The 36-year-old Congresswoman said she’s not basing her decisions on “deference.” Screenshot Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) says any decisions she makes about her political future won’t be decided by “deference” — and called the years ahead a “very unique political window” as she discussed a possible White House run with The New York Times. In a wide-ranging interview that dropped on Tuesday, AOC touched on everything from gender in politics to her own potential run for the White House to the chance the Democrats could take control of the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections. “There’s an argument that some make that this is a very unique political window and, oftentimes in politics, you do only get one shot,” she told The Times. “And you don’t — and just in life in general — life doesn’t wait for you to be ready for things. Sometimes life just makes things ready for you.” “Every element of this is something that’s within consideration,” she added in a phone interview last week with Times national correspondent Shane Goldmacher, who noted the congresswoman was home recovering from Covid as they spoke. Ocasio-Cortez, 36, was a political neophyte when she was first elected to Congress eight years ago after she shockingly unseated the incumbent, political veteran Joe Crowley. She recently made headlines for her very public fertility journey and told The Times she often thinks about how her gender and ethnicity have played a role in her career: Ms. Ocasio-Cortez weighed aloud the pros and cons of running for president with unusual candor, sounding less strategic than searching, as if the right answer were somewhere nearby. At times, she played the part of political pundit handicapping her own potential presidential candidacy from afar. At others, she voiced the unvarnished concerns of a woman who just opened up on Instagram (“Bloat check!”) about fertility treatments preparing for a possible future pregnancy. “I think about it personally,” she said of a White House run. “I am 36, I’m about to turn 37 years old — and what that means for my life.” “Pretty candidly, I think about my identity,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez went on. “I’m not naïve to the fact that we are living under a very regressive administration, and I happen to be a woman, and I, you know, happen to be Latina. And I think that there’s a lot of conversation about electability, and I don’t kind of shy away from those realities.” She said she frequently hesitates to talk about her race or gender “because people then just register it as an excuse or a complaint.” “If you’re asking me about the things that I weigh, of course, that’s part of what I weigh,” she said of a potential 2028 run for the White House. “It’s funny because it’s kind of like, everyone else is allowed to talk about it, but I’m not?” She also touched on the last two Democratic female presidential nominees — Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris — and the difficulty of electing a woman to America’s highest office. “This country has never elected a female president. Why are we pretending that this is not a factor?” she told The Times. “That doesn’t make it impossible, but to act as though it’s not a factor in anything ever is really a form of, like, denialism.” No one has ever been elected to the White House from the House of Representatives, Goldmacher pointed out in the piece, while also noting that Ocasio-Cortez did not rule out a run for Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) seat. “I don’t think that my decisions would come down to deference,” she said. Pollsters have given the Democrats a solid chance of taking control of the House in the November elections and have recently said the Senate also appears to be in play. The congresswoman called a Democratic Senate “the best possible problem we could have as a country.” “We’re working hard to have that problem, and I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it,” she added.The post AOC Discusses Her ‘Very Unique Political Window’ With NYT Ahead of Potential White House Run first appeared on Mediaite.This article originally appeared on Mediaite at https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/aoc-discusses-her-very-unique-political-window-with-nyt-ahead-of-potential-white-house-run/