A diarist at BlueJersey.com had an interesting idea recently when s/he proposed that the Blue Jersey community Write In Booker To Send a Message. However, I have serious doubts about whether or not a write-in campaign like this can have much, if any, impact on the kind of Senator that Cory Booker will be, once elected. His friends on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley and Hollywood are the people who have his ear. He listens to them, not us, and I do not think that a write-in campaign is going to change that. That doesn't mean that we are powerless to stop the Booker juggernaut.
We can do more than send a message that will not be heard. We can make a statement. We can end Cory Booker's political career, which will send a message to the entire political establishment here in NJ and throughout the country and world that we take our politics seriously and will no longer tolerate manufactured media creations who put a socially liberal face on fiscally conservative positions and demand elected officials who stand for something more than their own ambitions.
Yes, Steven Lonegan is a terrible person and having him as one of our United States Senators for a year-plus would be very embarrassing, but if a quasi-moderate like Scott Brown could not survive a real election cycle, someone who is more like another Scott (Garrett) than Brown, is going to lose to any Democrat in November 2014 that we nominate next June.
As much as we would like to fantasize about it, neither Rush Holt nor Frank Pallone are going to risk their safe House seats to run against Cory Booker in a Democratic primary election next year. They know how NJ politics works and they know that the risk is simply far too great and the reward is nearly impossible to realize. This is why they were both willing to take their chances on a run this summer even though they both knew that their respective candidacies were going to cannibalize themselves.
However, if Booker were to somehow lose to Lonegan in October, not only would his brand be irreparably damaged, making a 2014 rematch unlikely, if not impossible, Holt and/or Pallone might be more inclined to risk their political careers and futures in another wide-open primary election, knowing that whomever wins that primary election will be facing Lonegan in November 2014.
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