AOC Should Be Vice President

By
Dillon Eliassen
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2
1311
ocasio cortez

This is satire.

Joe Biden’s arbitrary decision to choose a woman of color as running mate is an incalculable measure of progress. Biden deserves high praise for employing the prerequisites of type of genitalia and amount of skin pigmentation to generate his list of possibles.

Ideally, the Democratic Party would have nominated a woman: 2020 was an embarrassment of riches of female candidates that included Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi Gabbard, Marianne Williamson, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Pete Buttigieg.

While Harris is a great choice for Veep, Biden could have made a greater choice: The Representative from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

AOC is a dynamic woman of color, the perfect counterweight to Biden’s hetero-normative, septuagenarian Caucasianness. If Biden had tapped her, the youth of the Democratic Party would swoon. She’s the female progressive Dan Quayle.

I’m sure you are saying, “But, Mr. Eliassen, AOC is not 35 years of age, and not allowed to succeed Biden should he die or be determined incapacitated after being found roaming the West Wing with a half-eaten bowl of Cream of Wheat, arguing with his reflection in a mirror.”

First of all: who asked you? And second, yes, as the law is currently written, AOC is ineligible, but this provides a golden opportunity to do away with another vestige of the Founding Fathers’ structures of power and privilege.

It isn’t too late to drop Harris from the ticket and add AOC. Once in office, Biden can sign an Executive Order to revise the rules to match America’s new reality. Like his predecessor, President Barack Obama, Joe Biden has a pen and a phone (along with a Florsheim shoe, nine iron, and rutabaga) at his disposal to institute real change.

Why should we still adhere to rules written by white, male slaveholders that dictate who is eligible to be elected when we no longer adhere to the rules written by those same bigots that dictate who is eligible to vote? If being 18 and a citizen is the threshold one must clear to cast a ballot, then we the people, in order to form a more perfect union, must be allowed to vote for any 18 year old citizen running for office.

It is deeply problematic that Joe Biden hails from Delaware, the first colony to ratify the Constitution that set the template for America’s structural and systemic racism. Though he did not vote for Delaware’s ratification of that parchment that reified the nightmarish hellscape American citizens of color endure every day, as a cis-gendered, white male he bears a burden of responsibility of undoing the Constitution’s Framers’ commitment to the separation of powers and civil rights.

Biden’s selection of Harris; a strong, ambitious, power-mad woman of color, wipes away centuries of oppression and repression, but her being over 35 upholds a barrier to entry put in place by the Constitutions’ Framers. The progressive political party should not comply with repressive and regressive policies that hold this nation back.

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Dillon Eliassen

Dillon Eliassen is a former Managing Editor of Being Libertarian. Dillon works in the sales department of a privately owned small company. He holds a BA in Journalism & Creative Writing from Lyndon State College. He is the author of The Apathetic, available at Amazon.com. He is a self-described Thoreauvian Minarchist.

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2 COMMENTS

  1. With the suggestion that AOC should have been Biden’s choice for VP, the article was already on shaky ground. So, when you included Pete Buttigieg in the list of “female candidates” you lost my respect and my attention.

    • The author temporarily lost me at “While Harris is a great choice for Veep”. Then I noticed the three little words in the red bar at the top “This is Satire.”

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