In the 2014 midterm elections when Republicans took over the U.S. Senate, the sector which gave the most to candidates for House and Senate was the financial sector.
The top recipient of money from the financial sector was Sen. Cory Booker, who pocketed $4.5 million from financial executives and PACs. Within that sector, Booker dominated among cash from real estate developers (almost 50 percent more than the Senate runner-up). He also dominated in Wall Street money.
This may clash with Booker’s man-of-the-people self-image, but it didn’t surprise anyone who followed his career:
“Booker shares a worldview with the financial elites who fund his campaigns,” liberal Noam Scheiber wrote in the New Republic.
Booker is “disturbingly tight with Wall Street and entrenched financial interests,” Matt Taylor wrote at Salon.
“He represents the interests of both Wall Street and Silicon Valley,” Alex Pareene wrote at Salon.
Booker, it should be noted, got rich by holding a job at a Silicon Valley company while holding public office.
Jeff Sessions, on the other hand, is an economic populist. He was a co-sponsor of the Brown-Vitter bill to break up the big banks. In opposing more low-skilled immigration, Sessions said of his opponents, “They read the Wall Street Journal in the morning, see wages going up, and they think that’s bad.”
Behind closed-doors in GOP conference meetings, sources tell me that Sessions shows distrust, even mockery, for the Wall Street titans who have bankrolled Booker’s rapid rise.
Sessions has clashed with tech companies who want cheaper labor, while Booker got rich off Silicon Valley while in office. The same tech companies bankroll his campaigns — in 2014, he got three times as much from the “Internet” industry as the second-place senator.
So today, when Sen. Booker testifies against Sen. Sessions’ nomination as attorney general, keep this in mind. The Booker vs. Sessions fight this week won’t be about immigration, breaking up the big banks, or bailing out the big banks. But as you watch these two men square off, keep in the back of your mind that it’s one of Wall Street’s favorite senators attacking one of Wall Street’s least favorite. It’s a corporatist versus a populist.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
