Winning isn't what it used to be in New York's 14th District
SAN DIEGO -- Have you been keeping track of the telenovela in New York's 14th Congressional District? If not, you're missing quite a show.
The primary election may be over, but the drama continues. And instead of the picture getting clearer for Democrats in a district that is made up of Queens and the Bronx, the outlook is murkier than ever.
The plot is about three things: power, power and power. And there is plenty of intrigue, with no sense of who can be trusted.
The old saying goes: "It's the pioneers who take the arrows." And in politics, the arrows come from friend and foe alike.
Clearly, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scares Republicans. It's amusing to hear folks who handed their party and the nation to a carnival barker with zero political experience and a knack for rattling the Republican establishment now wring their hands over a self-declared democratic socialist with zero political experience and a knack for rattling the Democratic establishment.
But the 28-year-old insurgent also frightens many Democrats, including those who are part of the machine that has been put in place by Rep. Joe Crowley, the 10-term incumbent who outspent Ocasio-Cortez 18-to-1 and still managed to lose by 15 points. The Democrats may need to worry less about socialism, and more about cronyism.
After the daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and Bronx-born Latino father ousted the son of an Irish immigrant who said he couldn't help being "born white," I wrote a column warning Democrats that the times they are a-changin'. The way I saw it, the upset puts white Democrats on notice that they will no longer be able to represent areas that are increasingly nonwhite.
The 14th District is nearly half Latino and 68 percent nonwhite.
An angry reader told me I was wrong and claimed that the Democratic Party is one big happy family and insisted that Crowley was supporting Ocasio-Cortez. After all, the reader said, Crowley had -- on election night -- picked up a guitar and dedicated to his opponent a rendition of Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run."
But due to a quirky provision in New York election law, write-in votes that were registered on the line of a third-party -- the Working Families Party -- have resulted in Crowley's name being on the ballot in November's general election. When Ocasio-Cortez learned this, she hit the roof. Then she hit Twitter to accuse Crowley of conspiring in, or at least going along with, an attempt by some of his supporters to return him to Congress and keep the gravy train going.
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