Sorry, Alex, it looks like New Jersey Democrats didn’t even come close to taking your advice. With half the vote in, Cory Booker is cracking 60% in a four-way race. Frank Pallone is in second place with 22%. So, Cory Booker is going to be a U.S. Senator. Whether he’ll be as bad or annoying as Alex thinks, I can’t really say, but I’d like to point out a few things. Maybe Booker is the right kind of person with the right point of view to run in elite’s circles without being a third wheel or a token black. But let’s look at what Booker’s done so far.
His parents were some of the first black executives at IBM, so Booker wasn’t raised in the Hood. He also wasn’t sent to any elite prep school. He was a star football player at a well-regarded public high school. He was good enough and smart enough to land a gig at Stanford University, where he became class president. He won a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at Oxford, where he received honors. Then he got a law degree from Yale. Along the way, he found time to do charitable work wherever he went. And then he won a seat on Newark’s city council and started butting heads with some seriously corrupt politicians, including the joke of a mayor, Sharpe James.
It’s true that spending part of your life studying with kids at Stanford, Yale, and Oxford will color how you view things, but let’s not pretend that Cory Booker hasn’t been excellent at pretty much everything he’s done so far in his life. That he’s made wealthy friends that have made him wealthy? White people do it all the time.
Booker might vote like a Goldman Sachs executive and break John McCain’s record for appearing on Sunday morning shows, but I doubt he’ll be ineffective. If he agrees with you on an issue, he’s going to be a valuable advocate.
He didn’t have to go to New Haven and Newark.
He gets props for that.
Parnee says: OK, but how do we actually think Booker spends most of his time? Fixing potholes personally, or attending meetings with rich, influential and important people?
This is somebody who had no idea what the mayor of a poor, not particularly large city does for a living. I’m sure the DPW Director and City Auditor would be thrilled to know that they are influential and important.
I first heard of Booker, quite awhile before he started getting national attention, through an amazing political documentary called Street Fight. It was about Booker’s first run against Sharpe James, which Booker actually lost. The story is basically told from Booker’s POV so take it with a grain of salt, but you can see what an innate political talent he is and seemingly a person who got into politics for the right reasons. I think it’s on Netflix, worth checking out.
That was a lovely campaign.
Seriously. IIRC James threw a lot of the “not black enough” crap at Booker too. Real ugly, divisive stuff. Sometimes it seems like the local campaigns are the dirtiest.
All I know is that Newark, ever since the 1960’s riots, has been a city in massive decline, and now it’s creating jobs and adding population, and that doesn’t happen if the Mayor is accusing private capital folks of being Jews who want to take over the city. I think people were so mad at Wall Street that they overreacted when Booker defended them. But it’s Wall Street folks who are investing in the city. There weren’t doing that for Mayor Sharpe.
Not an over-reaction. Love of money is the single greatest enemy mankind has. It is what empowers the fools and sociopaths that bedevil us. Let’s hope he was chastened and willing to look at why his remarks were flat wrong.
He’ll need some doing to live down his “nauseating” remark about Bain Capital. I’m willing to give him the chance. But he’ll need to get to work.
He’s done a couple of AMA’s on Reddit with some pretty lengthy responses to some of the questions. For those interested, there’s one from last July (2012) here and another from this past March here.
All I care about is that the seat is not in republican hands, hopefully for 20+ years. He’s not my Senator so I won’t get into whether it’s a great victory (or not) for progressive goals. Keeping that seat away from republicans is victory enough.
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If he does ‘vote like a Goldman Sachs executive’ I’m battling to think of an issue on which he might agree with me.
How about,
Choice
Guns
Environmental policy
Gay rights
Civil liberties
The Debt Ceiling
Protecting the safety net
Don’t forget, Jon Corzine was a Goldman Sachs executive. He was also a typical New Jersey Democrat on most issues.
Goldman Sachs wants to protect the safety net? That’s pretty laughable.
I would question whether a Senator Goldman Sachs would have the right views on environmental policy and civil liberties too, but those are more malleable.
NJ actually had a Senator Goldman Sachs for a while. While I have very few nice things to say about Jon Corzine, his record in the Senate was pretty liberal.
For example, John Corzine opposed the privatization of Social Security when he was in the Senate, and received a 90% rating from the Alliance for Retired Americans.
The stereotypes people have in politics are interesting to me. FDR was a Wall Street candidate for most of his political career. Any thoughts on FDR and the safety net?
FDR’s not a liberal anyway. His stances on civil rights were terrible. Social Security was blatantly racist! Plus you can bet he didn’t approve of the whole gay marriage thing.
How about,
Choice
Guns
Environmental policy
Gay rights
Civil liberties
The Debt Ceiling
Protecting the safety net …
Is that why Booker, at first, said young people don’t need Social Security? The debt ceiling is pretty much given because he’s not an idiot. How do we know the rest? Has he said any thing about what Snowden has done? Given Booker’s love of Silicon Valley, I think we can glean what his views on civil liberties are.
And who could have imagined promoting to national stature and immense wealth a group who are turning out to be an even bigger bunch of ill-informed social misfits than the robber barons of the Gilded Age?
Give me a living wage, labour rights and a shot at retaining middle-class property ownership as a social ethos and you can basically have the rest. Absent that and none of it lasts for long long anyhow.
I really have come to believe that there is a powerful cohort of financial services entities which, by accident or design, are eroding the economic solvency of American society. Not saying they were responsible for every macroeconomic factor but they are going to ride this pony into the ground or be damned in the attempt. If this trend is not reversed in the Senate then where?
I’m OK with Booker for now, but since the departure of Bob Kerrey and Joe Lieberman the Sunday morning shows have lacked for a Democratic senator who bashes the base. If he tries to make a media splash that way (and he did express admiration for how Paul and Cruz have performed their first terms) he can count on my money and labor going to his next primary opponent.
Cruz and Paul didn’t exactly make their media splashes by bashing the Republican base.
Well, the McCain seat of kinda sorta separating oneself from the GOP base was already occupied. And any Democrat who stands foursquare with her or his base will never be asked to be on the Sunday shows.
My in-laws live in the Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia. My father-in-law is a thoughtful and caring liberal. He supports Booker because of how effective he’s been in Newark. By Jersey standards, the guy does not even register on the corruption meeter.
With the proviso “By Jersey standards”, yes. Off topic, I wonder how Jersey Standards compare to Chicago Standards. Or are they neck and neck and does it really matter?
By Jersey standards…
LOL
That was the word about Barack Obama is about as clean as someone in Illinois politics.
being from Chicago, I completely agreed with the assessment, which is why, in the opinion of so many, was the reason why, when given the chance, folks jumped on getting Barack Obama OUT of Illinois.
Rikyah, are you the black lady that I talked with at length at Howard Dean’s Navy Pier rally? The one who pushed our way through the crowd so I could shake his hand?
Nope…that wasn’t me
Well, I won’t reject him a priori for being from a rich family. So was FDR. And he’s right about private investment being needed in the city. A lot depends on what he’s willing to give up to get that private capital. And does he realize that the USA has a major difference from the city of Newark in that the USA controls it’s money supply and is not dependent on borrowing and taxing?
His defense of Bain Capital seems to me from the few stories I’ve read on the web to be politically motivated. OK, but playing with fire, unless he really believes them in which case he’s another Rahm Emanuel.
Booker is who he needs to be to represent the state w/ the third highest per capita income in the nation. He couldn’t get elected pushing the agenda of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition.