Cory Booker Blew It

The Atlantic

Near the end of the latest Democratic debate, Cory Booker did something unusual for a presidential candidate: He admitted that his campaign was in trouble. “I have not yet qualified for the December stage,” the senator from New Jersey confessed, “If you believe in my voice and that I should be up here, please go to CoryBooker.com. Please help.”

The plea worked. A surge of contributions pushed Booker past the donor threshold needed to quality for the next debate, which is scheduled for December 19. But that might not be enough. To take the stage, Booker also needs at least 4 percent in four national or state polls or at least 6 percent in two polls from early states. As of November 24, according to The New York Times, he doesn’t have a single one. If that doesn’t change between now and the cutoff date of December 12, Booker’s campaign will be left for dead.

How has a candidate whom CNN last December placed fourth in its power rankings—ahead of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, not to mention Pete Buttigieg, who didn’t even make the list—found himself trailing Tulsi Gabbard, Tom Steyer, and Andrew Yang in both Iowa and New Hampshire? The answer has a lot to do with Booker’s unwillingness to stand up for what he once believed. Since early this year, Democratic moderates who are uneasy about Joe Biden have been casting about for a candidate. But Booker, by refusing to challenge his party’s left in the early debates, took himself out of contention. And now it may be too late.

In his early political career, Booker embodied the market-friendly, fiscally conservative ethos of Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party. In 2002, when he ran for mayor of Newark as a darling of Wall Street who supported school vouchers, New York magazine called him “essentially a Clinton Democrat.” Jesse Jackson dubbed him “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” In 2011, Booker enraged New Jersey’s public-employee unions by backing Governor Chris Christie’s effort to cut health and retirement benefits for teachers and other state workers. And the following year, Booker—who during the 2012 election cycle received more than one-third of his campaign contributions from the finance industry—famously called on Barack Obama’s campaign to “stop attacking private equity” in an interview on Meet the Press.