Vox‘s Matthew Yglesias believes that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should run for president.
Hey, why not? What could possibly go wrong?
Oh, and if she’s not old enough—and, at 29, she’s not—then it’s time to “fix” the Constitution.
The constitutional prohibition on people under the age of 35 serving as president is just one of these weird lacuna that was handed down to us from the 18th century but that nobody would seriously propose creating today if not for status quo bias. Realistically, most people that young would simply have a hard time winning an election. But if you can pull it off, you should be allowed. And I kind of think she should run for president.
Yglesias acknowledges that it’s difficult to do the “fixing” via constitutional amendment. But he thinks we should try so that hosts of young people who’ve never done much of anything in life except be students should get to head a country.
I wonder, though, why Yglesias is so keen on Ocasio-Cortez herself running. Does he think she would win? Does he hope she would win? And could she in fact win? Wouldn’t it be nice if she actually took some sort of office first? The new Congress hasn’t even been sworn in yet.
At least Obama had a career as state senator and a couple of years as U. S. Senator before running for president. And although Donald Trump never held office prior to his presidential run, no one can deny that he’d previously had a lengthy career being in charge of many things in the business world.
However, it’s no surprise that Yglesias would champion the cause of youth doing whatever it wants in terms of running for office with no restrictions. A Harvard alum who majored in philosophy, Yglesias began his own career as a blogger while still a college undergrad, and he’s been a writer for various publications ever since. He’s now reached the advanced age of 37, making him almost geriatric—and able to run for president under the Constitution.
But there’s more. Yglesias went further in a tweet than he did in his Vox article:
And of course Ocasio-Cortez—about whom one can say many things, but one of them wouldn’t be that she’s excessively humble—had already weighed in on the topic:
PHOTOG: “You can’t even run for president for another six years.”AOC: “No, not for a long time. Thank God. Although we’ve been joking that because the Equal Rights Amendment hasn’t been passed yet, the Constitution technically says he cannot run unless he’s 35. … So what we’ll do is we’ll force the Republican Party to pass the Equal Rights Amendment by threatening to run for president.”PHOTOG: “That is awesome. All the people who say a literal interpretation of the Constitution is the only thing you should be paying attention to.”AOC: “Exactly, all those Constitutionalists, I will keep vigilance.”— NOTE: The Constitution does not say “he”. It says “any person.”
That exchange appears to be some sort of joke by Ocasio-Cortez. But I strongly suspect that if she thought there was a chance of actually running she would do so.
Ocasio-Cortez is a potent combination of overwhelming ego, attractive physicality, ignorant youth, and doctrinaire ends-justify-means leftism, and if she ever did have that much power I believe she would happily and enthusiastically take her administration in the direction of Venezuela’s Chavez or worse.
[Neo is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at the new neo.]
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