Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wields Brevity as a Superpower

The lesson being: It does not matter how much time one has, what counts is how uniquely it is choreographed.That is just another way of saying young people have learned to make the most of what they were apportioned. On Tuesday, during night two of the first all-virtual Democratic National Convention, Ocasio-Cortez was given just 90 seconds to address the nation. That has not deterred her one bit; alongside Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Stacey Abrams, she is trying to rebuild government from the inside.Last night, backdropped by symmetrical American flags, Ocasio-Cortez addressed “a mass people’s movement working to establish 21st-century social, economic, and human rights.” Absent the singular flair that typically animates her speeches on the House floor, she spoke of wanting to build “reimagined systems”—around racial justice, gender equity, immigration, and foreign policy—that would take America in a new direction.https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1295912387648921601The polished compactness of her speech is as good a metaphor as any for the kind of generational politics that divide the Democratic party; where many of this week’s speakers will be allotted well past five minutes—yapping about why the country needs to get back to they way things used to be, blind to the fact those ways got America in this mess in the first place—Ocasio-Cortez’s capsule soliloquy was a nimble performance in how to get things done, an education in synoptic skill and vigor.