Opinion | Is Ocasio-Cortez Ready for the Glass Cliff?
Is Ocasio-Cortez Ready for the Glass Cliff?
Oh, she’s running.
"I’ve been watching the signs that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be considering a bid for president for over a year. She spoke about foreign policy at the Munich Security Conference in February. A few months later, she brandished her organizer street cred with a visit to a rural Georgia community fighting a data center. She is among the astonishingly few big-name Democrats embracing data center resistance, a rare point of bipartisan agreement in a divided electorate.
This week she all but soft launched the presidential bid so many of us have been expecting, with a video series about freezing her eggs. The rollout — personal, confessional and intimate — had all the social media savvy that made her a political star. It also gets ahead of the inevitable questions about how, or if, she will have children. In short, Ocasio-Cortez has crafted a political message in which the form and content suggest that she will run as a woman but unlike how every woman before her was forced to run.
That she is a viable potential presidential candidate is no small feat for any woman, much less a young, attractive woman without a political dynasty. Were she to formally declare a presidential bid, she would be one of the youngest and most progressive people to do it. She can run. But can she win?
To say women haven’t had an easy path to presidential power would be an understatement.
Hillary Clinton was both too unfathomable (a first lady who wanted more) and too well known (saddled with her husband’s scandals and positions). Kamala Harris was, alternately, too novel (a mixed-race Black woman) and too much like the same old (a capitalist hawk). They each were condemned as too uncharismatic to overcome a culture that is supremely suspicious of women who want, pursue and hold power. The ambition that brought them within reach of the presidency was a trap that ensured they couldn’t win it.
That is the gist of years of women’s political ambitions — a woman who wants the top job must be assertive but not aggressive, nurturing but not weak. She has to be the epitome of a mother and the epitome of a boss. It is an impossible needle to thread, and any woman who contorts herself to do so comes off as disingenuous at best and a liar at worst. This likability trap has hindered every qualified woman who has run for president.
But these are different times. Ocasio-Cortez is a different woman, and Americans love to turn to women when the house is burning down. Social scientists call it the glass cliff — the phenomenon in which women are often recruited to lead failing companies. President Trump’s businessman brand of governance has many Americans feeling this nation is failing. I suppose the dumpster fire of climate denialism, political corruption and general scamminess of, well, everything would be dire enough circumstances to make a female president possible.
In particular, Democrats — whom you might expect to be wary of placing another female candidate before the American public — are facing a political disaster of their own making. Americans are primed for an anti-incumbent electoral wave. They want an alternative to Trump’s MAGA-dominated Republican Party, but a lot of them indicate they would have to hold their nose to vote for mainstream Democrats. This “Is the enemy of my enemy really my friend?” game between the base and the party leadership has created an opening for progressive candidates in state races. Despite this, a lot of Democrats are faithful to conventional political wisdom that they cannot win the White House by running from the left.
Ocasio-Cortez is made for this moment. It’s not because she has tempered her progressiveness (as some democratic socialists worry). It’s because she has the greatest chance of sidestepping the likability trap that has foiled so many female presidential candidates who came before her. Whether she wins or loses, if she runs as she governs, an Ocasio-Cortez campaign could model a new way for women to lead.
Research on female candidates suggests that women who emphasize feminine traits are penalized while women who talk about female issues are advantaged. Ocasio-Cortez does both. She has shown off her favorite red lippie on Instagram and has live-streamed how government works for millions of people. There have been the usual consequences. Conservatives revile her, and even men who share her politics discount her gravitas. Too young. Too pretty. Too ambitious.
But instead of changing to accommodate these men’s discomfort — a quickie political marriage or a boxy power suit comes to mind — the self-described “girl from the Bronx” took it on like, well, a girl from the Bronx, with unabashed confidence in her ability to persist without permission. In doing so, she has fashioned female political power in a way that does not contort itself for male comfort.
Many Americans expect the president to be a father for the nation. A woman in the White House is supposed to be his wife and the mother to his children, a political appendage, as opposed to a person who wields power in her own right. One reason Clinton’s narrative never gelled with a lot of Americans is that she intended to amass power independent of her role as first lady. Her role in leading health care reform was considered by many to be too significant a task for a first lady, an unelected wife and mother. Not even her years as secretary of state could upend the idea that she somehow usurped power meant for men.
Harris’s campaign was a test of what makes a powerful woman legible while a man, who seemingly has no political ambitions of his own, stands behind her. However, she does not have biological children, and even though she talked often about her stepchildren calling her Momala, the idea of seeing her as the nation’s first makeshift mother never fit. Her blended family was not rare; many American families are now some form of nontraditional, meaning stepparents are a normal part of American life. But the presidential family is not supposed to be normal. It is supposed to be aspirational, a secular symbol of many Americans’ religious belief that ours is a nation uniquely blessed by God to prosper and reproduce.
Harris had the additional challenge of being a woman of color. People might have hated Clinton for insisting she wasn’t a stand-by-your-man little lady. But our culture has a legacy of hatred for women of color and our family formations. It isn’t said often enough, but a right-wing political vision that pairs a resurgent natalist movement with great-replacement theory is one that encourages white women to marry young and multiply in a way it does not for Black or brown women. There is no edict for women of color to reproduce for this nation because a large part of this nation would rather the nation not exist at all than be majority-minority.
This is why Ocasio-Cortez’s choice to lead her campaign intentions with a very public discussion of reproductive choices is so important. She is performing the preservation of her status as a mother for the public, creating the possibility that she would be a mother for the nation, even if she is not yet a mother. However, she also recognizes that whatever marriage or motherhood choices she makes, a New York Latina cannot embody the aspirational presidential family. Nothing she does will satisfy the haters, so instead, she’s charting a new path that presents new political possibilities. As is often the case, the best choice for a woman of color creates better choices for all women.
The American right has conducted a national assault on abortion care, birth control access and in vitro fertilization since the fall of Roe v. Wade. These are attacks on women’s enfranchisement and ability to work. No woman who has to consider which states allow her to control her reproductive decisions without her or her doctor going to prison is truly free.
In the face of this, Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to talk publicly about freezing her eggs is the kind of leadership women are hungry for. She is demonstrating that planning for a family while building the career she wants is still a compromise. She is implying that the best we can do right now is to plan for the worst while we work toward the best. She is also saying that reproductive health is a choice that a woman can make, on her own, for her own reasons, without apology or censure. That’s a message very different from the ones about family, gender and power that have bedeviled women’s political campaigns.
Ocasio-Cortez will have other, more workaday political challenges to overcome. Despite what the right-wing media pundits said, she didn’t totally bomb in Munich. But, her speech this year at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta was stilted and uncomfortable. It’s easier to learn geopolitics than it is to become fluent in Black Southern rhetoric. Black voters are pragmatic. But she will have to reconcile progressive policies for cultures outside New York City to win. A Southern running mate who matches her vibe and brings that fluency, like Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, would be a bold solution. Regardless, she will need to figure out how to speak to an electorate beyond her own.
Maybe we aren’t ready to finally join the long list of countries that have elected a woman to lead them. But the best time to issue the test is when the opposition grows fat and lazy with winning. That’s where the MAGA movement is now. It has control of both chambers of Congress, a favorable Supreme Court and almost total presidential legal immunity. After 2004, when the so-called compassionate conservatives felt this inevitable, Barack Obama made history by becoming a resounding countervailing force.
As we learned in 2008, when history says it’s your time, it’s your time.
Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. @tressiemcphd"
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