Cory Booker’s Burden: Senator deflects talk of a presidential run — for now

Cory Booker sits in the back seat of a black Chevy Suburban. It is a pristine, sunny Sunday in late July, and New Jersey’s junior senator is on the move.

The morning began at a Middle Eastern restaurant on Paterson's Main Street, where Booker met with a family of Syrian refugees. Then he stepped outside to exchange handshakes and high-fives with marchers in a Colombian heritage parade. Now, as Booker’s SUV glides down the Garden State Parkway, he takes a moment to look beyond the day’s hectic schedule.

Booker leans forward and breaks into the kind of rapid-fire policy-wonk sermon that has become his default political trademark. He ticks off plans to repair the nation’s infrastructure, to fix health care, to reform prisons, to create jobs and to change drug laws, especially the harsh penalties for marijuana use.

But something is missing in this litany — Booker himself. What about his plans, and the persistent buzz that that he may seek the Democratic nomination to challenge President Donald Trump in 2020?

One of the worst-kept secrets in New Jersey — and in Washington, too — is that Cory Booker seems destined for something more than just a seat in the U.S. Senate. But will Sen. Booker become President Booker? It’s a question Booker tries to avoid. And, as he is reminded almost every day, it’s not easy.

The SUV pulls up to a corner near the center of Somerville’s business district. Booker opens the door and steps into the sunlight, glad-handing shoppers, posing for selfies and popping into a bakery. He announces that he is a vegan, but drops $23 anyway on cookies for his staff and nieces.

As Booker is leaving, a man approaches and tells him, "I hope you run for president.”

Booker smiles, mutters a “thank you,” then walks on. There is no promise to run. But there is no denial, either.

Such is Cory Booker’s burden, blessing, and balancing act.

Plenty of people, from top political strategists to ordinary voters, see him as a presidential candidate. But what does Booker really want?

He is 48, midway through his first term in the Senate. In many ways, he’s still a political rookie. But, as more than a few political observers have noticed, Booker has reached the same place in his career as another political rookie, Barack Obama, who was 47 and in his first Senate term when he ran for president in 2008.

This year, with Democrats still reeling from Hillary Clinton’s defeat and with no clear standard-bearer in place for the 2020 presidential campaign, the party is looking for new voices to fill the void.

Enter Booker.

With Trump in the White House and Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, Booker is viewed increasingly as a go-to Democratic counter-puncher, taking star turns at press conferences and on cable news talk shows while trying to carve out his place amid the partisan wars on Capitol Hill.  

Whether this is Booker’s way of charting a path to the presidency in 2020 or four years later is anybody’s guess. Certainly, Booker is playing it coy.

“I accept being one of the next generation of leaders in the national party,” he says, quickly­­ adding that he feels no pressure to run for the White House. “Not at all. I don’t feel that the success or failure of my life of service is going to revolve on whether I’m president of the United States or not.”

Such deft deflections have done little to stop the speculation about Booker's future.

Since March, Booker, who has more than 3.4 million followers on two Twitter accounts and is considered a key link to young voters, has headlined Democratic fundraising events in seven states, including the key presidential battlegrounds of Ohio, Michigan and Florida. In June, in a move that evoked memories of Robert F. Kennedy’s attempt to focus the nation’s attention on the plight of poor people in the late 1960s, Booker embarked on a trek through Alabama to draw attention to how poverty is linked to environmental problems.

And on Wednesday, Booker signed on as one of 16 co-sponsors of a proposal, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, to create what Sanders described as a "Medicare-for-all, single-payer health care system." Other sponsors include such potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidates as Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.

But Booker's emergence comes as Democrats are facing a dilemma. Just as the party is trying to point toward the future, it finds itself still wrestling with the latent bitterness of Clinton's failed campaign.

For Booker, this could be especially daunting.  

As he tries to chart his own political path with an eye on the 2020 presidential election or beyond, Clinton is touring the country — with a stop at  Montclair's Watchung Booksellers on Sept. 26 — to promote her new campaign memoir, "What Happened." In the book — and in a series of finger-pointing interviews this week — Clinton harshly criticizes Sanders and other Democrats for not unifying the party against Trump. 

She acknowledges that she considered Booker as a possible running mate before settling on Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. She also praises Booker, an early supporter who hosted a campaign rally for her in Newark, for delivering a "rousing and heartfelt speech" at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. 

But observers say Booker's embrace of Sanders' health care plan and other liberal policies reflects a new — and carefully orchestrated — strategy to promote a more progressive agenda that distances him from Clinton.  

One of Booker’s closest friends and political confidants, Modia Butler, insists that Booker is not actively planning to run for president — not yet, anyway. But Butler, who was Booker’s chief of staff when he was mayor of Newark and also served as chairman of the city’s Housing Authority, says his friend’s political status could quickly change.

“A lot of that stuff happens organically. That’s the way Cory looks at it,” said Butler, who is now a New Jersey-based lobbyist. “You just do your job and see what happens.”

But Butler is not naïve. What he sees already from Democrats across the nation is steady pressure on Booker to jump into the 2020 presidential sweepstakes.

“I travel with him quite a bit, and we hear that talk constantly,” Butler said. “Wherever the Democratic Party is going, Cory is going to be at the forefront. As my friend, I see the sky being the limit for him.”

Julian Zelizer, who teaches presidential history at Princeton University, also sees Booker as a Democratic force, perhaps even the sort of candidate who could unite disparate factions as the party tries to reshape itself after years of setbacks culminating with Clinton’s crushing defeat last year.

“On financial issues, he’s not too liberal, and at the same time, on social and cultural issues, he’s pretty liberal,” said Zelizer, whose most recent book examines President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” legislative initiatives. “It’s kind of a nice mix that makes him a different kind of Democrat. I think his stock has clearly risen in a party that is rebuilding.”

Such praise is not unusual for Booker. Indeed, high expectations have shadowed him for decades.

As the brainy high school football star and class president at Northern Valley Regional High School in Old Tappan, and later at Stanford, Oxford and Yale Law School, Booker seemed on a glide-path to success. He was handsome and gifted, with a light-up-the-room personality that allowed him to easily connect with people.

He might be talking sports trivia one moment; the next, quoting a Greek philosopher or a history book he'd just read. At Oxford, which he attended as a Rhodes scholar,  he even became president of the L'Chaim Society, a Jewish organization that invited speakers to campus. Booker was brought into the society by its rabbi, Shmuley Boteach, who now lives in Englewood and has branded himself "America's rabbi." (The two have since fallen out over Booker's criticism of Israeli policies and his support for the 2015 six-nation agreement to limit Iran's nuclear weapons program.)

Booker carries a powerful personal backstory that he often cites as his most important guidepost — his upbringing in a middle-class black family in an overwhelmingly white Bergen County suburb.

Like Obama, Booker easily crosses racial lines — another reason he is seen as a unifying force in an increasingly diverse Democratic party. But Booker’s racial narrative has plenty of scars, too.

In buying a home in Harrington Park in the 1970s, Booker’s parents — both of whom were IBM executives — needed the help of Bergen County fair housing advocates to break through the real estate color lines that steered black families from large swaths of northern New Jersey for decades.

Once the family was settled, Booker juggled life in two worlds. He attended classes and competed on sports teams with mostly white children, but he worshiped on Sundays with the mostly black congregation of the Centennial African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Closter, and washed dishes in his spare time at a Teaneck soul food restaurant that his father owned as a side business.

Years later, Booker’s desire to reconnect more deeply with his black heritage prompted him to forsake a high-paying job with a Manhattan law firm and move to Newark, where he became a community organizer and then a two-term mayor before winning his Senate seat in a special election in 2013. Today, Booker still lives in a two-story home in Newark’s Central Ward.

In Newark, however, Booker faced unexpected criticism, in light of his family's history of breaking racial barriers in the lush suburbs of Bergen County. Some African-Americans in Newark who resented Booker’s rapid rise in local politics accused him of not being authentically black.

“They were the hardest years of my life,” Booker now says of how he constantly had to explain to Newark residents that his comfortable Harrington Park childhood did not erase his African-American roots.

In 2012, Booker, who has light brown skin and green-blue eyes, discovered that his racial background was even more complicated than he thought. When he appeared as a guest on the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” Booker learned that that his family tree included African-born slaves, Native Americans and at least one white man who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War.

In 2013, when Booker ran for the Senate, he faced yet another series of questions about his background — this time about his sexual orientation.

Booker’s Republican opponent, Steve Lonegan, the former Bogota mayor and conservative pundit, openly questioned whether Booker, who had never married, was gay. Booker initially dismissed the accusation. But then he stoked the rumor mill by telling the Washington Post that he was flattered to be described as gay.

“Because I want to challenge people on their homophobia, I love seeing on Twitter when someone says I’m gay, and I say, ‘So what does it matter if I am? So be it,'” Booker said. '“I hope you are not voting for me because you are making the presumption that I’m straight.’”

For the past year, he has been dating Cleo Wade, 29, an activist and artist whose poetry has been featured on Instagram.

Wade is “a special person,” Booker said, adding that he’s “hopeful” their relationship will lead to marriage.

“I’ve been a bachelor too long,” he said.

When it comes to defining his politics, Booker invariably points to his dual heritage — as a black kid in prosperous Harrington Park, and a black politician who had trouble gaining acceptance on the distressed streets of Newark — as his key compass point. He even dedicated his 2016 book, United: Thoughts on Finding Common Ground and Advancing the Common Good, to “Harrington Park and the surrounding small towns of New Jersey’s Northern Valley,” and to “the people of Newark.”

“I am who I am because of you,” Booker wrote.

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Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta and the author of The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark and Post-Racial America, says Booker’s seemingly disparate roots in Bergen County and Newark are a major reason he is viewed in the Democratic Party as “a natural-born bridge builder.”

The problem, said Gillespie, who spent months with Booker while researching her 2012 book, is that the nation’s politics have become much more partisan and divisive, especially in the aftermath of Trump’s election. “The zeitgeist is not about bridge building,” Gillespie said. “Booker’s challenge is to figure out how to remake himself and also be true to himself. It’s hard for someone who is a natural-born bridge builder to find their voice in this time.”

Certainly bridge building is one of the factors driving Booker’s recent call to legalize marijuana. To fiscally conservative Republicans, Booker argues that legalizing pot — and taxing it — would be a financial boon for governments. It would also help to save millions of dollars that America spends to imprison people convicted for possessing relatively small amounts of marijuana. At the same time, Booker sees the initiative civil rights issue, because blacks and Latinos are far more likely to be jailed on low-level drug charges.

Booker’s venture into the debate over marijuana, while politically risky in some ways, is also viewed by some political analysts as a brilliant strategy.

"You don’t take the lead on issues which are set up to fail; just look at what health care has done,” said Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “You find an issue where you’re not expected to make any progress in the short term but you look at the long gain. That’s what marijuana does. The way Booker is approaching this issue is smart. He’s setting himself up as both an advocate but also as a voice of reason who can reach across the aisle.”

After leaving Somerville on his Sunday swing through the state, Booker headed to Princeton where almost 200 people had jammed into the town’s public library to hear him and several other politicians reflect on the health care debate. It’s a partisan crowd, filled with all stripes of progressives who don’t seem to be in any mood to talk about finding common ground with Trump, Gov. Chris Christie or Republicans in general.

After almost an hour, Booker stood and looked out at the audience. He was not smiling. He seemed more like the tough football tight end who starred at Northern Valley Regional and then at Stanford.

"I'll tell you who to blame — it’s us,” he told the crowd. “People want to blame others. But the fact is, it’s us. People don’t show up to vote.”

Booker paused to let the words sink in.

“This is the moral moment for our country,” he continued. “Generations will ask, ‘Where were you?’ This is going to be the question that our children and grandchildren are going to ask us.”

He paused again, then added a line that could have been lifted from a half-time pep talk: “We’ve got to fight on.”

The audience applauded loudly.

Then Booker left.

It was the sort of speech that Booker often gives — biting and passionate, but not overly critical, and framed with a sense of optimism that good will ultimately prevail as a unifying force.

Two hours later, with the sun setting, Booker walked into the Atlantic City Rescue Mission. He donned plastic gloves, grabbed a spoon and stood behind a stainless-steel table to serve a pasta dinner to a bedraggled group of homeless men who lined up along the walls of the dining room.

Booker joked with the men as they approached, asking them about their favorite football and baseball teams or just wondering how they were, addressing many of them as “sir.”

One of the men, Brian Cairns, 55, smiled as Booker handed him a plate.

“I heard inklings that you’re running for president,” Cairns said.

Booker laughed, then quipped, “No, I’m going to be president of the 'Star Wars' fan club.”

The moment passed quickly and Booker finished serving. He stripped off his plastic gloves, set down his spoon, and strolled into the dining room to chat with several homeless men and pose for a few more selfies.

As he headed to his SUV about 20 minutes later, Booker again tried to steer clear of presidential talk, explaining that “it’s flattering” when people ask him to run.

Then he switched gears. He confessed that he worries the Democrats could lose seats in the Senate in the 2018 elections. And as unpopular as Trump appears to be, Booker fears it may be difficult for the Democrats to unseat him in 2020.

Booker frowned at the thought. Then he breaks into a wide smile.

“I’m always a prisoner of hope,” he says. “I don’t think it’s a problem. I think it’s an advantage.”

Email: kellym@northjersey.com