Video News Clips: In Their Own Words

Ex-Democrat Strategist Says AOC ‘Not Ready’ For Primetime After Her World Stage Fumble

Screenshot/YouTube/The Huddle

Former Democratic strategist Dan Turrentine said on Monday that Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rambling response at the Munich Security Conference showed she was unprepared to pursue the presidency.

Ocasio-Cortez’s 40-second rambling answer occurred on Friday when Bloomberg Television’s Francine Lacqua asked her if the U.S. should send troops to protect Taiwan if China invaded the contested Asian island. Turrentine, on “The Huddle,” said on the show that not even leftists defended Ocasio-Cortez after the answer and that she retreated in the aftermath rather than bouncing back.

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“[W]hat it was a reminder of is you’re now on the big stage. This is not a union hall in Queens … Her team hyped her appearance. She froze like a deer in headlights … I saw all the [former Vice President] Kamala Harris references online … I don’t think this is going to end her career,” Turrentine said. “But what I found fascinating was how she and her team reacted. She canceled media appearances on Saturday. There was nobody online defending her.”

“Even on the left, if you went to Bluesky, there were not kind of — like if [President Donald] Trump does something like this … if you even so much as mock him, comes back at you with a baseball bat,” he added. “She had no defenders. She froze not just on the stage, but she froze off the stage and basically slinked back to the United States. And to me, that was a sign that she is not ready for this.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s team limited her public and media appearances during the conference following her Taiwan answer, according to CNN.

“You know, I think that — uh — this is such a — you know, I think that this is a — this is, of course a — uh — a very long standing policy of the United States,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And, I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point.”

“And we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise,” she added.

Moreover, Ocasio-Cortez did not rule out a potential presidential bid in 2028 when The New York Times’ Katrin Bennhold asked her a question framed with “when you run for president.”

“So when you run for president, are you going to impose a wealth tax or a billionaire’s tax?” Bennhold asked.

“I don’t think that we have to wait for any one president to impose a wealth tax,” the congresswoman replied.

During her first run for Congress in 2018, Ocasio-Cortez admitted, “I’m not the expert in geopolitics,” when pressed by a reporter to clarify what she meant by a reference to the Israeli “occupation” of Palestine.