I’ll provide a link to the full video below, but one portion of Cory Booker’s hometown kickoff rally in Newark from Saturday really struck me as providing something different in this field.
“Newark has always been a community impatient for justice,” he explained. “A community that knew, in the words of Dr. King, wait has almost always meant never. In communities like ours and in communities all across this country, wait still too frequently means never. Wait for clean water. Wait for decent-paying jobs. Wait for better schools. Wait your turn. Wait. Here in Newark we refused to wait.”
But after a lengthy section recounting all the things for which we cannot wait (“We can't wait when this administration is throwing children fleeing violence into cages, banning Muslims from entering the nation founded on religious liberty, and preventing brave transgender Americans from serving the country they love…. We won't wait for criminal justice reform. We will end the system of mass incarceration in America”), Booker pivoted to how we can achieve all these necessary goals, and this I will quote at length:
Now critics are going to tell you and tell all of us that a campaign powered by grace and love and a deep faith in each other can't beat that. But I say it's the only way we win.
(CHEERING)
BOOKER: You see, the president wants a race to the gutter and to fight us in the gutter. But to win, to win, we have to fight from higher ground in order to bring this country to higher ground.
(CHEERING)
BOOKER: So we can't allow them to divide us. And we must also resist the urge to divide ourselves. Because the people on my block, the people gathered here and folks all across the country can't wait. They can't afford a politics of division that sacrifices progress for purity. They can't afford to allow this election to become just an exercise in political posturing or box-checking competition that is completely divorced from the realities of so many people who are struggling and hurting.
Look, I am the only Senator who comes home to a low-income, inner city, beautiful community.
(CHEERING)
BOOKER: And I know and you know that we don't have the privilege to wait for what fits into someone else's narrow view of what it means to be a progressive.
Our first priority must be to make people's lives better.
(APPLAUSE)
BOOKER: Right now, to move the ball forward, how best we can, as fast as we can, and to ensure that the closest -- that those folks that are closest to the pain and closest to the struggle have an active hand in defining how we confront it. A real progressive movement refuses to stall out in righteous indignation. It channels that indignation into the work that actually improves people's lives. A real progressive movement does not hold progress for communities like mine hostage today for promises that perfection will come tomorrow.
(APPLAUSE)
BOOKER: We are the inheritors of those kind of movements. Movements of committed Americans who came together gathering just like we are now. This has been the truth of generations of people in our country who in moments of great moral crisis and great moral challenge summoned great moral imagination. They did not surrender to the seduction of hatred. They fought with a defiant love. And when they rose, our nation rose with them. I'm here today, we are here today because of those kinds of movements.
[Transcripts stitched together via CNN.com: one, two.]
Not everyone here’s going to like this more explicitly pragmatic approach. I, for one, am uncommitted so far in this race (I’ve given to Warren, Booker, and Gillibrand), and I appreciate how they’re each trying to carve out different lanes, different approaches to what we should be seeking in our next President. For Booker, look how the above approach explains the health care section of his speech:
We won't wait to fix our broken health care system, because in America, health care is a right.
(CHEERING)
BOOKER: I will fight for Medicare-for-All, and I will start with lowering the age of Medicare eligibility and giving Americans a real public option.
(CHEERING)
BOOKER: I will use the government's bargaining power to once and for all bring down the cost of prescription drugs.
(CHEERING)
BOOKER: And I will once and for all end the sabotage of the Affordable Care Act.
You can watch the whole speech here:
