There’s an iconic moment from the old Saturday Night Live when Dana Carvey imitated George H.W. Bush in a debate with Michael Dukakis.  After Carvey gets done going on a tangent about “stay the course, thousand points of light, stay the course,” Jon Lovitz, playing Dukakis, looks into the screen and just mumbles incredulously, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”

There is a high degree of likelihood that Democrat representative Joseph Crowley said something very similar about his loss to Democratic-Socialist Alexandra Ocasio Cortez following her recent embarrassing interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

You might have noticed a lot less buzz coming from Democrats about Cortez in recent weeks, almost as if they are beginning to realize her ascension could be far more of a liability than a coup for left-wing politics.

Uneducated and unprincipled people – which ordinarily includes an unnecessarily and inexcusably significant portion of young, college-aged voters – will be persuaded by the political game of who can promise the most things to the most people.  On that front, Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Cortez simply cannot be outdone. 

Cortez’s platform includes it all: “free” healthcare for everybody, “free” housing for anyone in need, guaranteed job for anyone who wants one, “free” college at public universities, and the “cancelling” of all current student loan debt. 

To be a bit more precise, that actually means everyone’s healthcare will be paid for by the government, everyone’s housing (who needs it) will be paid for by the government, everyone’s jobs (who wants one) will be supplied by the government, everyone’s college will be paid for by the government, and everyone’s student loan debt will be paid off by the government.

The logical questions that honest, sane minds will ask are, “how much will that cost the government?  And given that our government already spends far more than it takes in, where will they get that money?”

Those were the questions that Tapper predictably posed to Cortez in a recent interview, and she was completely undone.  He pointed out that the liberal Tax Policy Center estimated the cost of her programs would be a jaw-dropping $40 trillion.  Her tax hike proposals would account for $2 trillion of that.  So where would the other $38 trillion come from. 

Stumbling, Cortez offered the defense that her ideas weren’t “pie in the sky,” but that they were “good for our future.”  Noticing that didn’t even address his fairly straight-forward and easy to understand question, Tapper tried again and against her better judgment, Cortez tried to answer rather than fake a heart attack and slip out the door:

TAPPER: Right. I get that. But the price tag for everything that you laid out in your campaign is $40 trillion over the next 10 years. I understand that Medicare for all would cost more to some wealthier people and to the government and to taxpayers, while also reducing individual health care expenditures. But I am talking about the overall package. You say it’s not pie in the sky but it’s $40 trillion is quite a bit of money. And the taxes that you talked about raising to pay for this, to pay for your agenda, only count for two. We’re going by left-leaning analysts.

CORTEZ: Right. When you look again at how our health care works, currently we pay — much of these costs go into the private sector. So, what we see, for example, is, you know, a year ago I was working downtown in a restaurant. I went around and I asked how many of you folks have health insurance? Not a single person did. They’re paying — they would have had to pay $200 a month for a payment for insurance that had an $8,000 deductible. What these represent are lower cost overall for these programs. Additionally, what this is, it’s a broader agenda. We do know and acknowledge that there are political realities. They don’t always happen with just a wave of a wand but we can work to make these things happen. In fact, when you look at the economic activity that it spurs — for example, if you look at my generation, millennials, the amount of economic activity that we do not engage in. The fact that we delay purchasing homes, that we don’t participate in the economy as purchasing cars as fully as fully as possible is a cost. It is an externality, if you will, of unprecedented amount of student loan debt.

TAPPER: I am assuming I won’t get an answer for the other $38 trillion. We’ll have you back and go over that.

Absolutely humiliating. 

But don’t expect Cortez to rethink her priorities or her approach to good government.  Don’t expect her to contemplate whether promising $40 trillion worth of new government programs with no idea how to pay for it is actually “good for our future.”  Socialists embrace the epitome of greed and envy – they crave power and will dangle irresponsible promises in front of the masses in order to get it. 

Only an undisciplined people with a dangerous sense of entitlement fall for it.