All along the way of Sen. Cory Booker’s political rise, in one way or another he’s been cast in—and played—the good-guy role.
He rose to prominence as the upstart Newark, N.J., city councilman depicted in the documentary Street Fight. As Newark’s mayor, he built a national profile by cultivating almost a million and a half Twitter followers, outshining New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg with his response to the 2010 “#snowpocalypse,” saving a neighbor from a burning building, and being known as the Democrat who managed to share a good-natured rapport with New Jersey’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie.
In his first few months as a U.S. senator, Booker, a Democrat, has kept the good-guy image going by bantering with Republican colleagues like Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky—in a Twitter exchange that morphed from a “Festivus” joke into a public challenge to work together on issues around federal sentencing—and breaking bread with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz at a dinner during which, he told me, they “talked about families, and our motivation, and the things that make us human.”
It’s a “can’t we all just get along” style that might come across as naive, but one that he’s consistently cultivated, even embracing hecklers with his perpetual buoyancy:
Six months into his tenure, then, Booker’s challenge is to show that his optimism can actually translate into legislative gains that help his constituents, because in his tenure as mayor, he was, at times, dogged by the perception that “he dazzles at news conferences, but flags on the follow-through.”
So to start, he’s put his stock in a bill he’s jointly sponsoring with Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina—the only other African American in the Senate—that would create incentives for businesses to offer apprenticeships for young Americans in various skilled trades.
Their Leveraging and Energizing America’s Apprenticeship Programs, or LEAP, Act would put in place a $1,500 tax credit for each apprenticeship provided to young people under age 25 and $1,000 for apprentices between the ages of 25 and 29.
The idea, as Booker puts it, is that in an environment of high unemployment—one in which it’s been estimated that there are 4 million job openings for skilled workers that employers can’t fill—American “competitiveness and economic strength depend on our commitment to developing a 21st-century workforce.”
And if it gains momentum and eventual passage, it’ll be a feather in the caps of both Booker and Scott for demonstrating that a newer generation of Senate leaders can break through partisan gridlock. To that end, Booker calls himself “a prisoner of hope” for bipartisanship but also says he’s “a realist” who understands “how difficult it is to get things done.” Particularly when it’s an election year in which the Republican agenda is being driven in the House of Representatives, and Democrats in the Senate have been focused on boosting the minimum wage.
It’s also a logical point of entry for a new senator when voters across the country consistently tell pollsters that their main concern is the economy and jobs. But not everyone agrees. While JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon argued back in January that closing the “skills gap”—training workers for today’s market—was an urgent economic priority, the New York Times’ Paul Krugman calls the skills gap issue a “myth” that gives the business sector an excuse for “blaming workers for their own plight.”
Booker calls his bill the “beginning of what I hope becomes more bipartisan work around dealing with one of America’s most pressing issues, which is unemployment.” It’s a problem that he acknowledges as “particularly acute—particularly challenging—within minority communities.”
But while the bill has attracted attention in part because it’s a team effort between the only two black members of the Senate, its provisions don’t specifically address the unemployment rate in the African-American community, which, at 12.4 percent, is close to double that of the national average. When asked, though, if that was an oversight, Booker expressed confidence that his and Scott’s legislation will help address that gap because “when the unemployment rate in America goes down, it doesn’t just go down for one segment, it goes down for all.”
And in the meantime, when it comes to workers who eventually may not be helped by his bill, Booker has stuck with the position of his Democratic colleagues, urging Congress to extend long-term federal unemployment benefits that he described as “America answering the call to help people in crisis not of their own making.”
When asked, on the subject of bipartisanship, if he thought Republicans would repeal Obamacare if they gained control of the Senate in 2014, Booker cautiously said, “No matter what happens in these elections—this idea that somehow the ACA is going to get repealed—I just don’t think that that, in any way, is a likely outcome.”
Ever the optimist, he went on to say, “If there are parts of the bill that need to be changed, let’s work together in a bipartisan fashion to get those changes done so this can be a more perfect bill to empower Americans to have health care security—access to care, care that’s affordable and ultimately produces healthier outcomes.”
His approach is hard to argue with, but he'll be relying on the same Republican colleagues that he's working with now to have that same spirit of compromise, even though, for instance, as a member of the House, Scott voted in 2011 and 2012 to repeal Obamacare, and in the Senate in 2013 to defund it. It's Booker’s challenge as he rounds out his predecessor’s term and runs again in November for a full term—representing a mostly Democratic state while trying to solidify his brand as an across-the-aisle uniter.
For now he’s following the advice of former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, who advised him to “sit down with every single one” of the Republicans in the Senate.
“I’ve learned from experience,” he says, “that even though you might disagree with someone on the majority of issues, [if] you can really start to connect with them on areas where you do agree, you can get a lot of stuff done.”
It’s what a perpetual optimist would say.
But since he’s only been in the Senate for six months—and the 113th Congress has been the least productive in history—a perpetual realist might counter: We’ll see.
David Swerdlick is an associate editor at The Root. Follow him on Twitter.
David Swerdlick is an associate editor at The Root. Follow him on Twitter.