The d.c. brief by philip elliott

WHEN ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-Cortez erupted on the national stage back in 2018, a lot of establishment Washington braced for the arrival of a Tea Party–style troublemaker from the left. Six years later, that assessment wasn’t so much wrong as undercooked. While the former bartender remains a key ally to the left, AOC’s main job in 2024 may be President Joe Biden’s most valuable pinch hitter.

As mainstream Democrats were tearing their hair out over new questions about the President’s mental acuity, there was Ocasio-Cortez on Feb. 13 not only reaffirming her backing of Biden, but not-so-subtly slapping down those in her wing of the party screaming for him to step aside. “I know who I’m going to choose. It’s going to be one of the most successful Presidents in modern American history,” she told CNN.

The boosterism came in the wake of a special counsel’s damning report that blasted Biden as a forgetful figure who would be impossible to convict on charges he mishandled classified information because he is so obviously aged. The White House and its allies called the report hackish and a hit job, but nonetheless Democratic insiders dispatched all available surrogates to spin reporters that Robert Hur’s disclosures about Biden’s alleged “diminished faculties” were misleading and inappropriate. And, when needed the most, those allies include Ocasio-Cortez as part of the establishment defense.

That turn of events is deeply frustrating to many of those who first helped Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist, get to Washington by toppling a 10-term Democratic incumbent who was the fourth most powerful figure in the House. In the time since, she has found the solid footing of a pragmatic disrupter. She’ll cause trouble—as she did last year in opposing a must-pass spending bill—but not needlessly or without purpose.

As a pragmatist, she understands that absent a health emergency, Biden is the Democratic nominee. While most Americans—86% in the most recent ABC News poll—say Biden is too old for another term (compared with 62% saying the same of 77-year-old former Presid