Booker Debut: Talks Big, Thinks Small

By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog

Booker (D-Twitter)
Booker (D-Twitter)

In case you missed it earlier this week, Save Jerseyans, Cory Booker (D-Twitter) delivered his first big floor speech in the United States Senate since taking office late last year. Tweeters were atwitter over it. Colleague Bob Menendez (D-Dominican Republic & Ecuador) took to the floor immediately afterwards and praised the junior senator’s “aplomb.”

My reaction? It was certainly a classic Booker performance.

We got (1) one Bruce Springsteen quote (a poor substitute for A.A. Milne?), and (2) a lengthy speech replete with good inflection and SAT words but devoid of either substance or originality. To hear Sen. Booker tell it, America’s greatness is attributable to unemployment benefits, ones which all objective indicators demonstrate are a poor substitute for economic growth. But oh well. The celebrity senator’s half-hour speech proved, yet again, that he’s nothing new or special. Just another politician lazily content to continue his predecessors’ habit of treating the symptom rather than addressing – or even admitting to the existence of – their role in catalzing poverty’s root causes…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqHVphWJ0xI

“When times are tough,” Booker admonished his audience, “as the great New Jersey poet sings, ‘We take care of our own.'”

Here’s hoping you have better luck than Newark, America!

Based on his track record back home, if Cory Booker shows up to my hospital bed and promises to “take care” of me, I’m going to use my last ounce of strength to crawl out the damn window quicker than you can say “T-Bone.” This man is an expert practitioner of rhetoric that’s as big as his solutions are small and woefully unequal to the challenges at hand.

Don’t believe your favorite conservative blogger? Ask a Newarker. They’ll offer up a different quote from a very different Springsteen song: “I’m just living in a town called Heartbreak.”

Matt Rooney
About Matt Rooney 8405 Articles
MATT ROONEY is SaveJersey.com's founder and editor-in-chief, a practicing New Jersey attorney, and the host of 'The Matt Rooney Show' on 1210 WPHT every Sunday evening from 7-10PM EST.