The signs are everywhere — if you know what to look for.
Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been crisscrossing the country campaigning for radical leftist candidates, and somewhere along the way she picked up a new message: “Hope” and “change.”
Sound like a controversial former president you remember?
At a recent rally for socialist Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, AOC delivered a word-for-word update of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign “same playbook.”
“Is the answer to our problems to turn to the same playbook over and over again?” Ocasio-Cortez asked. “A playbook that says in order to win we must be defenders of the same status quo that is drowning us and tells us the aspiration to change our government and the ambition to even try is foolish? No, it is not foolish, Michigan.”
In a campaign speech in 2007, Obama said something almost exactly the same.
“The same old Washington textbook campaigns just won’t do in this election. That’s why I am asking you to stop settling for what the cynics say we have to accept,” he said. “In this election — in this moment — let us reach for what we know is possible.”
David Axelrod, Obama’s chief campaign strategist and architect of “Hope and Change” messaging, confirmed it’s a repeat.
“Folks forget how much the Obama campaign in 2008 was an insurgency against the broken politics of those times. So AOC’s words, while her own, are familiar in spirit,” he said.
In Montana in May, AOC told voters to “ask your skeptical neighbor to believe. It’s the only thing that we have. Our hope is the only thing that creates change, and that’s why so many people try to talk us out of it.”
Obama, 2008: “Hope — hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!”
Ocasio-Cortez has the same goal as Obama, insiders confirmed: The White House. United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, whose union has endorsed El-Sayed, told Axios that AOC “definitely” could win Michigan and the presidency.
“It’s going to come down to who working-class people believe is going to represent their interest, and who they perceive is going to fight for them,” Fain said.
The Democratic establishment has noticed the rising socialist threat. Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight and the man who called Trump’s 2024 victory, has named AOC as his top pick for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. Fox News analyst Guy Benson also warned that she could “absolutely” win the White House under the right conditions.
And then there’s Vice President JD Vance, who already told Michael Knowles earlier this month that he expects AOC to be the 2028 Democratic nominee.
“I think it’s got to be AOC,” Vance said. “I know that’s probably conventional wisdom.”