Democratic congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (of Texas’s Dallas-based 30th Congressional District) is back in the news again, and once more for the only reason she ever makes news in the first place: She is behaving appallingly in public. Yesterday, at the start of a speech to the Human Rights Campaign, she paused to deplore her own state’s governor, Republican Greg Abbott:

Thank you so much, Morgan, um, because we in these hot-ass Texas streets, honey, um [audience chuckles] um . . . Y’all know we got Governor Hot Wheels down there, come on now! And the only thing hot about him is that he is a hot-ass mess, honey! So yes, yes, yes, yes. Right. Okay, alright, Ima move on, Ima move on.

For those unaware, Crockett’s jab at Abbott as “Governor Hot Wheels” is a reference to the fact that he has been limited to use of a wheelchair for over 40 years, after being paralyzed from the waist down after a freak accident (a tree fell on him while he was out jogging). It was truly a classy moment for her, only the most recent in a series of escalating plays for public attention (and the affections of enraged Resistance Democrats). Little more need be said about the tastelessness of her words; I am more interested in the transparent self-promotional strategy underlying it.

For Crockett’s public crudity, like that of so many others current Washington officeholders of both parties, is largely a put-on. Her exaggerated accent and affect is only the most obvious tell: Crockett grew up in a middle-class St. Louis family, attended the most elite all-girls private school in the state, and used to speak like this before she decided she needed to sound more “street” — for authenticity’s sake, that is. More importantly, immediately after reaching federal office, she took to the publicity stunt style of politics, now so prevalent among the House’s most obnoxious figures, in a cruder and more clumsily calculated way than even that of her closest Republican analogue, South Carolina’s perpetually spotlight-hungry Nancy Mace.

It is the artificiality of her attempts to spark outrage that makes them fall so weirdly flat. Her attempt to catfight on the floor of Congress with Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R., Ga.) last May was strangely unsuccessful — she started out with the moral upper hand, no less — precisely because MTG is a moron to the manner born, a natural talent unrestained in her impulses by qualms of intellect or conscience. Crockett is blocked from any real path to advancement in office by both geography (Texas may yet one day turn blue, but not for a former BLM activist) and work ethic (she isn’t exactly leadership material). Publicity — and its hopefully attendant financial rewards — is the best she can hope for.

Yesterday’s soundbite — designed quite intentionally to get people like me writing huffy pieces about her — instead leaves me feeling the same way I do about Mace: Stop trying so hard to elbow your way into a picture you don’t belong in. But I ultimately feel quite differently about the two: When Mace does something embarrassing, I cringe because we are on the same team. When Crockett does this, I can only applaud and happily encourage her to carry on. Let’s go, Jasmine! It’s time to escalate! Let’s see how you can top this one — and I hope every voter in America is watching when you do.