By: Theodore Mikalis
The knives are out as Democrats view for the ideological control of their party.
The latest dispatch from the war zone sees Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He has called her a less than powerful leader, and moderate Democrats in general – of which Pelosi is purportedly one — of racism.
One Democratic party member told the New York Post that Chakrabarti has proven “incredibly polarizing” and is “pushing this conflict between Pelosi and AOC. He and AOC are looking for enemies, they are looking for fight, they are looking to create controversy. And it’s working. It’s raising money, getting more media, raising stature, increasing email lists, increasing profile.”
During the first week of July, Chakrabarti took to social media to insists that Pelosi “claims we can’t focus on impeachment because it’s a distraction from kitchen table issues. But I’d challenge you to find voters that can name a single thing House Democrats have done for their kitchen table this year. What is this legislative mastermind doing?”
Just a couple of weeks before, Chakrabarti let it slip that he thought the “New Southern Democrats” were “hell-bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the 40s.”
NBC News’ Jonathan Allen has been following the action, and recently noted, “As they feud publicly, freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is slowly learning a painful lesson about American politics at the hands of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: Power is about numbers. Pelosi has them and Ocasio-Cortez does not. The more Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., lashes out over the limits of her own influence, the more obvious those limits become and the more the imbalance tilts in the direction of Pelosi, D-Calif. After all, their fellow politicians are nothing if not hypersensitive to even the slightest shifts in the winds of power.”
He continued, “Now, they’re freely dunking on Ocasio-Cortez and her allies in the wake of her not-so-veiled allegation that Pelosi is discriminating against her clique, known as “The Squad,” because of their lack of seniority, their gender and their skin color.”
Ocasio-Cortez had previously remarked that the House Speaker had been intentionally “singling out” freshman congresswomen of color. Oddly, President Trump came to Pelosi’s defense, saying that in his estimation she was not a racist.
Others are enjoying the infighting less. House Democrats and their aides “are quickly losing patience with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over her office’s nonstop sparring with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other long-serving members, suggesting the speaker’s dismissive comments toward her may represent the view of a growing section of the caucus,” noted Fox News. “She is a complete fraud,” one senior Democratic source told Fox News on Friday, succinctly summing up members’ frustration.”
