Cory Booker announces 2020 presidential run

Cory Booker, once mayor of New Jersey’s largest city and now one of the most high-profile, social media-savvy U.S. senators, declared his candidacy for president Friday, joining a growing field of Democrats looking to be President Donald Trump’s 2020 challenger.

Booker announced his long-anticipated decision the same way many Americans have come to know him, on Twitter, then spread his message of unity on TV and radio, in English and Spanish, before hosting a frigid outdoors news conference in the courtyard of his Newark home.

“I believe that we can build a country where no one is forgotten, no one is left behind,” Booker, 49, said in a rousing, 2-minute-and-26-second social media video announcing his campaign. “It is not a matter of can we, it's a matter of do we have the collective will, the American will? I believe we do.”

Coming to prominence as mayor of Newark, then becoming New Jersey’s first African-American senator after winning a special election in 2013 to fill the remainder of the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg's term, Booker brings to the race a liberal record on issues like marriage equality and abortion rights together with a promise to prioritize breaking gridlock ahead of party politics.

In December, for example, Booker was central to a bipartisan effort to pass historic changes to tough-on-crime prison and sentencing laws that then gained Trump’s signature, and he had a friendly relationship with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican.

But that approach may be unpopular with Democratic primary voters furious with Trump and his GOP supporters. And parts of the Democratic base are already wary of Booker’s ties to Wall Street and the pharmaceutical industry, relationships Booker has tried to downplay in recent months by, for example, renouncing contributions from corporate PACs, but ones that could haunt him on the campaign trail.

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Booker at one point was the top recipient of Wall Street money in Congress and, in 2017, voted against a budget amendment aimed at lowering prescription drug prices, earning him the ire of many in his own party.

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Booker joins a diverse field of candidates that will likely swell into one of the most crowded primary contests in Democratic Party history.

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts announced in December she was forming an exploratory committee, the first step a presidential hopeful takes before formally declaring. 

Two other senators, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Kamala Harris of California, launched campaigns soon thereafter.

Other candidates include Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Maryland Rep. John Delaney, former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana.

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Booker was an active campaigner for Democrats during the 2018 midterms, appearing in 24 states and building relationships that he can call on during the primary. He spent his first day as a declared candidate closer to home, calling into three morning radio and TV programs and then appearing on ABC’s "The View."

With Booker’s mother and brother in the audience, The View co-host Meghan McCain took aim at what critics perceive in Booker as a lack of authenticity.

“When I think of you now, I think of ‘I am Spartacus,’” McCain said, referring to Booker’s self-comparison to the Thracian gladiator during the Senate confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. “How do you convince people, especially on the left, that you’re authentic and that you’re not a phony?”

"You can’t speak to authenticity. No, you just kind of be who you are," Booker responded. “It’s about what you do — let my works speak for me.”

Another co-host, Joy Behar, asked Booker what makes him different from candidates like Harris and Gillibrand.

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“My record, I think when I have a chance to put it before people, they’re going to see a very different, sort of not usual path in politics,” Booker said, referencing at various points his work on housing and education in Newark and criminal-justice reform in Washington.

Later Friday, Booker staged a news conference in front of his home in Newark’s Central Ward, where he has lived for more than 20 years, first as a councilman and then as mayor for two terms.

“We’ve got to stop bad actors from taking advantage of people,” Booker said when asked about his ties to corporate America. He pointed to his work against bank overdraft fees and called for fairer tax laws, including an end to the so-called carried interest provision.

Booker was also asked whether his message of love would be enough to defeat a scrappy, hard-nosed campaigner in Trump.

“Love ain’t easy,” Booker said. “I’m running for president because I believe in us. I believe in these values. I’m going to put them before the American people. Hey, and if that’s not what they want, then I won’t be the next president of the United States.”

In the video announcing his candidacy, Booker recounts his family’s experience breaking the race barrier to buy a home in the New Jersey suburb where he grew up, Harrington Park, and credited that move with setting the stage for the rest of his life — from high school football star to scholarship athlete at Stanford, followed by a Rhodes scholarship, a Yale law degree and his political career.

Booker frames his move to Newark as a way to pay forward the sacrifices made by his parents and notes that he is the only senator who goes home to a “low-income inner-city community.”

Over archival footage of soldiers marching into battle that blend into images of modern-day protests, Booker intones that “we are better when we help each other.”

“The history of our nation is defined by collective action, by interwoven destinies of slaves and abolitionists, of those born here and those who chose America as home, of those who took up arms to defend our country, and those who linked arms to challenge and change it,” Booker says.

“Together, we will channel our common pain back into our common purpose,” he adds. “Together, America, we will rise.”

The GOP’s main campaign arm issued a statement Friday previewing some of the likely attacks against Booker during the primaries and the general election should he clinch the Democratic nomination.

“Cory Booker is a political opportunist who left Newark ridden with crime and an ‘emblem of poverty,’” Michael Ahrens, spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said in statement. “Even the liberal base thinks he’s a disingenuous self-promoter, and his embrace of policies like higher taxes, single-payer health care, and government-guaranteed jobs make him totally out-of-touch with most Americans.”

New Jersey's Democratic establishment started lining up behind Booker within hours of his announcement, with Gov. Phil Murphy and U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez endorsing him on Twitter.

Email: pugliese@northjersey.com