Part of
Vox’s guide to the 2020 presidential candidates
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker is officially running for president.
Booker, 49, is the former mayor of Newark, New Jersey, who has championed measures to address criminal justice issues, reduce racial and economic inequality, and legalize marijuana.
He leaned heavily into themes of social, racial, and economic justice in an announcement video sent to supporters on Friday, the start of Black History Month.
“We are better when we help each other,” Booker said in the video. “I believe that we can build a country where no one is forgotten, no one is left behind; where parents can put food on the table; where there are good paying jobs with good benefits in every neighborhood; where our criminal justice system keeps us safe, instead of shuffling more children into cages and coffins.”
Booker is hoping his candidacy will speak to an increasingly younger and more diverse Democratic base. He has also positioned himself squarely within the Senate’s progressive wing since he was elected in 2014.
The New Jersey senator is a familiar face in early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire, where he made appearances on behalf of other candidates in 2018, earning praise from state party officials and operatives. He spent Martin Luther King Jr. Day in South Carolina, another early primary state.
New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley has called Booker “the best friend New Hampshire Democrats had in 2018.”
But Booker is entering a large field made up of many of his Senate colleagues. The New Jersey senator has entered the race after Democratic heavy-hitters, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) are thought to be readying announcements of their own.
Cory Booker, briefly explained
Booker has been in the Senate for one term, but his profile within the Democratic Party has been high for quite some time.
Originally born in Washington, DC, Booker grew up in a wealthy New Jersey suburb about 20 miles from Newark — the city where he started working as a community organizer, and eventually became mayor. Booker’s father Cary Booker grew up poor in North Carolina. He and Booker’s mother Carolyn were the first African-American executives at the computer company IBM, but the senator has noted they essentially had to pretend to be white to buy a home in the neighborhood he grew up in.
Becoming mayor of Newark in 2006, Booker helped revitalize part of the city’s downtown and promised to crack down on crime. He got some flak from residents who complained he had abandoned some of the city’s neighborhoods, and teachers unions who didn’t like Booker championing school choice and charter schools.
Booker also got national media attention when — during a 2010 blizzard — he essentially turned his mayoral Twitter account into a snowplowing hotline and even personally showed up to shovel a constituent’s driveway.
But more recently, Booker amped up his profile role during the confirmation hearings of embattled Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
As a member of the Judiciary Committee, Booker’s questioning of Kavanaugh took a combative turn during the hearings, when he released emails he described as confidential, pertaining to Kavanaugh’s views on racial diversity. Booker did this even as he received threats from Republican leaders about expulsion from the Senate. The New Jersey senator responded, “Bring it,” before putting the emails out on his Twitter.
A few hours later, staff for Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley clarified the emails weren’t in fact confidential, they had been made public the morning before, giving the impression that Booker’s stand had been more show than substance.
Still, the Kavanaugh hearings were watched by many Americans and highly emotional and politicized; Booker was leaning into the position of the Democratic base.
What Cory Booker says about policy
Booker signed on to Sanders’s Medicare-for-all plan, a progressive litmus test. He also is a high-profile backer of the Green New Deal, the bold plan to combat climate change proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
But Booker’s core issues are social and criminal justice reform policies meant to benefit communities of color. In 2017, Booker introduced a wide-ranging bill that not only would have decriminalized marijuana at the federal level, but also would have encouraged states to legalize marijuana on an individual basis, and punished states that had especially restrictive marijuana law laws.
Last year, he introduced a Senate bill that would establish a three-year pilot program to test out a job guarantee in different areas of the US. The idea of a job guarantee program is gaining traction in the Democratic Party, but Booker’s bill so far is the only one in the Senate laying out steps to set one up.
Booker also released a “baby bonds” bill meant to reduce income inequality by giving low-income children “opportunity accounts,” with a lump sum of up to $50,000 in some cases. The idea is to give all children — not just those born to wealthier families — a chunk of change they could someday use to help pay for college tuition or a house, further building upon their own wealth.
He also introduced bills to put more money in working Americans’ pockets; making sure workers get a share of stock buybacks that normally go to company shareholders, and stopping banks from tacking overdraft fees on consumers’ debit card transactions and ATM withdrawals that are over their available balance — a move to protect low-income people who get hit with fees for being in debt.
A tough issue for Booker in a Democratic primary could be education and charter schools. He was a proponent of school choice and charter schools as Newark mayor, praising current Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s school choice organization, the American Federation for Children. Booker voted against DeVos’s confirmation, but his position has still earned him sharp rebukes from teachers unions, which are influential within the Democratic Party.
Booker is a rare bachelor in the Senate, most recently linked to actress Rosario Dawson (although the question of whether the two are actually dating has not been confirmed).
Another tough spot for Booker could be his past financial ties to Wall Street — in 2014, he got more money from donors with ties to Wall Street than any other member of Congress. As the Democratic base has objected to this money, so has Booker, who disavowed corporate PAC donations last year. Still, a wealthy supporter has already created a super PAC to support his bid called Dream United and put in $10 million. A Booker spokesperson told the New York Times that the senator and his team aren’t involved in any way to “organize or endorse the creation of a super PAC.”
Booker’s allies are quick to point out his legislative record taking square aim at big banks and trying to return more money to American workers. He’s voted numerous times against efforts to weaken or roll back Dodd-Frank, the landmark financial regulation law.
But with the public’s increasing and bipartisan desire to stamp out the role of money in politics, it’s sure to be something Booker’s competitors in a Democratic primary seize on.
Sourse: breakingnews.ie
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