Rep. Ocasio-Cortez: "I'm proud to be a bartender. Ain't nothing wrong that. There's nothing wrong with working retail...There is nothing wrong with preparing that your neighbors will eat."



"There is nothing wrong with being a working person in the United States of America." pic.twitter.com/VTzLpybKfw

I didn't beat her up for the black accent earlier because I found it more striking that the content of her remarks made sense. Yes, there is value in all work, even the most menial work. It's a helluva lot more dignified than a government check, for one. If a black accent is what it takes for Ocasio-Cortez to talk sense, maybe she should keep it.

The ad was created in late March, and Ocasio made her black-accent comments in early April, so it all might be the wildest of coincidences. But Ocasio-Cortez has made similar remarks in the days earlier, to less publicized audiences, so it still may be linked. Most tellingly, the ad was flashed around on Twitter yesterday — yesterday was the first I'd seen of it, and I am an Ocasio-Cortez follower on Twitter, so I can't help but think I saw the ad because of that.

So now we have USBank featuring an Ocasio-Cortez lookalike pushing a broom in what looks like a bakery, which isn't very different work-wise from a bar. If the bank's ad agency had really wanted to feature a cleaning lady, a more likely trope would be a fat old middle-aged woman or man, because ad agencies deal in stereotypes. They didn't this time — their model is the near spitting image of the rather glamorous-looking Ocasio-Cortez.

Two things might be going on here.

First one is that Ocasio-Cortez sits on the House Financial Services Committee, and maybe the bank is trying to flatter her.

It's a possibility, but probably a distant one. A survey of the lobbying records on Open Secrets shows that the bank is a big spender on lobbying in Washington, shelling out more than $460,000 in fiscal 2018 for political matters. But the concentration of its spending there is on moderate Democrats and Republicans. It didn't give any money to the House Democrats PAC for one, though it gave to the House Republicans, as well as the PACs for both parties in the Senate.

Second one is that they may be aiming the ad at the buyers the bank wants to attract — which would be Ocasio-Cortez fans, who, anecdotally, are concentrated among the young and who are all in for Twitter and other social media, quite unlike the average person.

This might be the idea. Picking out the one seemingly intelligent thing Ocasio-Cortez has said might have been a good fit for the bank to market its services, and its marketers surely know what will sell with the people it wants to attract.

All the same, Ocasio-Cortez is a socialist who would gladly put banks and the accumulated value of workers' hard work out on their ear if she could. Socialists don't like banks. Banks require people to pay bills, something socialists show a repeated pattern of never doing — and all you have to do is look at the record of Fidel Castro to get a whiff of that. What it shows is that Madison Avenue is convinced that Ocasio-Cortez is a selling point with buyers. What a shame that a bank's marketing department would ultimately build up Ocasio-Cortez's image as a hardworking person through its ad, then. The reality is, her socialist views repeatedly signal that she's utterly opposed to rewarding any hard work at all.