The Week that Was ...
Ending Sunday, April 27, 2025
Welcome to the latest edition of The Week that Was, my rundown of what happened last week, curated, in the loosest sense of the word, for your reading pleasure, or displeasure.
First, after the photo of the week—the wildfires in New Jersey—I take a deep dive into a shallow take on Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, from The New Yorker. After that, The Financial Times, continues to show no signs of improvement. Other topics include: Trump seemed to hit a speed bump; the ironies of U.S. power, or the massively overvalued U.S. dollar; Tesla called out to Musk, or at least the massive drop in sales did; Pete Hegseth may be too incompetent, even for Trump; AOC was discussed and dismissed; Target feels the DEI rub. The bonus video is the ending scene of the great Being There, directed by Hal Ashby, based on the novel by Jerzy Kosiński, and starring Peter Sellers, with Melvyn Douglas, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Warden, and Richard Dysart, among others. This film says as much about American politics as just about any other movie.
1. Photo of the Week: Wildfire! In New Jersey!
2. A Deep Dive into a Shallow Look at Claudia Sheinbaum: The New Yorker Considers the Mexican President
3. The Financial Times Does It Again
4. Trump Hits Reality, a Bit
5. Therein Lies the Rub: The Ironies of American Power
6. Musk Misses His Dough
7. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Probably Too Incompetent for Trump
8. AOC Under Discussion
9. Target Misses the Bullseye
10. Bonus Video: Ending Scene of Being There
1. Photo of the Week: Wildfire! In New Jersey!
Photo courtesy of New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection
Is New Jersey the new California for wildfires?
2. A Deep Dive into a Shallow Look at Claudia Sheinbaum: The New Yorker Considers the Mexican President
The New Yorker decided to take a look at Claudia Sheinbaum, and, while the article actually does have some merit, it is still, well, not very cognizant. And it certainly doesn’t get off to a good start.
The subtitle of the piece is Can Claudia Sheinbaum manage the demands from D.C.—and her own country’s fragile democracy? Note: The U.S.A. is first, then Mexican democracy. I must admit that I find it rather disconcerting for an American journalist to refer to another country’s democracy as “fragile.” I was in Mexico City for the election. Mexican democracy is vibrant, and the country is undoubtedly more democratic than the U.S., which is, I’ll admit, a low bar.
I was in Mexico City for the election. What I saw was an incredibly vibrant democracy.
The piece starts out with some puzzling characterizations.
“Mexico’s most important venue for political theatre is the mañanera—the press conference that takes place each weekday morning in the Treasury Room, a vast Italianate hall in the Presidential palace. It took its current form in 2018, under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—a pugnacious, swaggering populist known throughout Mexico as AMLO. …. AMLO’s mañaneras began at 7 A.M. and often stretched on for hours, with guest speakers, musical interludes, and endless Presidential monologues. Because he was perennially at war with the press, they were often his primary mode of communicating with the Mexican people.”
Well, I am puzzled that the mañaneras, of both former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and those of his successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum, are characterized as “political theatre.” They are the means by which both Presidents have bypassed the conservative Mexican press and reached out to the Mexican people. A vast number of Mexicans tune in, or watch, the mañaneras on their dedicated YouTube channel. This isn’t a show; it’s a movement.
I have yet to see one journalist north of the Rio Grande remark on the fact that the last two Mexican presidents have been able to hold forth with the press and with reporters, and with citizens, a couple of hours, at 7 am, five days a week. Imagine an American president doing that.
Continuing, the writer of this piece, Stephania Taladrid, then gives us some atmospherics: “click of high heels on stone”; (“sensible shoes,” in my opinion) and the President’s outfit, “a black pencil skirt and a shirt embroidered with Indigenous motifs.” Superficial.
The piece then goes on to portray everyone in the room and probably throughout Mexico as being in deathly fear of Donald Trump, and portrays the Sheinbaum’s discussion of the Mexican government’s attempt to fight dengue fever (a serious part of some very serious health initiatives) as an attempt to divert attention from Trump and the U.S.A.
Teladrid then suggests that Sheinbaum’s popularity is due to AMLO, and not due to her commitment and her abilities. And then gets in some digs using the tired label “populist.”
“In the months before the Mexican Presidential election last June, banners went up across the country with the message ‘Es Claudia’—it is Claudia. The phrase, summoning a kind of papal succession, alerted the political faithful that Sheinbaum had been chosen to succeed López Obrador as the head of his party, the National Regeneration Movement, or MORENA. Sheinbaum had spent most of her career in Mexico City; she was an urban intellectual, a type that populists tend to dislike. But AMLO was revered to the point of worship, and his endorsement gave her a potent advantage. When the votes were counted, Sheinbaum had beaten her closest competitor by thirty-one points.
First of all, why the phrase “papal succession”? That is an awful metaphor for the electoral process in Mexico. The MORENA party, by the way, got its name from a newspaper carrying the title Regeneración, or Regeneration. It would be nice to see more discussion of the Flores Magon brothers. They were instrumental in setting the spark that ignited the Mexican Revolution. After all, Francisco Madero simply wanted the Porfiriato with elections, sort of a managed elected dictatorship. The book Bad Mexicans is a good place to start.
Mexico is a country populated by Mexicans, but Teledrid then proceeds to make everything about the U.S.A.
“How she would govern was less clear. The view in Washington was cautiously optimistic, a senior Biden Administration official told me—though skeptics worried that ‘she’d have all the flaws of López Obrador without any of his authority.’”
I’m not surprised to hear that “Biden administration officials” would think something like that; however, since these are the people who hid Biden’s mental infirmities while otherwise conducting a fairly awful foreign policy, well, I don’t need to hear from them. I’ve heard more than enough.
Teladrid then does touch on Sheinbaum’s life, and she mentions, for several paragraphs, some aspects I have not seen covered in the media up here. Teledrid touches on 1968 and the Tlatelco massacre, and its influence on Sheinbaum. She mentions her grandparents’ immigration from Lithuania and Bulgaria. And the fact that many of Sheinbaum’s relatives from that generation where murdered in the Holocaust.
Teladrid also discusses Sheinbaum’s participation in the protests against “reforms” to Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico), or UNAM, the remarkable university in Mexico City. The “reforms” would have devastated the mission of UNAM: to provide free education. It still costs money to live in Mexico City. Books are not free, either. In fact, AMLO himself attended UNAM on a scholarship that paid living expenses.
The protests were victorious. And, although the article implies that Sheinbaum’s support was limited:
“Sheinbaum was deeply engaged, but behind the scenes. Each night after the debates, she met with the students to help them plan the next day’s line of attack.”
This article would suggest otherwise.
After that, Teledrid delves into the stolen election of 1988 and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas.[1] Teladrid casts Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas into a heroic role, and he was certainly transformative, but them uses him to casually diminish AMLO. Cárdenas founded a new political party, Partido de la Revolución Democrática, or RRD, in 1989, to oppose the longtime monopoly of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI. Teladrid puts it this way:
“In 1997, Cárdenas ran in Mexico City’s first free election for mayor, and won decisively. The PRI’s monopoly was broken, and rival parties across the ideological spectrum began to gather strength. As Cárdenas later wrote, Mexico was at last on its way to ‘dismantling the state’s party regime.’
“By then, the P.R.D. had found a new leader—López Obrador, who at the time was still an ambitious upstart.”
“[A]mbitious upstart”? AMLO has been involved politically since at least 1973, and was a founding member of the PRD. For a better English language account of AMLO’s career from 1973 to his election as president in 2018, Assessing AMLO: The Path to Power, by Kurt Hackbarth in Jacobin magazine, is a very good starting point.
Teladrid then continues in her dismissive tone:
“In the run-up to the 2000 elections, when he ran to succeed Cárdenas as mayor, Sheinbaum and Ímaz hosted campaign meetings for him. The son of shopkeepers from Tabasco state, AMLO had an outsider’s charisma: he drove an old Nissan to work and moved around the country without an entourage, talking with regular Mexicans. He vowed to purge the government of corruption. But, rather than encouraging unity, he inveighed against ‘élites’ and the ‘power mafia’—a group that came to include seemingly anyone who opposed him. Nevertheless, Sheinbaum was fascinated by his political conviction. It was, as she saw it, the essential fuel for a ‘movement of transformation.’”
How or why does one seek unity with an elite that essentially used Mexico for its own needs? The use of the words “nevertheless” also makes no sense. Why would Sheinbaum, after all, a dedicated political activist from her teens, seek unity with “elites”? Sometimes it seems to me that the neoliberal press just cannot understand why Claudia Sheinbaum and AMLO and others want to serve their country. Shouldn’t they be clamoring to have dinner with Bill and Hillary at Roberta’s in Brooklyn? Or to hang with the Obamas on Martha’s Vineyard?
By the way, before 2018, the North America press regularly derided this elite as corrupt. Although NAFTA was supposed to transform them into North American style liberals. I’m curious, also: Are we supposed to seek “unity” with Trump?
At this point Teladrid basically starts following the usual format of these pieces: quote from a very select group of “experts” who are tied ideologically to neoliberalism (and well paid for it), then bring everything back to the United States and the supposedly incredible and seemingly insuperable problems that Mexico and its government faces, with a condescending tone of hard realism softened with a touch of pity.
In this case, the “expert” is Eduardo Guerrero, “a well-regarded security analyst.” He’s the guy who wrote, in 2014, Yes: Violence and Murder Are Decreasing in Mexico. In 2014, the rate was 16.85 per 100,000; by 2018, the year of AMLO’s election, the murder rate had climbed to 29.58 per 100,000, a 77% increase. Nice crystal ball you got there. Since AMLO’s election, the murder has started a slow decline from the historic highs achieved by two successive conservative governments. For more info, click here.
The rest of the article is more of the usual stuff about tariffs, Trump, cartels, democracy, etc., with scant reporting and even less thought. But she does repeat the wholly unfounded Teledrid does get in some praise for Marcelo Ebrard, the Secretary of the Economy in the Sheinbaum government, as “perhaps Mexico’s nimblest political operative—a canny centrist who served as secretary of foreign affairs under AMLO.” Well, not nimble enough to beat Sheinbaum for the MORENA nomination.
And Teladrid states that Sheinbaum is under pressure from the U.S. about the “cartels.” Let me present some thoughts on that. At the moment I’m reading Gomorrah, by Roberto Saviano, a searing and very personal account of organized crime in Naples: its tactics; its organizational structure, and its worldwide reach. Organized crime in Southern Italy is no secret, and yet I cannot recall one instance of any of these groups being called “cartels.” No one has called for their designation as “terrorist organizations,” as far as I know. And there is U.S. official awareness as well: Saviano notes the warnings that the Department of Defense provides to U.S. military personnel stationed at the enormous NATO base on the Bay of Naples.
And the reason is not geographical, either, I don’t think, but why don’t you decide for yourself. Take a look at the State Department’s list: Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
It doesn’t take long to reveal what we already know: this is all about domestic U.S. politics.
As for “cartels,” may I suggest a look at Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture (Los cárteles no existen. Narcotráfico y cultura en México), by Oswaldo Zavala, translated by William Savinar. Zavala reviews the history of PRI involvement with organized crime in Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s. At that time, when the Reagan Administration, as the Cold War was ending, starting calling drug trafficking organizations “cartels.” And then the term entered popular culture; after that, the political discourse, where the media cartels have repeated the term until it was drilled into our collective psyche. Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture costs $35, but you can check it out of your library. At least that’s what I did.
Concerning Eduardos, may I suggest taking a look at Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (Las venas abiertas de América Latina), by another Eduardo, the great Eduardo Galeano. This work is a searing account of the exploitation of Latin American for the last 500 years, and how the wealth that was extracted from Latin America fueled so much of the wealth of the developed world. Open Veins of Latin America has been incredibly influential in Latin America. Isabel Allende wrote the Foreword to the U.S. edition of Open Veins. In that foreword, Allende writes:
“The breath of hope is what moves me most in Galeano’s work. Like thousands of refugees all over the continent [Allende previously described the wave of coups, planned in Washington, DC, that engulfed South American in 1973], I also had to leave my country after the military coup of 1973. I could not take much with me: some clothes, family pictures, a small bag with dirt from my garden, and two books: an old edition of the Odes by Pablo Neruda, and the book with the yellow cover, Las venas abiertas de América Latina. More that twenty years later, I still have that book with me.”
Open Veins of Latin America has been so influential, in fact, that Stephania Teladrid mentioned the book in a piece she wrote for The New Yorker in 2024, Will Mexico Decide the U.S. Election? The article covers the visit of Alicia Bárcena, Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs, to the U.S.—Mexico border. Teladrid notes that Galeano’s work had a great influence on Bárcena:
“Young people were taking to the streets to demand change, and many were violently repressed; in 1971, dozens were killed by a paramilitary unit, which contained agents trained by the United States. Bárcena took part in protests, and augmented her political education by reading such leftist thinkers as Eduardo Galeano, who wrote the anti-imperialist tract ‘Open Veins of Latin America.’”
Teladrid doesn’t touch on the book, though; and she seems not to be familiar with it, although she holds a master’s degree in Latin American studies from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
Another piece that Teladrid recently wrote for The New Yorker carried the title Isabel Allende’s Vision of History. This is an at length interview of Isabel Allende by Stephanie Telamadrid. In the interview, the coup in which Augusto Pinochet’s military murdered Salvador Allende is discussed. In fact, the first question is about the coup. (Isabel) Allende remembers hearing Salvador Allende’s last words. And yet Galleano’s work, one of only two books Allende took with her when she fled her country in fear of her life, isn’t mentioned.
This is the situation we’re in. There is very little real reporting on Mexico and Latin America in the United States, and our reporters almost never seem to have information available to me, a casual student. And our government is led by a man who knows no limits.
The Mexican President Who’s Facing Off with Trump
3. The Financial Times Does It Again
Chrisine Murray of The Financial Times, when not contradicting her newspapers financial reporting on Mexico, keeps up with stereotypes:
“Thousands of sweaty fans packed into a concert hall in Guadalajara last month to hear Los Alegres del Barranco perform their hits — including jaunty ballads, like “El Del Palenque”, that celebrate the exploits of drug traffickers. When images of that song’s hero, cartel leader Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera, appeared on the screen, many revellers erupted into cheers.”
Why “sweaty” fans?
In any case, Murray then goes to make this about President Sheinbaum, trying somehow either to implicate her or else make her look ineffective.
“Sheinbaum has said that musical groups shouldn’t be apologists for violence, but she is against banning songs. Instead, she is promoting a government-sponsored music contest with ‘positive’ messages.”
We need reporting about Mexico, not this.
The hit music accused of glorifying violence in Mexico
4. Trump Hits Reality, a Bit
It was a dizzying week of turns and turns and turns. All of which were completely planned and rational, of course.
At last, Trump is starting to get some pushback. Of course, it’s from a deep-pocketed, elite adversary: Harvard University.
Harvard sues the Trump administration in escalating confrontation
Meanwhile, Trump seems to think that Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin might not be on the up and up. Nothing, and I mean nothing, gets past that man.
Russia launches nearly 150 drones against Ukraine as Trump says he doubts Putin’s desire for peace
On Monday, Trump continued his attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, with no visible effect on Powell, but with a visible effect on the U.S. dollar, still the number one currency in the world.
“Trump criticized Powell again on Monday, calling the Fed Chair ‘Mr. Too Late’ and ‘a major loser’ in a post on Truth Social.
“’We’re seeing a clear signal from the market that it doesn’t like even the idea that the president might try to remove the Fed chair. There has been some loss of confidence in U.S. economic policy making in recent weeks. We’ve seen that in this very odd combination of upward pressure at times on longer-term bond yields combined with a weaker dollar. That suggests global investors pulling capital out of the U.S.,’ Krishna Guha, vice chairman at Evercore ISI, said Monday on ‘Squawk Box.’”
It would appear that the sophistication of Trump’s analysis, as shown by such insightful remarks as “Mr. Too Late,” is going right over investors’ heads.
U.S. dollar falls to three-year low as Trump's Powell threats further dent investor confidence
However, much like Brave Sir Robin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Trump abruptly changed his mind.
“Trump on Tuesday said he had no intention to fire Powell — despite days of criticism over the central bank’s policies — and said he believed a deal with Beijing would significantly reduce the sweeping tariffs he’s posted on Chinese goods. After a report that the US would be willing to phase in lighter tariffs on Beijing over five years on Wednesday, Trump told reporters that China was ‘going to do fine’ once talks had settled.”
Trump’s U-Turns on Powell, China Follow Dire Economic Warnings
However, it seems that Trump has become the boy that cried “wolf” too many times.
“Any other time, it would have been a signal that the worst of the stock-market’s slide is nearing an end, one that would have set off buy signals at trading desks across Wall Street.
“Yet as the S&P 500 Index on Wednesday flirted with its first back-to-back gains of more than 2% since October 2022, it didn’t unleash a surge of optimism — or even much relief. Instead, it underscored a new reality that’s been confounding investors for weeks: All the price moves now — the sudden surges and the stomach-churning tumbles — are being driven by White House policies that seem to shift constantly and with little to no forewarning….
“’This is very frustrating,’ said Jay Woods, chief global strategist at Freedom Capital Markets.”
Exhausted by Trump Reversals, Traders Get No Relief From Rebound
By Thursday, it was clear that traders, investors, etc., have to keep an eye on Trump’s X account. That’s more important than the economy or anything else. Or rather his Truth Social account.
By the way, was there ever a greater oxymoron than a social media site owned (or controlled at least) by Trump called with the word “truth” in it?
Wall Street’s New Reality Is Trying to Trade Off Tweets
One piece of good news that a bit of sanity was restored, for the moment, to student visas.
“A Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge in Washington on Friday that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency will no longer revoke legal status for students due solely to checks against a national crime database, reading from a statement provided to Bloomberg News by a lawyer for some of the students. ICE said it would restore legal status for any visas revoked due to those checks.”
However, this new policy of sanity does not extend to freedom of speech and human rights.
“The cases affected by the change are separate from those involving students detained by immigration authorities for their involvement in pro-Palestinian activities. Many of those students have no criminal record ….
And this might be a bit like Lucy taking the football away from Charlie Brown, in any case.
“ICE also said that the agency ‘is developing a policy that will provide a framework’ for terminating student visas, raising the possibility that international students’ status could be up in the air again in the future.”
Trump Administration Backtracks on Revoking Student Visas
Trump’s poll ratings are falling, apparently. Although to my way of thinking, they are astonishingly high.
“President Donald Trump’s approval rating is dipping as he nears 100 days in office and Americans grow skeptical of his sweeping actions to transform government, new polling shows.
“A trio of polls out Sunday show that a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the presidency. His approval rating — which hovers between 39% and 45% in the three surveys— is the lowest for any newly elected president at the 100-day mark in more than seven decades, per CNN.”
Trump’s approval ratings fall as he nears 100 days in office, polls show
5. Therein Lies the Rub: Ironies of American Power
Have you ever wondered why Mississippi, the poorest state in the United States, has a higher per capita GDP than Germany?
Well, it’s not because Mississippi is secretly rich, or because Germany is impoverished.
It’s because the U.S. dollar is massively overvalued, due to its role and the world’s primary currency, due to the ubiquity of our military, and due to our massive spending, which we finance largely because we can, because the dollar is number one.
The U.S. dollar is probably over twenty percent overvalued.
And there are further reasons:
“American Exceptionalism not all benign. Without downplaying the unique and familiar strengths of the US, a good part of the US’ superior real GDP growth, high inflation, high interest rates, and strong dollar are a result of its aggressive fiscal posture. We have posed the rhetorical question: if the US embarked on a fiscal consolidation program to bring its fiscal deficit down from the current 6-7 percent of GDP to the Maastricht limit of 3 percent of GDP, which is what many non-European countries consider the threshold of tolerance in the absence of major recessions, what would its GDP growth rate be, and where would the FFR need to be? Where would the dollar trade?
“The US’ fiscal posture is unsustainable. Few would contest this point, yet most of the members of Congress resisted spending cuts last December. Currently, the US’ federal expenditures are around 23 percent of GDP, while its revenues are around 17-18 percent of GDP. The latter has been stable at these levels for more than three decades. The former, however, rose sharply and steadily since the early 2000s, from around 19 percent of GDP then, to 23 percent in the period between the GFC and Covid, and 26 percent average between 2021-2024.”
“Inflation and future currency depreciation. The US has experienced cumulative inflation from end-2019 of some 24 percent, compared to 10 percent in Japan and 3 percent in China during the same period.”
The ‘grossly overvalued’ American dollar
6. Musk Misses His Dough
This is a shocker.
“Just 33% of U.S. adults have a favorable view of Musk, the chain-saw-wielding, late-night-posting, campaign-hat-wearing public face of President Donald Trump’s efforts to downsize and overhaul the federal government. That share is down from 41% in December.
And guess what? It affecting Tesla, bigly. So Elon Musk is feeling the call to return to the office.
“He is expected to start dedicating more time to Tesla, his electric automaker that has suffered plummeting revenue while he was working for Trump. Musk told investors on a recent conference call that ‘now that the major work of establishing the Department of Government Efficiency is done,’ he expects to spend just ‘a day or two per week on government matters.’”
I’ll bet Tesla employees just can’t wait to see Musk back at work.
As Musk gained power in Washington, his popularity has fallen, an AP-NORC poll finds
7. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth Probably Too Incompetent for Trump
Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, is putting his skills to good use in coming up with defenses for his incompetence and poor judgment. There was Signalgate, then Signalgate Two, and we have since learned that Secretary Hegseth set up an internet connection on his personal computer in his Pentagon office that was outside of normal security protocols. In other words, Hegseth had a dirty connection, direct to the internet.
“Known as a “dirty” internet line by the IT industry, it connects directly to the public internet where the user’s information and the websites accessed do not have the same security filters or protocols that the Pentagon’s secured connections maintain.
“But the biggest advantage of using such a line is that the user would not show up as one of the many IP addresses assigned to the Defense Department — essentially the user is masked, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with military network security.”
Sounds like what the Republicans said that Hillary Clinton did with her emails.
“… it also can expose users to hacking and surveillance. A ‘dirty’ line — just like any public internet connection — also may lack the recordkeeping compliance required by federal law, the official said.”
Hegseth had an unsecured internet line set up in his office to connect to Signal, AP sources say
All this has caused chaos (and not, at least not yet, KAOS, although this is starting to feel like a very expensive version of Get Smart), to reign in that five-sided building.
“The circle of top advisers in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s orbit has shrunk in recent days to little more than his wife, lawyer, and two lower-level officials — leaving the Pentagon’s lead office without longtime expertise or clear direction.
“Hegseth’s decision to fire three senior aides last week and reassign his chief of staff has blown a hole in his leadership team, severing essential lines of communication across the department and leading to fears about dangerous slip-ups such as weapons program delays.
“The wholesale turnover just 100 days into Hegseth’s tenure has been remarkable for its speed. And it has left the first-time government official without trusted staff who understand Washington — just as he faces fallout from a series of scandals that have led to rampant speculation inside the building about how long he’ll keep his job.
“’It’s a free-for-all,’ said one person familiar with the office dynamics, who was granted anonymity to talk candidly about the situation.”
So, why are we not talking about what the Pentagon actually does?
Pentagon leadership vacuum overwhelms Hegseth’s office: ‘It’s a free-for-all’
8. AOC Under Discussion
The fact that the Democratic Party establishment basically landed us in this mess has awakened the need to prove that they are actually the best, in spite of everything, and one way to do this is to pretend to seriously consider persons such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and then dismiss them. Starting with AOC herself.
“In some ways, the current hype cycle around Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez makes a lot of sense: There’s a leadership void in the Democratic Party, the base is hungry for guidance and new ideas, and Ocasio-Cortez is young and dynamic, a desperately needed contrast to the crusty old leaders that seem to dominate the party. She excites young people who have been tuning out the establishment for years, with a message of economic fairness and thunderous attacks against the billionaire class. She is a digital native, literate in the fast-changing vocabularies of social media and gaming, who understands that the small screen in your hand matters more than the big one in your living room, that conflict seeds attention, and that attention is really all that matters in politics these days.
“She’s also a remarkable small-dollar fundraiser, a headline act, the rare political figure on the left who can draw big crowds. Just look at her recent rallies with Bernie Sanders. Who else can pack venues like that? Not just in Los Angeles and Tucson, mind you, but in Idaho and Montana, too. The images of these raucous rallies are made for television and algorithmic virality, offering hope to Democrats everywhere, as people in Washington debate whether Sanders is implicitly blessing A.O.C. as the next progressive torchbearer.”
What’s not to love? Okay, “small-dollar fundraiser.” What an unsubtle dig. We need the big bucks, like the $1.5 billion that Kamala ran through.
“She has so many tools and talents, in a party demanding action and change, that it would be folly for her not to run, especially when the Democratic bench—at least for now—seems pretty meh.
“So, let me present the bear case: What’s been almost totally absent from the recent presidential hype surrounding A.O.C. is any consideration of her obvious liabilities with the larger electorate. I’ve spoken with many Democrats, elected and otherwise, who find the fawning coverage of her rallies completely blinkered. As one New York City operative told me on Monday, with some disdain: ‘Reporters are turning into suckle pigs at the first sight of a meaningful crowd.’”
New York operative? In other words, someone lining up his next overpaid political consulting gig, for which he’ll rake it in, win or lose.
The establishment analysis continues in this vein. She’s a woman, her statements in the past, Bernie lost in South Carolina, it goes on and on and on.
What one sees in all of this is a preoccupation with theatricals, posturing, “messaging,” “branding,” and insiderism. What about the future of the country?
But one Republican had something interesting to say:
“…one Republican strategist working on midterm campaigns who told me that Ocasio-Cortez is ‘the best hope’ for Democrats come 2028. ‘Gotta go on talent, not résumé,’ this Republican told me. ‘Any candidate in the field is going to have to defend that left-wing shit anyway. But A.O.C. does the class warfare thing well, which is their only way out of the desert.’”
I don’t think AOC is going to run for president in 2028. I’m not sure if she’ll “primary” Chuck Schumer. What I do know is that she and Bernie are building a movement that really can change this country. Something like AMLO started doing in Mexico in the 1990s.
9. Target Misses the Bullseye
DEI does sell, at least a bit. Or going full MAGA may not be the best strategy for a mediocre retail chain.
“Data from the analytics firm Placer.ai shows foot traffic at Target locations has declined for 10 consecutive weeks.
“More than 200,000 people participated in a nationwide boycott against Target.
Target foot traffic down 10 consecutive weeks amid company's shift away from DEI policies: Report
10. Bonus Video: Ending Scene of Being There
[1] Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas is the son of Lázaro Cárdenas, president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940, and the president who nationalized PEMEX and carried out one of the most important promises of the Mexican Revolution, land reform, and established the ejido system.
