Cory Booker is the Real Deal

My Interviews With Cory Booker

About seven years ago, a staffer from Cory Booker’s office reached out about a potential interview with the Senator around school reform. Booker’s office thought the press coverage of his high profile efforts to improve schools in Newark during his years as mayor was inaccurate, and they wanted Booker to set the record straight.

As a regular contributor to the Atlantic’s education section and a proud Jersey girl, I had already written one or two small pieces about Newark schools. They thought I was the right person to tell his story. I got the okay from my editor and took the train to his Newark office.

My Atlantic byline gave me instant access to the hotshots in education politics. However, I had never interviewed a standing Senator before, so I was nervous as hell. Surrounded by staff and supporters in his office, I lined up multiple recording devices on his sofa and pulled out my list of questions.

I didn’t have a chance to ask many of those questions. I turned on the record button, and he talked for an hour without stopping for a breath. It’s no wonder that he's just broken Strom Thurmond’s filibuster record. Booker can talk.

Here’s an edited version of the interview. You can see from that transcript that it was a one-hour monologue.

A few months later, the staffer asked if I wanted to chat again. The Senator had a short block of time after a local event and wanted to continue our conversation. The staffer told me to meet Booker outside his two-family home, situated on a modest block in Newark.

Again, nervous as hell, I had the Uber drop me off 20 minutes early. With time to kill, I walked around the block a few times. I passed a McDonald’s, some grand old homes from Newark’s German brewery years, and a bodega or two. He lives in a low-income neighborhood of hard-working folks who keep their properties neat and put bars on their windows.

Booker spontaneously offered to give me a tour of the neighborhood. With my iPhone recorder on, we walked for an hour with a staffer trailing behind us.

It was a long discussion that went beyond his views on schools. He talked about choosing to live in a low-income neighborhood, his roots in local politics, his family, books that he was reading, and more.

During our walk, he popped into a bodega to talk with folks in Spanish. We stopped to chat with a young homeless man with addiction problems. Booker called his driver to take the man to a shelter and had another staffer line up the man with social services. Folks stopped to shake his hand and shouted greetings from moving cars. It was the closest that I’ve gotten to a celebrity.

I asked Booker if he planned to run in the 2020 election. I have to go back to the transcript to check the exact wording, but I remember that his response was carefully worded. As it turned out, he announced his campaign in February 2019.

The 2020 campaign was a rough time for moderate Democrats. The primary race pushed everyone to the left. Kamala Harris’s campaign in 2024 was burdened by statements that she made back then about defunding the police.

Pressured to go farther to the left, Booker tried to distance himself from his support for charter schools and take on the language from other progressives. It wasn’t a great fit for him. At heart, Booker is a moderate Democrat with close connections with the church ladies who protect their communities in Newark and roots in middle-class Jersey.

Booker was the football star in an upper-middle-class town in Bergen County in the 1980s. I grew up a couple of towns away from him. Bergen County is a melting pot of Wall Street bankers, plumbing contractors, and Korean programmers, who live in suburban towns that haven’t changed much since 1950. It’s a nice place. When I had kids, I moved back for the schools and soccer fields.

After an education at Stanford, Oxford, and Yale, he moved to Newark, where he worked with the Ward leaders to get his footing in local politics. Newark’s ward leaders aren’t AOC-style progressives. They are religious women of a generation that wears hats to church on Sunday. Booker feels at home with these women and the larger religious community; he participates in a Congressional bible study group and has close connections with Jewish leaders.

This week’s marathon filibuster showcased Booker’s unique brand of politics — pragmatic, religious progressivism. Booker champions the interests of the poor without the rhetoric that tanked Harris’s campaign last year. He’s pragmatic about policies like charter schools and is willing to work with Republicans. The 2020 campaign was not a good fit for Booker; today’s political climate is a different place.

As someone very concerned about Medicaid and other possible hits to the disability community, I stayed up late to watch Booker give his historical filibuster and thought back to our conversations many years ago in Newark.

A staffer drove me to the train station at the end of my afternoon in Newark. Overwhelmed and exhausted by Booker’s energy and enthusiasm, I turned to his staffer and asked, “Is he for real?” The young man solemnly nodded.

As sometimes happens, senior-level editors at my publication decided to go in another direction and declined to publish my article. So, I took my interviews and research to another publication. I wrote about our education discussion but not the second conversation and stroll through Newark. Maybe I should.