Booker’s Aversion to Debating is No Mystery

By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog

Cory Booker and Rand PaulI don’t respect what he’s doing but I understand why, Save Jerseyans. Cory Booker (D-Twitter) is sitting pretty this morning with $3.5 million in the bank to this challenger’s $130,000+. He up by double-digits in the RCP average. Why risk a proverbial wayward political punch?

But even Chris Christie, who had much larger lead than Booker at this point in 2013, bothered to debate Buono twice.

Cory? He’ll debate Jeff Bell once on October 25th.

The primary difference, of course, is that Cory Booker isn’t Chris Christie. Extremely talented in his own right? Absolutely. That talent resides in the all-important realm of communications and marketing (e.g. tweeting, quoting, empathizing, branding, participating in human pyramids). It sure isn’t management; his record as mayor of Newark was abysmal. When it comes to the big issues of our time – the economy, health care, ISIS, etc. – New Jersey’s junior senator is a human hash tag that’s trending in the wrong direction.

In fact, he does the best he can to avoid discussing the big issues for the same reason that he won’t debate Jeff Bell: taking a stand is always fraught with peril.

That, and his #YOLO approach to leadership is substantively bankrupt. He lives in a fantasy land like Dukakis, McGovern, and all of the other wacky statists who came before him. Consider how he continues to advocate for minimum wage hikes, claiming that that strategy boosts wages by citing data from woefully small samples with weak correlations that (deep breath) also miss the larger point: we can’t prove a negative! Of course many wages are elevated in the immediate aftermath of the government ordering it; the sluggishness of the national economy and the New Jersey economy in recent years, however, is directly related to policies which have retarded job growth such as minimum wage hikes.

Higher salaries for a shrinking pool of workers is not impressive!

Said another way, what’s the point of higher wages if there aren’t any jobs to pay them? 

A worthy debate opponent could draw upon Booker’s record, tie it to his ideology and make a convincing case that he’s #clueless even if the persuadable viewer is other predisposed to support minimum wage hikes. Politics is personal. Winning is all about selling confidence in your product… or revealing the other guy’s brand as B.S.

The Crown Price of Twitter also isn’t scandal-free. Hardly. His as-of-yet untouched Watershedgate debacle earned next to no media attention despite a bipartisan call for an official legislative probe. That’s a shame. This story line – if it ever came into the public consciousness – belies the popular perception of Booker as a nice guy regardless of how you feel about this politics.

Imagine what we could’ve done to redefine this guy, a celebrity who can’t hit 50% in a reelect cycle, with a well-funded GOP U.S. Senate campaign?

Again, like I started out saying above, I wouldn’t want to debate either were my jaw made of glass like Cory Booker’s. That doesn’t make it right, nor does it speak well of him as a purported loving devotee of our democratic system.

 

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.

4 Comments

  1. Borrow a page from the Andrew Cuomo book of politics. Never debated his UNKNOWN opponent to sail to victory last election. Unknowns cant use debates with rock star politicians as publicity. You must pay for that….or be charismatic like BOOKER.Say what u need to say in one debate or GO HOME!

  2. Unknowns cant use debates with rock star politicians as publicity. You must pay for that….or be charismatic like BOOKER.Say what u need to say in one debate or GO HOME!

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