AOC lays out progressive wish list for Biden
The congresswoman also weighed in on the presumptive Democratic nominee’s choice of running mate.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday called for Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to shift leftward on four key policy issues in a bid to earn the trust of his party’s progressive wing.
“There are very real, tangible areas where Democrats even fell short perhaps during the Obama administration that I think I would like for us to have a plan to improve,” the New York Democrat told POLITICO Playbook in a virtual interview — citing federal treatment of Puerto Rico, immigration, health care and climate change.
On the subject of Biden’s health care proposals, Ocasio-Cortez said his support for lowering Medicare’s eligibility age to 60 is not “going to be enough for us,” adding that the party is “going to have to pursue a much more ambitious health care policy.”
Ocasio-Cortez also elaborated on Biden’s stance toward climate change, characterizing his preferred methods for combating the threat from rising global temperatures as inadequate.
“I don’t think that the vice president has a climate change policy that is sufficient right now,” she said, “and I’d like to see us really work on that.”
The remarks from the freshman lawmaker, while largely critical of Biden’s platform, seemed ultimately aimed at bridging intraparty divides through securing certain ideological concessions from the former vice president.
Biden, who is viewed skeptically by some liberal Democrats, has taken significant steps to consolidate broad party backing in recent days, rolling out successive endorsements from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, President Barack Obama and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
But Ocasio-Cortez has yet to formally throw her weight behind Biden, and tensions between the two politicians — one a pillar of the party’s more moderate establishment, the other a superstar of its progressive grassroots — intensified earlier this week.
In an interview with The New York Times published Monday, Ocasio-Cortez said she had not been contacted by the Biden campaign and predicted unification among the party’s various factions would not come easily.
But Wednesday, the congresswoman revealed that her staff was now “having conversations with Biden’s team” in an effort “to figure out what some of these policy conversations will [be] looking like” as the race for the White House moves forward.
“You know, I would love to see the vice president clarify and deepen his policy stances on certain issues. But aside from that, you know, I think it’s incredibly important that we support the Democratic nominee in November,” Ocasio-Cortez said, stopping short of explicitly endorsing Biden’s candidacy.
The congresswoman also offered advice on the most important decision Biden will make in the coming weeks, casting his choice of vice presidential nominee as another litmus test of the candidate’s progressive credentials.
Although Ocasio-Cortez said she was heartened by Biden’s pledge to name a female running mate and his openness to a woman of color being on the Democratic ticket, she argued that “what’s really important is not only just that woman’s identity, in terms of gender and cultural terms, but ... who that woman is and [what] her stance is.”
“There is a wide spectrum, politically, of women of color. There’s some that are very conservative, in terms of Democratic context, and there’s some that are more progressive,” she said.
Just as Obama selected Biden as his running mate in 2008 partly because “Biden was more conservative than Obama at that time,” Ocasio-Cortez said, it would be “encouraging if Biden also picked someone who was a little bit more progressive, that he knows may push him.”