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.
