Nicely done, Seth.
On Wednesday night, [Cory] Booker crosses the state line in his SUV to attend the comedy show on the top floor of Finnegan’s Wake, a brick-walled pub in South Philadelphia. The dozen or so tables set aside for local politicians and donors to a children’s charity slowly fill up as waitresses deliver bottles of beer and gin and tonics in clear plastic glasses. Booker enters, pauses for photos and grips a bottle of water. He looks around in disbelief through an hour of stripper, Viagra and masturbation jokes but perks up when Philly’s District Attorney Seth Williams begins a riff on the prodigious Twitter account of “Pennsylvania’s future third senator” — shorthand for Booker.
“It’s been a full-time job for me just keeping up with him,” Williams says. “He’s tweeting every, what, 20 seconds? . . . It’s like every other second, he saved a woman out of a burning house. He was in a helicopter and went down in raging waters during superstorm Sandy. There was a panda where a train fell over at the zoo. He got the panda inseminated, all types of stuff. He is a true hero. Hero!”
Finally, Booker takes the stage. He stands in front of the brick wall and notes that “I’ve never ever been accused of inseminating a panda before tonight. . . . My staff literally said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ ” He tells some safe, crowd-pleasing sports jokes and attributes his presence in a state absent of Jersey voters to his “perfunctory profession of prodigious pandering.” He jokes about the triteness of comparisons with Obama. “President Obama left school to become a community organizer. I left school to become a neighborhood coordinator. . . . President Obama was born in the United States of America, I was born in Washington, D.C.”
Also, from the Post profile:
He is partial to quoting Winston Churchill and using rhetorical flourishes, such as “Touché, mon capitaine.” He says goodbye to the [Greek] diner owners in Greek, chats with an Ecuadorean patron in Spanish and wishes a Jewish reporter happy holidays in Hebrew.
He’s going to be an interesting senator, that’s for sure. Apparently, he’s going to get a place in a poor, black neighborhood in the District, too. It’s not a stunt. He spent eight years living in a Newark housing project without heat or hot water. I think he likes living that way. I think he defies caricature. He’s totally unique.