On Day Three of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, Cory Booker seized the political spotlight.
With one hand pointed toward the ceiling, the New Jersey senator looked around the chamber and vowed to give up everything, even his position in the Senate, to release “confidential documents” that would expose Kavanaugh as a racist. “This is about the closest I’ll probably ever have in my life to an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment,” Booker proclaimed.
Alas, the documents Booker promised were not confidential, having been released by an investigator the night before. Nor did they confirm that Kavanaugh had participated in racial profiling.
Six months later, Booker announced his candidacy for the White House.
Booker’s Spartacus moment was a dud, much like his ensuing presidential campaign, which he suspended on Jan. 13. But it did solidify Booker’s new political image, one that he had been crafting since President Trump’s election.
Before Booker reached the Senate, the two-term mayor of Newark, New Jersey, was a self-proclaimed bipartisan centrist. He palled around with Republican Gov. Chris Christie and supported policies that were too conservative for most liberals, such as school choice and reasonable entitlement reform. He even vocally criticized former President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign for pushing “nauseating” attacks on Mitt Romney and private equity, a criticism he later walked back, unconvincingly.
So it’s no wonder, then, that Booker’s election to the Senate was hailed not as a victory, but as a tragedy. Salon called him “an avatar of the wealthy elite, a camera hog, and a political cipher,” and the New Republic described Booker as a sellout whose only concern was “agitating for the cause of himself” and “the moneyed classes.”
Booker rejected the idea that he was “some sort of Manchurian candidate for the right,” but nevertheless used this reputation to his advantage in the Senate. He extended an olive branch to the other side of the political aisle and actively worked to co-sponsor bipartisan projects such as criminal justice reform. If Democrats were going to hold his centrism against him, Booker intended to show them why they were wrong.
Yet Booker didn’t change the Democratic Party; it changed him. As he settled into the Senate, his views became predictably partisan, and he willingly sacrificed his bipartisan relationships when party loyalty demanded it. When Trump nominated former Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general, Booker fell in line and denounced Sessions, calling his views “deeply troubling.” Just two years earlier, Booker had worked with Sessions to introduce legislation to honor the participants of the 1965 civil rights march in Alabama.
And despite his commitment to criminal justice reform, Booker threatened to withdraw his original support for the First Step Act, a bill intended to improve the treatment of prisoners while increasing efforts to rehabilitate them, after Trump vowed to sign it. Booker eventually voted for the measure, but only after joining several of his Democratic colleagues in a letter that declared the bill a meaningless half-measure and “a step backwards.”
Booker’s lurch to the left occurred when Trump became president, and the senator realized that if he wanted to have any kind of leadership role in the Democratic Party, he’d have to abandon nuance and join the resistance. He began to advertise himself as everything that Trump was not: civil, thoughtful, and unifying, all while distancing himself from the centrist positions he had once held. He flip-flopped on school choice, embraced Medicare for All, and demanded that Congress do something about gun violence.
His past appeals for bipartisanship fell by the wayside, too. Booker still called for solidarity, but with a narrower focus: “The only way to beat hate is not to bring in more hate, but to bring in love and hope, and uniting people in solving the persistent injustices in our country,” Booker declared. Trump, in this telling, was the one bringing in the hate, and Republicans were enabling it; thus, Booker argued, the Democratic Party must become a unified coalition against Trump and Trumpism.
Despite his consistent pleas for civility, the Democratic senator became more aggressive in his rhetoric, denouncing Trump as a “racist” and “misogynist” in an attempt to prove that he could fight the president on the debate stage if given the chance. Booker was still the nice guy, the senator known for bear hugs and congeniality, and the down-to-earth politician who lived in a run-down New Jersey housing project and had lived off of food stamps for a week. But Booker also wanted to be known as a fighter, someone who wouldn’t give an inch to Trump.
That brings us to Kavanaugh’s nomination. Before allegations of sexual assault had even surfaced, Booker insisted that the judge and his supporters were “complicit in evil.” Gone was the thoughtfulness Booker had once been known for. After Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault in high school, Booker declared, without proof, that Kavanaugh was a sexual offender and a racist.
This was his Spartacus moment, the moment in which he demanded that Democratic voters take him seriously.
They didn’t. Booker’s campaign never broke 4% in the national polls, and after failing to qualify for the sixth and seventh Democratic primary debates, Booker admitted he didn’t have the funding to continue. “Our campaign has reached the point where we need more money to scale up and continue building a campaign that can win — money we don’t have, and money that is harder to raise because I won’t be on the next debate stage and because the urgent business of impeachment will rightly be keeping me in Washington,” he said in a statement.
Perhaps Democratic voters didn’t find Booker’s hardline act convincing. The thing that made Booker attractive to Democrats and Republicans alike was his openness. And that disappeared the moment Booker decided to run for president, and with it, his chances of a successful campaign.
Booker had fallen into the trap the late John McCain, who had apparently taken a liking to Booker, had once warned him about: particularistic politics. What made Booker so intriguing to someone such as McCain was his willingness to consider proposals that other Democrats wouldn’t. But that changed, too. The Booker campaign’s proposed policies were indistinguishable from Elizabeth Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’s, and as a result, he failed to stand out or make a significant impression. Even his signature issue, gun control reform, was dominated by Beto O’Rourke.
The one thing that hasn’t changed about Booker is his unfiltered earnestness. But his subtle shape-shifting over the past few years threw that earnestness into doubt. His commitment to bipartisanship disappeared the moment it was politically inconvenient, and his support for centrist policies lasted until it became too difficult to maintain. It wouldn’t be fair to call Booker a political chameleon, but he is a fair-weather politician, drifting from one side of the liberal spectrum to the other whenever it suits him.
Now that Booker is no longer running for president, he might drift back toward the center and take up the bipartisan mantle once more. But it’s unlikely anyone will listen. Booker’s Spartacus moment has passed, and with it, any standing he once possessed. Now, voters are left to wonder whether it was all just an act.
Kaylee McGhee is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
