I have to be honest. Before watching Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on stage at the Munich Security Conference, I was not only convinced that she would be the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee, but I also believed that she would have a legitimate shot at beating Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or whoever landed the GOP nomination. Crazy? Maybe.
However, her most recent outing made me a little less crazy. After the performance in Munich, where she utterly flopped, I came back down to Earth and concluded that, if AOC were to win in the primary, she would get nuked out of orbit in the general. Not necessarily because of her bad policy ideas, but because she lacks the most underrated, but also the most important, quality in a political leader. In Munich, this void was on full display.
It’s not brains. It’s not knowledge or “policy chops.” It’s even not good policy ideas, “vision,” or whatever else the political class tries to sell to candidates as important. Sure, these things matter. But a lot of mainstream consultants and pundits don’t want to admit what really matters, because it could make their whole data-driven “expertise” obsolete.
Before we break down this trait, though, let’s take a look at how the left responded to AOC’s 2028 audition. We all know she got the pile-on treatment from the right. How the left judged her is more important.
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