Cory Booker

We’ve been told that President Trump’s address to Congress tonight would dilate on the theme of the “Renewal of the American Dream.” And so it did. But for short hand, two ideas predominated. One was “Woke No More.” The other was “common sense.” Both were themes of Trump’s inaugural address. I have expatiated on the theme of Trump’s embrace of common sense in a talk I gave to the Connecticut outpost of Hillsdale College at the end of January. The irony is that what should be common to all has been so uncommon in an age marked by perversity and ideology. Together, the attack on wokeness and the reinstitution of common sense go a long way towards summarizing the extraordinary achievements of Donald Trump in his first forty-two days.

Many failed actors work as waitstaff, or move back in with their parents. Some spiral into heroin addiction, prostitution or death. But it could be worse: a number end up in the United States Senate. This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee lent further credence to my long-held belief that anyone who declares an interest in running for political office should be committed to an asylum. The hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson bore closer resemblance to a remedial acting class than the inner democratic workings of a somewhat serious country. The right have been gorging on the clip of Democratic presidential hopeful Cory Booker giving it the full Olivier in his remarks to the judge.

Every politician who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is the height of inauthenticity. Fortunately for lovers of comedy, many politicians are too stupid and too full of themselves to notice this. Every election year, another squad marches hopelessly into the enfilade of the inauthenticity firing line. Think of Bush I visiting the National Grocers Association Convention in Florida back in 1992. Bush ambled towards an exhibit where a new type of checkout scanner was the hallowed attraction. The fancy device could read torn barcodes and weigh groceries.

If the Democratic presidential debates reflected the sort of person who votes for the party, Marianne Williamson and Tulsi Gabbard would be center stage. As would Ed Buck, Harvey Weinstein, and the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. But with Williamson systematically sidelined by the Democratic machine and Gabbard abruptly deployed to the front lines at the behest of a vengeful Kamala Harris (I mean, maybe?), we were left with the chum.

You don’t get to pick which war you fight in. When Cory Booker burst onto the national scene earlier this decade as the do-good mayor of Newark, New Jersey, most thought he was presidential timber. He agreed. Doubtless he believed his best case scenario was landing on the 2016 ticket as Vice President, with a subsequent White House bid of his own. But by the time Booker joined the Senate in 2013, his odds were lengthening. Questions swirled about his management of Newark — or if he even truly lived there. And by the time Donald Trump seized the White House, Booker became better known for garnering buffoonish headlines — he wasn’t a future president or a thoroughbred. He was ‘Spartacus’.

Let’s be honest – the best part of primary season is seeing just how wild some of the fringe candidates are. Every election cycle throws up a few quixotic single-issue mavericks without a hope in hell of actually securing the nomination. Such campaigns are usually admirable attempts to force concessions from more viable contenders or shift the debate on some key issue or another – standard politicking. Somewhat more unorthodox is the campaign of Mike Gravel – the ex-politician who doesn’t want anyone to vote for him at all. Mike Gravel, former congressman and senator from Alaska has been politically reincarnated by David Oks, a high-school senior who is now serving as his campaign manager.

Andrew McCarthy, writing in National Review Online a couple of days ago, was certainly correct that it would have been outrageous and irresponsible to have suggested, at that early juncture of this still-unfolding episode, that the pipe ‘bombs’ were hoaxes devised by leftist activists to make it appear that nebulous right wing activists are targeting famous critics of Donald Trump, from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, all the way down the food chain to Senator ‘Spartacus’ Booker and Mad Maxine Waters. But the fact that McCarthy’s column is titled ‘Why No One Trusts the Media’ tells you that his prudent restraint is redolent of that device rhetoricians denominate apophasis or praeteritio.

What does it say about President Trump if Republicans lose control of the House of Representatives after the November 6 midterms? If your answer is that Trump is failure or Trump is a disaster for his party, then you have to say the same thing about President Clinton and President Obama, both of whom also lost the House in their first midterms. Here’s my prediction: the GOP will indeed lose control, but the swing to the Democrats will be smaller than the swing to Republicans was in 1994 (54 seats) or 2010 (63 seats). Trump will have outperformed Clinton and Obama, and on strictly empirical grounds — setting aside anti-Trump bias, including among NeverTrump media conservatives — any honest analyst will have to admit as much.

Cory Booker has a problem. It’s a painful problem for a man who believes he has the background and résumé to rescue the country from an ahistorical reactionary force clawing back the progress achieved during the Obama era. It’s an especially painful problem that is made worse because it is strikingly obvious to almost every person except Cory Booker. The problem rears its head every time Booker opens his mouth or attempts the smallest gesture of solidarity with some member of an aggrieved class. It’s a problem made worse every time Book feels like he’s solving some other problem or crisis facing the country. With each desperate attempt at heroism or good, ol’ fashioned problem solving, he finds himself one step back.