Cory Booker’s toothless testimony last week at the confirmation hearing for Jeff Sessions failed to derail the nomination of the next attorney general. But The Scrapbook suspects that was never the New Jersey Democrat’s intent when he announced he would defy an unwritten rule of Senate decorum and testify against his fellow senator. Listen to the lofty language of his introductory apologia:
I will always choose conscience and country? Those in the hearing room might be forgiven for imagining that they were at a county fair in Iowa or a diner in New Hampshire.
In other words, Booker is entertaining thoughts of a presidential run. Nor are they idle thoughts: He’s serious enough to have begun the process a few months after the last presidential election finally came to a close. Democrats are desperately searching for their future. It isn’t preposterous to imagine a forty-something, black, Twitter-savvy liberal from a deep-blue state—and one willing to stand up early to the Trump administration, no less—will cure what ails the party.
The campaign-starved press knew what was what. They were waiting for Booker outside the hearing room to pepper him with questions about his next moves. The New Jersey senator declined to admit he harbors designs on the White House. Which just goes to show that there’s one Senate tradition Booker won’t buck: that of ambitious presidential wannabes denying the obvious.
