It’s difficult to suppress the schadenfreude as Democrats and Never-Trumpers wail over Bernie Sanders’ crushing victory in Nevada.
In a night of heavy sighs on MSNBC, Chris Matthews likened the Vermont socialist’s win to the Nazis invading France, and James Carville warned the Democratic Party was committing “political suicide.”
But, elsewhere in the country, sensible people are setting about defeating Sanders’ legacy by unseating his most potent political asset, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The Bronx and Queens congresswoman was Sanders’ secret weapon in Nevada, wooing the crucial Latino voters who propelled him to victory, and injecting much-needed ethnic, gender and age diversity into his campaign. Without her, he’s just another grouchy old lefty howling into the wind.
Whether Sanders wins the party’s nomination or is swindled out of it, his 30-year-old protégé will carry on his work of transforming the Democratic Party, using her new political action committee to bring on a slew of female clones to challenge establishment candidates around the country.
But in AOC’s 14th Congressional District, Bronx native and building superintendent Miguel Hernandez, 45, wants to nip this burgeoning socialist juggernaut in the bud.
He’s taking on Ocasio-Cortez on her own turf, as a born-again Republican, and he has the quiet backing of some of the city’s most influential Democrats and independents.
Nightclub impresario Noel Ashman, arguably the city’s best-networked promoter, has stepped up as Hernandez’s political director in time for Tuesday’s campaign launch.
He’s brought on board celebrity supporters, including detective-turned-actor Bo Dietl of “The Irishman” and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and Angel Salazar from “Scarface” and “Carlito’s Way,” who grew up a few blocks from Hernandez in the Bronx.
“Lifelong Democrats are really concerned that the party has moved so far to the left, they’re never going to win an election,” says Ashman.
“I consider myself politically independent, fiscally very conservative, socially very liberal. But there’s a big difference between liberal and socialist. Socialism is one of the biggest dangers we could face.”
“The entertainment industry is very liberal, but this has gone too far, and people have to stand up.”
Ashman and pals are backing Hernandez, although he’s running as a Republican, because “he’s a regular person, not a politician all his life, someone who has actually worked for a living in blue-collar jobs. That matters.”
The son of Puerto Rican immigrants in the Bronx, Hernandez had to support his single mother and six younger siblings from the age of 12, when his father walked out.
Not for him the luxury of AOC’s middle-class upbringing in Westchester, degree from top-notch Boston University or internship with political royalty in the office of Sen. Ted Kennedy.
Instead, he stacked shelves at a bodega after school, learned to be a handyman for a local building superintendent and put himself through school at the then-TCI College of Technology to become an electrician, a plumber and a boiler technician.
When his mother died of a heart attack at age 52, he was just 25 and had to assume responsibility for four brothers and two sisters as young as 16.
“Unlike AOC, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon,” he says. “My mom found it really hard to keep seven of us fed when I was a child. As I grew up, I learned how to get out of poverty by working hard … Now I want to show others how to follow my footsteps and earn six digits a year.”
Among the biggest problems in his district, he says, are crime and crumbling city housing: “I am a building superintendent and a certifier. There are a lot of problems with housing: mold, asbestos and lead inside the walls. Kids that are living inside these properties that are health hazards for them. I could fix it. I’ve been doing this for over 19 years.”
As a child, he would open a remote-controlled toy car to see how it worked. He was good with his hands and figured out how to fix neighbors’ washing machines and TVs. Now he has a thriving business.
“I know how things work. I fix problems. This is why I am running for Congress. AOC and many politicians run for government, but have no idea what to do.”
He is a living rebuke to the “free stuff” socialism offered by AOC and Sanders. At least AOC briefly worked in the real world as a bartender, but before he became a career politician, Sanders never had a regular job, was a deadbeat dad and spent his 20s and 30s couch-surfing in Vermont.
Hernandez, by contrast, has lived a life of industry, common sense and practical achievement, the sort of life that once would have made him the ideal Democratic candidate. But in today’s “beer and blue jeans” Republican Party, he’s right at home.
Pete’s gay-kid stunt is an outrage
Rush Limbaugh aside, most Americans are cool with Pete Buttigieg kissing his husband on stage, judging by the 37-year-old former small-city mayor’s remarkable rise.
But parading a 9-year-old as a gay role model in a campaign stunt Saturday night was a terrible misjudgment.
What a prepubescent child thinks about sex, if they think anything at all about it, should be private, not co-opted as political performance art.
A video of Buttigieg’s Denver town hall meeting shows a woman reading aloud a question from the boy: “Would you help me tell the world I’m gay, too? I want to be brave like you.”
Then Buttigieg campaign staffers rush the child on stage, where he stands, silent and solemn, as the crowd cheers.
“It took me a long time to figure out how to tell even my best friend that I was gay, let alone go out there and tell the world,” Buttigieg tells the boy, “and to see you willing to come to terms with who you are in a room full of … thousands of people you’ve never met, that’s, that’s really something.”
Buttigieg handled the situation gently, but the child never said a word. Everything was said by adults on his behalf. Yes, love is love, but let kids be kids.