Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is not quite ready to announce a run in the 2028 Democratic primary, because she said her ambition is far greater than that.
"They assume that my ambition is positional; they assume that my ambition is a title or a seat," Ocasio-Cortez told Democratic strategist David Axelrod at an event Friday in Chicago. "And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country."
"Presidents come and go; Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever," she continued. "A living wage is forever. Workers’ rights are forever. Women’s rights, all of that."
Ocasio-Cortez was responding to criticism of her comments that billionaires like Elon Musk cannot truly "earn" a billion dollars without the work of others, calling the blowback "a veiled threat" against her running for president.
"This was the elite saying, if you want this job, you just stepped out of line," she said. "And we want you to know where the real power is, and it's in the modern-day barons who own The [Washington] Post and own the algorithms, and we're going to — we’ll make an example out of you."
She said critics misunderstand what drives her political decisions: "What use is a gavel, what use is a seat if it doesn’t result in anyone’s life changing for the better. She does not aim for the top, but from it.
"When you haven’t been fantasizing about being this or that since you were seven years old, it is tremendously liberating," she said. "Because I get to wake up every day and say, how am I going to meet the moment?
"And conditions change radically all the time. So I make my response less to an attachment to some positional, like, you know, title or position and working backwards from there.
"But I make decisions by waking up in the morning, looking out the window, and observing the conditions of this country. And saying, 'What move or decision can I make today that's going to get us closer to that future, stronger, faster, and better than yesterday?'"
The New York Democrat made an early realization of the competition in America, walking onto the Senate floor as a freshman House member and thinking, "Wow, everyone here thinks they’re going to be president."
"And they are making decisions from that place," she said. "And I don’t want to make decisions from a place of, what’s in it for me? I want to make decisions from a place of, how are we going to change the country?"
Ocasio-Cortez did not rule out any future office, saying she could pursue her goals from multiple places, regardless of big media's attempts to spin her away from her ambitions.
"No billionaire can stop that: No concentrated level of power and no elite, no gatekeeper, can prevent me from doing everything I can, waking up every day in service of the working class," she said. "I can do that in the House, in the Senate. I can do that in the White House.
"I can do it from a shack in upstate New York chopping wood and being a burnout. I can do it from anywhere."
