By Jack Crowe
Thursday, October 17, 2019
Democratic city councilman Fernando Cabrera sounds like a
New Yorker. He’s speaking fast when I reach him by phone Monday, rattling off
the myriad differences between himself and the woman he’s challenging for the
Democratic primary nomination for New York’s 14th district: Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
As a well-known New York Democrat who is unconcerned
about jeopardizing a future career in national politics, Cabrera is the most
serious primary challenger to enter the race, and the media have taken notice.
His announcement was covered in the New York Post last week, and he was
headed to an interview with Fox News as we discuss his plans to upset a
political phenom.
While the cosmetic differences between Cabrera — a
55-year-old Pentecostal pastor and his 29-year-old former bartender opponent —
abound, he’s convinced that the primary distinction between himself and
Ocasio-Cortez is his willingness to do the work of government. He rapidly
details his record as a three-term city councilman: falling crime and
unemployment rates in his district, coupled with increased graduation rates and
high-school STEM achievement. He juxtaposes this record with the way that
Ocasio-Cortez has spent her first year in office.
“The ‘o’ in Ocasio stands for ‘zero,’” he says
impatiently. “She has brought home zero money, she’s advanced zero bills.” His
frustration is obvious. Cabrera explains that he had no intention of running
for the congressional seat. “I would’ve retired,” he says, but then he saw how
Ocasio-Cortez derailed Amazon’s plan to bring its headquarters, and 25,000 jobs,
to Queens.
Citing her concern for the city’s working class,
Ocasio-Cortez joined fellow progressives in Albany to lobby against the tax
breaks that the city used to woo the corporate giant. And, having successfully
blocked the move, she bizarrely touted the money she helped the city “save” by
blocking tax breaks on taxes that will no longer be paid at all. This
infuriated Cabrera, who was in talks with city educators to develop special
technical high schools that would train students for jobs exactly like those
Amazon would have offered.
The problem with Ocasio-Cortez is twofold, in Cabrera’s
estimation. She prioritizes broad, attention-grabbing national issues over
constituent service, and when she tries to solve problems that are, arguably,
far outside her remit as a freshman congresswoman, her commitment is purely
rhetorical. Or, as Cabrera puts it, “she doesn’t show up.”
To illustrate their differences, Cabrera cites their
respective approaches to addressing climate change. When hurricanes rocked
Puerto Rico last year, Cabrera dropped his life in New York and joined a
cleanup crew on the island for three weeks. Ocasio-Cortez, by contrast, has
responded to the threat of climate change by using her considerable political
capital to introduce the Green New Deal, a resolution that ostensibly is aimed
at combating environmental disaster but actually would restructure much of the
American economy, bringing it under government control within a decade.
“She was voted down by her own [Democratic] colleagues,
57 to zero,” when the resolution was put up for a vote in the Senate, Cabrera
notes before launching into a diatribe about her refusal to work with more
experienced politicians to navigate the machinery of government.
While he stresses that he would be focused on local
matters if elected, when it comes to addressing massive issues like climate
change, he’d get involved to the extent that he could help directly, he
explains. He believes that government works best when narrow policy solutions,
arrived at through compromise, are applied to specific problems. He’s therefore
allergic to Ocasio-Cortez’s particular brand of revolutionary politics, which seeks
to combine a host of discrete policy issues with a broader socialist framework
by which they can all be resolved in one fell swoop. Also, unlike
Ocasio-Cortez, he has skin in the game when it comes to creating a better
future: “Socialism is not what I want for my kids and my grandkids.”
Ocasio-Cortez recently suggested she may not have kids since the threat of
climate change has made the thought of doing so “bittersweet.”
Those three weeks spent in Puerto Rico, cleaning up and
helping repair a world his kids and grandkids will inherit, versus
Ocasio-Cortez’s endless media appearances touting the toothless Green New Deal,
provide a neat juxtaposition. The day after I speak with Cabrera,
Ocasio-Cortez, as if eager to make his point, tweets jubilantly about the
socialist virtues of Denmark.
“Thank you everyone for the birthday wishes,” she writes.
“Spending the day in Denmark after C40, enjoying this social democracy that
treats healthcare & education as rights, zero-carbon as priority, &
infrastructure as a key public good.”
Asked how, as a congressman, he would spend the free time
he’d gain by forgoing projects like the Green New Deal and, presumably, trips
to Denmark, Cabrera suggests he would continue the work he’s done throughout
his career, but on a larger scale, with considerably more resources.
That means he would continue working to curb gun
violence. Once again, the dichotomy between himself and his opponent rears its
head. In 2012, Cabrera founded the Gun Violence Task Force with fellow councilman
Jumaane Williams now the city’s public advocate. As co-chairs of the task
force, Williams and Cabrera helped implement the Cure Violence program, which
trains and sends out former gang members from Brooklyn and the South Bronx to
interrupt insidious cycles of violence in the neighborhoods they grew up in.
The program has been effective: “In the South Bronx Cure Violence site, the
analysis revealed significant declines in shooting victimizations,” according
to a 2017 report from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Cabrera wants
federal funding to expand this program, which currently encompasses just ten
square blocks in his district.
He sees Ocasio-Cortez’s histrionic calls for overarching
federal gun-control legislation, usually issued in the wake of a mass shooting
or an outbreak of violence thousands of miles from her own district, as yet
another empty gesture. “She’s nowhere to be found here,” he says. “She’ll point
the finger at Chicago, but in her own backyard we have seen the rates of crime
climb through the roof.” Indeed, both police precincts that are entirely
encompassed by the 14th congressional district have experienced more than twice
as many gun deaths in 2019 than in the year prior, according to weekly NYPD
crime reports.
In addition to the apparent gap between their governing
philosophies, he and Ocasio-Cortez have diametrically opposed social values.
“I’m about family, faith, and community,” says Cabrera, who was born to a
Puerto Rican and a Dominican immigrant and raised in the Bronx. Like much of
his congregation and, he argues, much of the congressional district he hopes to
represent, he is socially conservative.
He was pilloried by fellow Democrats on the city council
in 2014 after a video surfaced of him praising Uganda’s adherence to Christian
doctrine and its prohibition against gay marriage. The video emerged soon after
Uganda passed a law making homosexuality punishable by life in prison, though
Cabrera does not mention that legislation specifically in the video. While he
holds traditional views on marriage and opposes abortion, he is sure to tell me
that he’s worked with every stripe of New Yorker during his years as a pastor
and in his nine years on the city council.
Ocasio-Cortez, by contrast, helped fundraise for the
British transgender-rights group Mermaid Coalition, as one of her first acts in
office. As our own Madeleine Kearns reported in January, “the 29-year-old
congresswoman appeared in a livestream to support Harry Brews, a British gamer,
who played the entire game of Donkey Kong in one sitting in order to raise
$340,000 for Mermaids UK, a British charity that promotes sex changes for
gender-confused children.”
Cabrera is convinced his traditional values better
reflect the district and will win out over AOC’s particular brand of
social-media-friendly progressivism. “It’s a moderate to conservative
district,” Cabrera says. “I’m a match, I’m a perfect fit, I’m a reflection the
people.”
Cabrera is under no illusions about the uphill battle
he’s facing. He recognizes that the country’s young progressives, spurred on by
sympathetic and monolithic national media, have rallied around Ocasio-Cortez as
the epitome of authenticity. After all, she livestreams herself making mac and
cheese. Cabrera’s campaign rests on his belief that New Yorkers have a finely
tuned nose for the real thing and they’ve realized Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t
qualify.
“In this district we’re not impressed with any type of
celebrity status,” he says. “We want elected officials who are able to produce
results and she has utterly failed.” We’ll find out, on June 23, 2020, whether
his faith in New Yorkers is justified.
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