“This is about the closest I’ll have in my life to an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment,” New Jersey senator Cory Booker declared during yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, in one of the lamer and less convincing efforts by an aspiring presidential candidate to give himself a cool nickname.
Alas, Booker’s lame stunt — announcing that he would defy Senate rules and release confidential documents, and daring the Republicans to expel him, only to later find that the documents had been cleared for release — is getting an exceptionally sympathetic assessment from the mainstream media. Here’s the Washington Post’s description:
Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), soon joined by other Democrats, released documents he said were marked confidential. There’s some dispute as to whether, at the time Booker released an email chain of Kavanaugh talking about his views on racial profiling, they were actually still confidential. Aides on both sides of the aisle said they were set for release Thursday morning.
Then what, exactly, is the dispute? If aides on both sides agree that the documents were set for release Thursday morning, then they weren’t confidential, now were they? Cory Booker is walking up to the free-sample tray and announcing to everyone that it’s shoplifting.
Booker boasted that he was willing to risk expulsion from the Senate, with way too much “don’t throw me into that briar patch” tone. For starters, Article I, Section 5, of the United States Constitution says, “Each House [of Congress] may determine the Rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member.” You’re not going to get two-thirds of the U.S. Senate to expel Booker — although Democrats might vote to keep Booker around for a different reason than you might think.
Cory Booker seriously wants to be the next president, and right now, a day job in the Senate is a hindrance. For a while, the day job gave him a platform for publicity stunts, like fiercely denouncing the man he praised and cosponsored legislation with just two years earlier, or calling the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh “evil.” (Notice how quickly everyone forgot about that? These publicity stunts and over-the-top rhetoric are political junk food, with little-lasting effect or consequence.)
But serving in the Senate has now become a time commitment that keeps Booker away from where he wants to be: campaigning in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, etcetera before the small army of rival candidates descends upon those states. It’s also difficult to stand out in the Senate; right now at least six of Booker’s colleagues are also thinking about running in 2020: Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Kamala Harris of California, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. (Don’t feel bad, I had forgotten about Klobuchar and Merkley too.)
If you’re Booker, why not end your Senate career with a bang, pose as a martyr to those secretive, nasty Republicans, and get a couple months head start on the rest of the Democratic field?
The problem for Booker is that so far, no one’s taking the bait. The only person talking about expelling Cory Booker is Cory Booker. Senate Republicans can see what’s going on here, and if Booker wants out of the Senate, he can always resign. Of course, that would allow Booker’s 2020 rivals to accurately call him a quitter.
It’s not often you see senators so gleefully trashing a colleague. Marco Rubio, this morning: “On this day in 71 b.c. the Thracian gladiator Spartacus was put to death by Marcus Licinius Crassus for disclosing confidential scrolls. When informed days later that in fact the Roman Senate had already publicly released the scrolls, Crassus replied, ‘Oh, ok, my bad’.”
(I hate to say this, but the shameless combativeness of former Stormy Daniels lawyer Michael Avenatti and his willingness to jab at potential rivals for the 2020 Democratic nomination . . . makes for some entertaining Tweeting. He really is the Trump of their side. He doesn’t feel any obligation to be nice to anyone else in the Democratic party, so when their arguments in the Kavanaugh hearings turn out to be sound and fury signifying nothing . . . Avenatti gleefully points it out.)
The problem for Cory Booker is that right now, there’s not a lot that makes him stand out from the rest of the Democratic field, particularly the other senators. Honest assessments of his time as mayor of Newark point out that “Booker cared more about the optics of a social media moment than actually delivering on basic city services” and “Newark has a steep climb before anyone deems it the model city Booker envisioned.” Democrats with long memories will recall the then-mayor defending private equity and taking intermittent potshots at the 2012 Obama campaign. His speeches drag on far too long, and he shouts them, convinced he’s leading a spiritual revival. Booker has always been a little too transparently ambitious, a little too shamefully self-promoting, a little too obviously bursting with self-regard.
As a young African-American senator with roots in a big city, Cory Booker will get compared to President Obama in the coming two years, but the figure he reminds me of the most is John Kerry: vain, supercilious, utterly convinced of his own historical importance, and completely oblivious to how he’s actually coming across to other people.
The Wall Street Journal’s Byron Tau yesterday: “I asked Senator Booker if his remarks in committee were a stunt. He told me I [was] violating the Constitution by being in his way.”
So What Difference Does the Op-Ed Make, Really?
For what it’s worth, U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman publicly denied being the senior administration official who wrote that op-ed trashing the president. Of course, the author would almost certainly have to deny writing it, unless the second half of his sentence was, “and I am resigning immediately.”
If the author thought the op-ed would generate goodwill and appreciation, it’s not working out as planned. Our David French:
Let’s put this as bluntly as possible: If you’re actively defying the president to pursue your own preferred policies, you’re subverting an American presidential election. If you’re withholding from the American people actual hard evidence of presidential unfitness, then you’re placing your own career before your country. If you’re lying or badly exaggerating the facts for the thrill of constant media contact or the approval of your peers, then you’re just despicable.
Elsewhere, our Jay Nordlinger asks why everyone’s more focused on who wrote the op-ed than the content of it.
I’d guess it’s because the descriptions of Trump in the op-ed, and the new Woodward book, aren’t that different from the portrait painted by other unnamed sources in the White House the past two years. Trump is described as erratic, uninformed, inattentive, temperamental, obsessed with what’s being said about him on television, prone to angry outbursts, and a general pain in the rear. What’s more, very little of that description of the private Trump contradicts what we see in the public Trump. We all know who this guy is.
People react to that portrait of Trump in one of several ways. Some of his diehard fans dismiss it all and insist that real life is a variation of the classic Saturday Night Live “Mastermind” sketch. Some shrug and conclude that volatile outbursts and Twitter tirades are an acceptable price for good judges, tax cuts, and an aggressive policy against ISIS. Others point out that even if this is the worst possible personality to entrust with the powers of the presidency, you’re not going to get 67 votes to impeach him in the Senate without hard evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors. Republican primary voters had a choice, and the general electorate had a choice, and they made their choice. They’ll get another one in 2020, with this year’s midterm election being something of a referendum on the president’s performance so far. The president has had some of his priorities stymied by Congress and overturned by judges. These are the constitutional measures in place to limit the powers of a president, and until there are 67 (or so) votes in the Senate to remove him from office, the president’s foes and critics will have to make do with those measures.
There’s No Use Crying Over Spilled Uranium
Now we know what the Obama administration used as leverage during negotiations with the Iranians . . . literally crying at the negotiating table. Wendy Sherman, the chief American negotiator of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a.k.a. the Iranian nuclear deal, has a new book out. Matthew Continetti observes:
“After dinner on the 25th day, I met with Abbas Aragchi, Iran’s lead negotiator, with his partner, Majid Takht-Ravanchi to go over one final UN resolution.” Aragchi agreed. Then he backtracked. He wanted to re-open a matter previously considered closed. What happened next is the most stunning thing I have ever heard a diplomat reveal.
“I lost it,” Sherman continues. “I began to tell [sic], and to my frustration and fury, my eyes began to well up with tears. I told them their tactics jeopardized the entire deal.”
The Iranians sat there, “stunned” and “silent,” as the representative of the United States of America, the global economic and military superpower, broke down in the middle of a conference room inside a posh hotel in the Austrian capital. “Women are told early in life that it’s not socially acceptable to get angry,” Sherman laments. “And it’s a sign of weakness to let people see you cry.” Men are told that too, by the way.
What’s fascinating is that Sherman thinks this is a good anecdote to share. When your negotiating partner suddenly backtracks on a commitment, and your response is to cry, do you think that makes the other side feel chastened or emboldened?
ADDENDUM: It’s been a busy week. If you find yourself craving football talk, you can find Jets-focused talk here and general league-focused talk here.