evidence: Her victory on June 26, 2018, over her mainstream Democratic opponent, Joe Crowley, was a marker delineating the moment after which American politics would never be the same. It established AOC’s prodigious political gifts while showcasing a new sort of Democratic candidate and a new way of recruiting them. Barack Obama, previous holder of the "generational talent" title, may have resembled Ocasio-Cortez in some ways. Brown-skinned, good looking, with his own misadventures in the postcollegiate wilderness, he challenged political convention even as he titillated its guardians. But he had a résumé — the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, constitutional-law professor at the University of Chicago — that the Democratic-consultant class could easily recognize and safely admire. The Establishment didn’t know what to make of AOC. As she put it in an interview then, "If a spaceship landed in your backyard, it’s like, ‘What the fuck is that? Is it going to hurt me?’ "