- A conservative author and reporter tweeted a picture taken from behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and criticized her clothes as being too nice, saying they didn't match her working-class public persona.
- Eddie Scarry, the reporter, got predictably torched on Twitter, was denounced by a member of his own publication, and eventually deleted the tweet.
- Ocasio-Cortez is without an income until she takes her job in Congress in January.
A conservative author and reporter tweeted a picture taken from behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and criticized her clothes as being too nice, saying they didn't match her working-class public persona.
Eddie Scarry, the reporter, got predictably torched on Twitter and was denounced by a member of his own publication. He eventually deleted the tweet."Hill staffer sent me this pic of Ocasio-Cortez they took just now. I'll tell you something: that jacket and coat don't look like a girl who struggles," Scarry wrote.
Ocasio-Cortez campaigned on her working-class upbringing and life. Before entering
After defeating Democrat incumbent Joe Crowley in one of the biggest upsets of the 2018 midterm elections, Ocasio-Cortez noted that she was in between jobs and without an income.
As a congresswoman, Ocasio-Cortez can expect to pull in $174,000 a year, placing her in a high tax bracket by anyone's count. But she'll have to maintain a residence two expensive districts: New York's 14th, and Washington, DC.
Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, and does not have the accumulated wealth that see other incoming congress members through the transition.
She commented on the struggle her financial struggle on Twitter, saying: "There are many little ways in which our electoral system isn't even designed (nor prepared) for working-class people to lead. This is one of them."
But when Scarry shared a surreptitious photo of Ocasio-Cortez taken from behind, and apparently without her knowledge, to cast doubt on her financial struggles, she defended her wardrobe and joined most of Twitter in mocking him.
"If I walked into Congress wearing a sack, they would laugh & take a picture of my backside. If I walk in with my best sale-rack clothes, they laugh & take a picture of my backside," she tweeted.
In a subsequent tweet, she called for Scarry to apologize. He has not yet done so publicly.
Scarry - a conservative writer who works at the Washington Examiner and who recently wrote a book pushing back on Bob Woodward's "Fear: Trump in the White House" - deleted the tweet after resounding disapproval from conservatives and liberals alike.The Examiner's breaking news editor, Daniel Chaitin, apologized on behalf of his publication. He tweeted: "I'm sorry, but this is not a proud moment" for the Examiner, "the place where I work and have fought so hard to make respectable as a breaking news editor."