress.
“It’s not just about being an ac-
tivist,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “It
forces you to grow. So it doesn’t
mean you don’t endorse activists,
but it also requires an assessment
for a capacity of growth and how
you navigate a space like this.”
When she first arrived on Capi-
tol Hill, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and her
team made it clear they planned to
use their perch inside Congress as
a platform for their divisive, out-
sider brand of politics. On her first
day of orientation, Ms. Ocasio-
Cortez joined protesters camped
outside Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s
office agitating for the Green New
Deal.
“It could have made people
mad; they could have put me on
the dog walking committee,” she
joked later that week on a Justice
Democrats conference call pro-
moting the organization’s candi-
date recruitment campaign.
“They still might.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez may have
meant it as an offhand quip, but
her comment underscored a reali-
ty on Capitol Hill that she and her
team were slow to fully appreci-
ate: the extent to which power
and the ability to get things done
in the House were dependent on
personal relationships and re-
spect for the hierarchy.
The first-term congresswoman
enjoys rich public support outside
Congress, particularly on the so-
cial media platforms where pro-
gressive activism thrives. But the
approach that she and her cohorts
champion — pulling the institu-
tion to the left in part by threat-
ening the careers of any Demo-
crats who fail to embrace their
ideas — quickly alienated many of
her colleagues, and has made it
difficult for her to get anything
done.
In private conversations, many
of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s Democrat-
ic colleagues routinely complain
that in her zeal to build her social
media celebrity and political
brand, she is too quick to cast as-
persions on her fellow lawmakers,
painting them as apologists for
the status quo.
“In many ways, I feel like I walk
around with a scarlet letter be-
cause many members who just
have any primary, whether I know
about it or not, tend to project that
onto me,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said
in an interview. “In many ways, I
feel like I walk through that body
as a symbol of someone who
should not be there and a threat to
the way power is organized.”
She said she has gone through a“loss of innocence and naïveté,”
realizing that it was impossible to
separate the legislative work of
serving in Congress with the poli-
tics of re-election campaigns.
“They are frankly much closer
in that dynamic and much closer
in overlapping than a lot of people
tend to realize,” she said.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has cut back
on her appearances on behalf of
Justice Democrats and has begun
bolstering her fellow incumbent
freshman lawmakers, like Repre-
sentative Joe Neguse of Colorado,
a member of Democratic leader-
ship whom she is joining at a fund-
raiser this week for the Boulder
County Democratic Party.
In April, she rallied around
some of her colleagues who
flipped districts President Trump
won in 2016, encouraging her
Twitter followers to donate to
their campaigns. She diligently
reached out to the so-called major-
ity-makers on her committees —
the centrist freshmen who flipped
Republican-leaning seats — to
win them over.
Her aides, however, continued
to carry the Justice Democrats’
flag without restraint, tweeting
out their support when the group
challenged incumbents, to the dis-
may of Democratic aides and law-
makers. In July, Saikat
Chakrabarti, then her chief of
staff, ignited a firestorm by accus-
ing centrist Democrats of en-
abling “a racist system” after they
blocked an effort to defund immi-
gration enforcement as part of an
emergency border aid package. In
a tweet, now deleted, he compared
them to “new Southern Demo-
crats,” a reference to segrega-
tionists. It was a remarkable
breach of protocol for an unelect-
ed aide.Mr. Jeffries used the House
Democrats’ official Twitter ac-
count to deliver a biting warning
shot in a tweet, also now deleted,
that singled out Mr. Chakrabarti.
Two weeks later, Mr. Chakrabarti
announced he would leave the of-
fice.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s new chief
of staff, Ariel Eckblad, a former
aide to Senator Kamala Harris of
California, is well versed in the
workings of Capitol Hill and is
widely seen as a sober-minded re-
placement. Corbin Trent, who had
been handling communicationsfor both Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s cam-
paign and her congressional of-
fice, a highly unusual arrange-
ment, has returned to the political
side.
The rift was an escalation of a
feud that began days earlier when
Maureen Dowd, a columnist for
The New York Times, asked Ms.
Pelosi about the fury from Ms.
Ocasio-Cortez and three other
progressive freshmen over the
border aid package. The speaker
noted that the group had failed to
persuade any other Democrats to
join them in voting against the
House’s version of the bill.
“All these people have their
public whatever and their Twitter
world,” Ms. Pelosi said then. “But
they didn’t have any following.
They’re four people, and that’s
how many votes they got.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez fired back by
saying that it was she and the pro-
gressive activists who revere her,
not Ms. Pelosi, who wielded the
real power in the party, and later
complained about the speaker’s
“singling out of newly elected
women of color.” Mr. Chakrabarti
followed up with a tweet question-
ing the speaker’s leadership.
The break ultimately led to a
private, one-on-one meeting last
month with Ms. Pelosi in the
speaker’s office, where Ms. Oca-
sio-Cortez appeared ready to call
a truce, telling reporters, “I think
the speaker respects the fact that
we’re coming together as a party
and a community.”
“Very rarely does a member en-
ter the House and exit the House
as the same person,” said former
Representative Steve Israel,
Democrat of New York. In fresh-man orientation, Mr. Israel said,
representatives are asked what
kind of member they want to be:
an activist, a policy wonk, a politi-
cal leader.
“You have to grapple with
choosing a lane,” he said, “and
very often, you end up shifting
lanes.”
But Waleed Shahid, a spokes-
man for Justice Democrats, said
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has never been
interested in staying in just one
lane.
“Navigating her role as a legis-
lator and a movement builder is
basically what her career is
about,” Mr. Shahid said in an inter-
view. “We’ll continue to have that
theory of change with one foot in
D.C. and one foot in the move-
ment. It’s really hard to do that.”
For Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, the
process continues to be bumpy.
Even with Ms. Eckblad at the
helm, her office still operates in
some ways more like an upstart
campaign on a shoestring budget
than like a congressional office. A
replacement for Mr. Trent has yet
to be hired, and another aide who
routinely irritates rank-and-file
aides and lawmakers with com-
bative comments — like when he
claimed his fellow congressional
aides were elitist “careerists” — is
still in place.
And while it is not clear how
many more Justice Democrats
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez will endorse,
she said she was still “very wed-
ded” to the insurgent theory of
change that propelled her to Con-
gress.
“Change by nature takes fric-
tion,” she said. “It’s just a question
of how we move through it.”Nearly 9 Months on the Job, a Firebrand Adapts to Washington’s Rules
CELESTE SLOMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESBy CATIE EDMONDSONRepresentative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New
York, with Saikat Chakrabarti, her former chief of staff, one of sev-
eral original staff members no longer with her Washington office.ANNIE TRITT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESThis Sunday,
grounded.
nytimes.com/magazineALSO IN THE MAGAZINE:Can the N.F.L. turn an
Australian rugby player into
an offensive lineman?Three generations of a
family’s life inside and
outside America’s rigid
racial categories.Jacqueline Woodson’s books
for young people present
frank portrayals of interracial
relationships. Now she’s
turning her attention to adults.ADVERTISERSFor information on advertising
in The New York Times
Magazine, contact Maggie
Kiselick at (212) 556-1445 or
[email protected].WASHINGTON — Representa-
tive Joseph P. Kennedy III of
Massachusetts plans to announce
on Saturday that he is challenging
Senator Ed Markey for the Demo-
cratic Senate nomination in their
state, setting up a titanic genera-
tional clash next year between an
heir to the state’s foremost politi-
cal dynasty and the longest-serv-
ing member of its congressional
delegation.
Mr. Kennedy informed Mr.
Markey of his plans today, accord-
ing to a Democrat familiar with
their discussion who spoke on the
condition of anonymity to relate a
private conversation. Mr. Ken-
nedy, the grandson of Robert F.
Kennedy, will announce his candi-
dacy in a modest, East Boston
neighborhood before embarking
on a statewide tour.
The contest will almost cer-
tainly be the country’s most high-
profile Senate primary and could
offer clues for just how eager
Trump-era Democrats are to re-
place more incumbent lawmak-
ers. But unlike with some of the
Tea Party-era Republican races
between ideological foes, Mr. Ken-
nedy, 38, and Mr. Markey, 73, are
both reliable progressives and
each is claiming support from lib-
eral leaders and organizations.
Initial polling indicates that Mr.
Kennedy would begin the contest
as the front-runner. And some
Massachusetts Democrats — un-
easy about the prospect of a frac-
tious, yearlong primary contest —
had hoped that Mr. Markey would
take a hint and bow out after word
of Mr. Kennedy’s interest in the
seat first leaked last month.
But Mr. Markey, who was first
elected to the House in 1976, made
clear again Wednesday that he in-
tends to run for re-election.
“I’m going to run in all of the is-
sues that I have been fighting for
today and into the future: climate
change, income inequality, a wom-
an’s right to choose and on gun
safety legislation,” Mr. Markey
told reporters in the Capitol after
The Boston Globe revealed Mr.
Kennedy’s intentions, adding:
“The response I have been getting
across the state has been abso-
lutely terrific.”
Mr. Markey’s senior campaign
adviser John Walsh made no men-
tion of Mr. Kennedy in a prepared
statement, but did note that “elec-
tions are about choices.” In an in-
terview last month, Mr. Markey
emphasized his lengthy legisla-
tive record and blue-collar roots,
previewing how he’d run against
his younger, more affluent col-
league. Massachusetts has been
riveted by the prospect of a Ken-
nedy-versus-Markey showdown
since August, after a report by
The New York Times found that
the political scion had begun
telling senior Democratic officials
that he was considering taking on
Mr. Markey.Some in Washington and Bos-
ton were skeptical that Mr. Ken-
nedy would go through with the
race, finding his calculation to be
out of character for a young law-
maker who has sought to avoid
controversy since being elected to
the House in 2012.
But as Mr. Kennedy began trav-
eling far from his southeastern
Massachusetts district in recent
weeks, it became clear he was se-
rious about confronting Mr.
Markey. And with a long roster of
Massachusetts Democrats rising
through the state’s political ranks,
it became clear that running
against Mr. Markey may prove to
be his best chance to join the Sen-
ate where his grandfather and
great-uncles, Edward M. and John
F. Kennedy, once served.
A handful of Massachusetts
Democrats began sounding notes
of regret for getting behind Mr.
Markey after it became clear Mr.
Kennedy may run. But one lead-
ing figure said she was remaining
by the senator’s side.
“I endorsed Ed Markey last
February,” said Senator Elizabeth
Warren. “I couldn’t ask for a bet-
ter partner in the United States
Senate.”
But Ms. Warren, who taught Mr.
Kennedy at Harvard Law School,
noted that she has “known Joe
since long before he got into poli-
tics.”
And asked if he was wise to pick
this fight, she said: “I have no crit-
icism.”Kennedy to Announce Bid for U.S. Senate
By JONATHAN MARTIN
and NICHOLAS FANDOS