A favorite poem of mine, “Barter,” by Sara Teasdale, contains the couplet “[C]hildren’s faces looking up/Holding wonder like a cup.” Teasdale died in 1933, fifty-six years before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born. But a new video of the freshman representative’s reaction to her vegetable patch in a community garden in D.C. makes it hard for me to believe she wasn’t somehow Teasdale’s inspiration for these lines.
The Gateway Pundit’s Joseph Curl provides a faithful transcription of her comments in the video, which follows:
I just checked on my community garden slot and I was so nervous because I was in New York for two weeks in recess. Look! Oh. My. God! Look at this!
It’s like — look at the collard greens! Look at the dahlias! Oh my God! I have to trim all of these back for smoothies.
I. Am. Shook! Look, like, honestly, gardening — food, that comes out of dirt. Like, it’s magic.
I can’t say whether this is all an act or on whether Ocasio-Cortez genuinely suffers from sort of developmental problem that causes her to behave like a young child. The fact that the child-like behavior is not constant — sometimes she uses “grown-up” words — suggests that she perhaps views it as a trait that will endear her to people.
In some cases it has. Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume sized her up in March, telling network host Tucker Carlson, “She’s kinda compelling. She’s kinda adorable in the sort of way that a 5-year-old child can be adorable.” He quickly added, “And she is, for the moment I think it’s fair to say, the de facto leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives.”
