Few people can pander like Elizabeth Warren. This is a woman who pretended to be a whole different race to appeal to the social justice wing of the party for years and got away with it up until she was trolled into taking a DNA test by President Trump.

Since then, it seems Warren is still desperately reaching for the Oval Office which is, more than likely, too far out of her grasp. The sad part is that she likely knows it, and the even sadder part is that she won’t accept it.

Normally I’d consider a “down but not out” attitude a positive character trait, but the problem with politicians who specialize in pandering is that not knowing when to quit too often drives you to do things that make you look silly. In Warren’s desperation, she’s resorted to doing silly things.

And that silly thing just so happens to be looking at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) as inspiration.

It’d be a lie to say that Ocasio-Cortez hasn’t become a disruptor and trailblazer within the Democratic party. She’s parade conductor of the Democrat’s march into radical leftism, and her unwavering smugness and inability to admit she’s done or said anything wrong makes her seem all the more like the driving force guiding the Democrats into their future.

Warren seems to be seeing this and judging by some of her actions is both filled with awe and envy. For one, that was supposed to be her. After Hillary Clinton fell in 2016, Warren was supposed to be the obvious next choice for the leader of the Democrat party. That this young upstart waltzed in and become the new face of the Democratic party must not sit well to she who would be queen.

But Warren, being a panderer, isn’t attempting to bring Ocasio-Cortez down. She’s watching and learning.

Warren watches as Ocasio-Cortez is praised for her personal and fun Facebook Lives. She sees the approval numbers on Ocasio-Cortez’s tax plans, and her Green New Deal getting media attention. So, trying to secure the energized part of the Democratic party AOC has under her thumb, and what is likely its future, Warren desperately begins undertaking the task of being Ocasio-Cortez.

She first attempts a Facebook Live that’s so awkward it’s difficult to watch. Warren’s attempts to look young and cool by cracking a beer set the tone for the entire video, and prompted a bevy of articles denoting the “how do you do fellow kids” vibe Warren struck. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) even gave some open advice to Warren to leave that kind of thing to Ocasio-Cortez. We haven’t seen one from Warren since.

What we do see, however, is a tax plan that mimics — nay — outshines Ocasio-Cortez’s tax plan in terms of attractiveness to the increasingly anti-rich left, as Warren’s plan specifically targets the rich. As CNBC reports:

While Ocasio-Cortez’s plan is a tax on income, Warren’s proposal would tax wealth. In America, wealth inequality is greater than income inequality.

While the 1 percent of Americans with the highest incomes receive about 20 percent of the total income in the United States, the top 1 percent of wealth holders collectively own more than 40 percent of the nation’s total wealth, according to a report published Wednesday by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy arguing for a wealth tax.

With this kind of tax plan, the left is promising to be able to fund radical programs like the Green New Deal, which Warren “supports the idea” of.

“Senator Warren has been a longtime advocate of aggressively addressing climate change and shifting toward renewables, and supports the idea of a Green New Deal to ambitiously tackle our climate crisis, economic inequality, and racial injustice,” a Warren aide told Axios.

What kind of green energy plan Warren comes up with will be anyone’s guess, but if the pattern follows, it’s going to look a lot like the Green New Deal only better, somehow.

Expect Warren to come out with some kind of plan here in the near future as her 2020 plans come clearer into view. In fact, expect anything Ocasio-Cortez does to have some sort of fraternal twin in the Warren camp.

At the end of the day, though, rest assured that Warren is letting someone else doing all the leading in her political dance. First, it was Trump who waltzed her straight into political suicide with a DNA test she should have never taken, now it’ll be Ocasio-Cortez, who Warren believes is the key to rising from the dead.