[OFFICIAL] Cory Booker is Running for President Thread

Good piece on Cory Booker. More stuff like this and those non-existent swing voters someone mentioned in another thread are going to start taking a look at Booker.

Cory Booker Finds His Moment
Do Democrats want the fist or the open hand?
By David Brooks
Opinion Columnist
March 18, 2019

How do you answer hatred? How should you respond when your political opponents assault you with insult, stereotype and contempt? That’s the moral question we all have to answer during this election campaign.

Hatred has become the defining emotion of our political life. As my colleague Thomas B. Edsall reported last week, according to a recent paper, 42 percent of the people in each party regard their opposition as “downright evil.” Nearly 20 percent of both Democrats and Republicans believe that their political adversaries “lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals.” Roughly 20 percent of Democrats and 16 percent of Republicans say that the world would be better off if large numbers of the other party died.

Some people believe that fire can be fought only with fire. We’ve got to face the world as it is. If the other side is going after you with full viciousness, you’ve got to find a leader who can do the same to them. This is a knife fight. We need a brawler.

This is the argument white evangelicals made in deciding to back Donald Trump. We’re under siege. He’ll fight for us.

And this is the argument many of the Democratic campaigns are already making. Republicans are irredeemable. Racism is ubiquitous. Capitalist greed is ubiquitous. We need someone who can match Trump blow for blow — the indignation of Bernie Sanders, the confrontational, prosecutorial style of Kamala Harris.

Other people are in the as-they-go-low-we-go-high camp. People in this group argue that if you meet fire with fire all you will do is unleash an inferno that will destroy everything you care about. If you descend to hatred you’ll turn yourself into a mirror image of what you detest.

People in this camp believe that we can change our laws only after we’ve changed our politics. Moreover, they believe that after Trump, Americans yearn for a moral cleansing. You succeed politically when you appeal to voters’ basic decency.

So far, Cory Booker is the candidate who has placed the biggest bet on this latter argument. He agrees with many of his rivals on policy, but he argues that how you behave is just as important as what you propose.

Three emotions run through Booker’s campaign. The first is an unabashed patriotism, and with it the conviction that despite our differences, Americans are still connected by sacred bonds.

“Patriotism is love of country, and you cannot love your country unless you love your fellow countrymen and women,” he told an Iowa audience last month. Republican or Democrat — we are brothers and sisters under the skin.

The second is the dogged but radical hopefulness that he inherited from the black church. Booker uses religious categories more naturally than any other candidate: grace, faith, sacrificial love, the command to love your neighbor as yourself, the awareness that love has a redemptive power to cast out fear. The gospels are pretty clear that the correct response to hate is love.

“Love means that I see you, I see your worth, I see your dignity,” Booker said at that rally last month. “Your destiny is my destiny.”

The third emotion is simple gratitude. Booker had to overcome challenges in life, and he has seen many more, but his family story is a success story. The church raised money for his grandmother to go to school. His parents worked at IBM. He was elected class president in high school before going off to Stanford and Yale Law.

Others see America’s institutions as systems of oppression, but Booker calls the founders “imperfect geniuses.” America needs reform, but our inheritance is a precious one.

The knife fight view is correct if you believe that war is our permanent state — if you believe that our evolutionary roots sentence us to inevitable tribal conflict and the only choice is conqueror be conquered.

But I’d say that Booker has a fuller and more realistic view of our situation. Fanaticism is not the normal human state. Fanaticism is a disease that grows out of existential anxiety. It grows when people fear that they are being delegitimized. It grows when people are isolated and insulated from one another. It grows when you have leaders, like our president, who reduce everything to us/them stereotypes and so poison the public mind.

The disease is in our context and not in our souls. And that context can be changed with better leadership.

I write this to you from Nebraska City, Neb., just over the Iowa line. I just had lunch with 15 locals, many probably Trump supporters and some probably not. But it didn’t come up. The idea that any of these good people are “downright evil” because of some political affiliation is ridiculous and a sign of how deranged our discourse has become.

When you’re in the midst of everyday life, the idea that you can deal with one group or another only through condemnation and attack is absurd. You don’t build a better society by turning yourself into a rotten human being.
​

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/...l?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

 

more spine from Spartacus . . . we're not seeing this kind of directness and authenticity (if that's the word for it) from other candidates so far imo

Cory Booker blasts ‘senators bragging about their pot use’
Felicia Sonmez
March 18 at 10:11 PM

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) appeared to take a swipe at two of his fellow 2020 presidential hopefuls during an MSNBC interview Monday night in which he criticized “senators bragging about their pot use.”

Booker did not mention anyone by name during the “Hardball” interview with host Chris Matthews. But he suggested that it was inappropriate for lawmakers to make light of the issue when some in society face legal repercussions for similar actions.

“We have presidential candidates — senators — bragging about their pot use while there are kids who can’t get a job because they have a nonviolent offense,” Booker said.

In a radio interview last month, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who is running for president, laughingly acknowledged that she has used mar1juana in the past, saying, “Half my family is from Jamaica; are you kidding me? And I did inhale.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), another 2020 candidate, has also recently spoken about having used mar1juana, although his comments were not as widely reported as Harris’s. “Didn’t do a whole lot for me. My recollection is I nearly coughed my brains out, so it’s not my cup of tea,” Sanders said in an interview this month with the same radio program, “The Breakfast Club.”

Spokespeople for the Booker, Harris and Sanders campaigns did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday night.

Booker’s remarks in the MSNBC interview come one day after he made a similar statement during a campaign event in Davenport, Iowa.

In response to a question about mar1juana policy and criminal justice reform, Booker noted that “poor people and — way disproportionately — people of color” are affected by nonviolent drug charges for “doing things that two of the last three presidents admitted to doing.”

“We have presidential candidates and congresspeople and senators that now talk about their mar1juana use almost as if it’s funny,” he said. “But meanwhile, in 2017, we had more arrests for mar1juana possession in this country than all the violent crime arrests combined.”

He told the crowd that he is “all for legalizing mar1juana,” but that it needs to be part of a broader policy shift on the issue.

“Do not talk to me about legalizing mar1juana unless in the same breath you talk to me about expunging the records of millions of people that are suffering with not being able to find a job,” he said, prompting applause from the crowd.
​

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...4dbcf38ba41_story.html?utm_term=.193e3e6d0988

 

Dems aren't buying Cory Booker's campaign message:

The extent to which Booker’s opening message has fallen flat can be seen in both the polling and the fundraising numbers that have been released to date. The most recent poll of Iowa Democrats by The Des Moines Register, for example, puts Booker at just three percent, which is better than many candidates in the field but significantly trails better-known candidates such as Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Beto O’Rourke. The same poll Booker at just three percent as a potential second choice for Iowa Democrats, which is an important fact due to the manner in which the Democratic Caucuses are run. Nationally, the polls show Booker averaging 3.5% according to RealClearPolitics, which is better than candidates such as Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro, John Hickenlooper. and Kirsten Gillibrand who are in the 1-2% range, but far behind poll leaders Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders as well as the middle of the pack which includes O’Rourke, Warren, Harris, and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Finally, the most recent fundraising numbers show Booker raised $7.9 million in the first quarter and has roughly $6 million in the bank, placing him near the bottom of the list among the current field.

It’s not surprising that Booker’s message of unity is falling flat in the era of Trump. For one thing, as I noted last week, Democratic voters really, really want to get behind a candidate that they believe is capable of taking on Trump in 2020. For many of these voters, this appears to mean a candidate who is capable of taking the President on in his own territory, which is anything but a message of “love” and unity. They are, in other words, looking for a fighter, not a lover, and so far at least Booker isn’t offering that message. For better or worse, Donald Trump has at least for now changed the political landscape to the extent that he has engaged in rhetoric that would have previously been considered unacceptable and has managed to make it acceptable. Any Democrat that wants to take him on and win is going to need to match that rhetoric blow for blow while at the same time offering voters a different vision on policy from Trump and the Republicans. So far at least.. Booker isn’t doing that.​

https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/democrats-arent-buying-cory-bookers-unity-message/

 

apparently, anyone with a vagina will do

 

Booker releases a gun control plan today

 

"Booker Refuses To Say Whether His Plan Would Result in Jailed Gun Owners":

Senator Cory Booker (D., N.J.) refused Monday to say definitively whether he would support the prosecution, and potential incarceration, of gun owners who refuse to turn over their assault-style weapons in compliance with the gun-control proposal he’s just released.

Asked by CNN’s Poppy Harlow whether he agrees with fellow Democratic presidential candidate Eric Swalwell’s plan to prosecute Americans who retain their banned assault-style weapons after a buy-back period, Booker evaded the question, choosing instead to recount his experience dealing with gun violence as the mayor of Newark.

“Well, first of all, when I was the mayor of the city of Newark again I have a record on dealing with gun violence,” Booker said. “We did a lot of gun buybacks and even other creative ideas that I think we should have when I’m president of the United States.”

Harlow responded: “But would you prosecute people, do you support the government buying them back and if not potentially people could go to jail if they don’t want to buy them back, yes or no?”

Booker again refused to specify how his administration would deal with Americans who refused to participate in a gun-buyback program.

“Again, we should have a law that bans these weapons and we should have a reasonable period in which people can turn in these weapons. Right now we have a nation that allows in streets and communities like mine these weapons that should not exist,” he said.

​

https://www.nationalreview.com/news...r-his-plan-would-result-in-jailed-gun-owners/

 

Booker's gun proposal inviting some ridicule:

“We do this for people driving cars,” Cory Booker tells CNN about his new gun-control proposal, which is not only not true but also irrelevant. Booker employs easily demolished arguments in his push for requiring federal licensing for gun ownership, so much so that it’s impossible to believe that it’s not being prompted by anything other than electoral desperation. After last week’s disarray at the NRA annual meeting, Booker must have thought the time was ripe for everyone to forget about the Second Amendment. . . .

Unless DMVs around the country have started requiring face-to-face interviews to determine who should get a driver’s license, we don’t use Booker’s system. Contra Booker again, we don’t require face-to-face interviews for passport approvals, either. The TSA Pre-Check Program does require an interview, but that’s because it’s an optional program for avoiding some security checks by giving TSA an advance look at travelers. You can stand in a TSA line without this “license,” and you stand in a line with it, too.

All of that is secondary to the main point, which is that none of the above involves a right granted explicitly by the Constitution. The Second Amendment prohibits the federal and state governments from infringing on the right to bear arms, a natural right rather than a grant from Uncle Sam. Licensing means permission, and no permission is necessary for gun ownership. Many states require permits to carry outside the home, and the NRA might even support a proposal to supersede those with a federal license; they’ve been pushing for federal reciprocity for several years on carry permits.​

https://hotair.com/archives/2019/05/06/booker-lets-require-federal-licenses-interview-gun-ownership/