images courtesy of booker.senate.gov
Senator Booker meets with students at Bergen Tech in Paramus, N.J.
Booker’s warm, often self-deprecating sense of humor is strongly evident in the book as in his speech. “My dad was a comedian,” Booker says. “He got by on his quick wit and his gift of gab. And yet he had a tough childhood.” And, except maybe for the childhood part, Booker could say the same about himself—both father and son, adept practitioners of the comedian’s art. The memoir is rich in both light and dark tones. “I hope my book is inspiring,” he says, but I also hope that I didn’t pull punches and that I told the truth” And that truth is full of brokenness and failure and death, as he talks about the death of his father, and of close friends in his community in Newark, including a young man who lived downstairs from him in Brick Towers. “I found that the best things to talk about in the book were either moments when I was getting my comeuppance or moments when I was broken by this country, by circumstances in this nation.” But Booker’s unwavering response to the darkness is optimism, as he urges, “We must use our lives with courageous love. Every moment we have a choice—to accept things as they are or to accept responsibility for trying to change them.”
Elections 2016 In discussing the primaries, Booker, who has made a number of campaign speeches for Hillary Clinton, once again embraces the positive, at least on the Democratic side. “I celebrate the primaries we’re having. It’s a wonderful engagement of ideas between the candidates. It’s been a good contest,” he says. “Unfortunately what we’re seeing in the Republican Party now is disappointing and often discouraging.” He emphasizes his support for Clinton, “I’m campaigning very hard for her. I’m a believer. She’s somebody who’s proven herself over decades and her commitment to serving the less fortunate, the marginalized in our country. She’s somebody I trust who can make a difference for our country on the issues that matter.” Expressing his admiration for Bernie Sanders and predicting a unified Party after the convention, Booker goes on to state, “We have two great candidates, and I think that Senator Sanders, whom I’ve served with, understands the urgency of what’s at stake, especially if Trump becomes the nominee. The urgency is there for Democrats to win in this election, and I’m confident they will come together.“
Call for Action
and growth,” he states. “The Democratic Party has shown time and time again how the economy recovers and grows strong under a Democratic president and is often driven into a ditch with a Republican President.” But, despite the fact that the two baby boomer-generation Democratic candidates are aging and he is a generation younger, Booker is unwilling to address his own political ambitions, vice presidential or otherwise. “Absolutely not,” he says. “My next election isn’t until 2020 for the Senate. I feel really blessed to be where I am and to focus on the job at hand for New Jersey. The focus for me is regaining the Senate for the Democrats and seeing Hillary Clinton get elected.” In summing up his thoughts about the difficulties and opportunities in the 2016 election season, Booker invokes Martin Luther King, urging people to get involved. “For a lot of people who don’t like what’s going on,” Booker says, “the way to combat that is not just to condemn it, to be stuck in a state of what I call sedentary agitation, but to get up and do something about it, to match their negativity with your political action. You have to match their darkness with your light.” He continues, “I have often said that our nation needs more poets. We have to find a way to prick the moral imagination of our country. I hope this will be an election when we don’t give in to the demagogues and the derision and instead rise to more engagement, more activism and strive towards justice.…There’s no presidential candidate who’s going to ride in and solve the challenges we have. There has to be an expansion of our moral imagination of who we are, followed by a courageousness of action that we’ve seen at so many points in our history.” In the conclusion to the chapter of his book titled “Ms. Virginia Jones,” Booker talks about the lessons he learned from Ms. Jones, the 68-year-old president of the tenants’ association at Brick Towers in the Central Ward of Newark, where he lived for eight years: “For Ms. Jones, hope was relational. It didn’t exist in the abstract. Hope confronts. It does not ignore pain, agony or injustice. It is not a saccharine optimism that refuses to see, face or grapple with the wretchedness of reality. You can’t have hope without despair, because hope is a response. Hope is the active conviction that despair will never have the last word.” Wherever his future leads him, Cory Booker, pursuing his mission to find common ground and advance the common good, means to make sure that despair does not have the last word.
Eager to promote his positive message, Booker reflects on the future of the Democratic Party. “Our party has a stronger message for our economy, for education, for innovation
JUNE 2016
UA_CoryBooker2016.indd 5
URBAN AGENDA MAGAZINE
15
5/27/16 10:21:40 AM