Cory Booker: Education, Early Career, and Rise to the Senate
Cory Anthony Booker, born on April 27, 1969, is an American politician and lawyer currently serving as the senior United States Senator from New Jersey, a position he has held since 2013. His journey from a young activist to a prominent figure in American politics is marked by a strong commitment to social justice, urban development, and criminal justice reform. Cory Booker believes that the American dream isn’t real for anyone unless it’s within reach of everyone. Booker has dedicated his life to fighting for those who have been left out, left behind, or left without a voice.
Early Life and Education
Booker grew up in northern New Jersey and received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University. Booker was born in Washington, D.C., to parents who were executives at IBM. The family later relocated to New Jersey. His parents, Carolyn Rose (Jordan) and Cary Alfred Booker, were among the first black executives at IBM. Booker’s parents managed to buy his childhood home by having a white couple put down a bid, only for his father and a lawyer to show up instead at the closing. The real estate agent punched the lawyer and set a dog on Booker’s father. But the house was sold. Growing up in the prosperous majority-white community, he has said, his family seemed like “four raisins in a tub of sweet vanilla ice cream”. Booker excelled as a high school athlete and was named Gatorade New Jersey Football Player of the Year. He earned a scholarship to Stanford, turning down an effort by former president Gerald Ford to recruit him for the University of Michigan.
He attended Northern Valley Regional High School at Old Tappan, where he played varsity football and was named to the 1986 USA Today All-USA high school football team. At Stanford, Booker played varsity football, volunteered for the campus peer counseling center, and wrote for the student newspaper. He graduated from Stanford University with a Bachelor of Arts in political science in 1991 and a Master of Arts in sociology in 1992. He played football for Stanford at tight end and was teammates with Brad Muster and Ed McCaffrey, making the All-Pacific-10 Academic team.
Booker was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at The Queen's College, Oxford, earning a degree in United States history in 1994. At Oxford, Booker served as president of the Oxford University L'Chaim Society and became a close friend of Shmuley Boteach. He obtained his Juris Doctor in 1997 from Yale Law School and operated free legal clinics for low-income residents of New Haven, Connecticut.
Early Career and Newark City Council
Instead of working for a corporate law firm, Booker moved to Newark after law school and started a nonprofit organization to provide legal services for low-income families, helping tenants take on slumlords. In 1998, Booker moved into the Brick Towers housing project in Newark, where he lived until its demolition in 2006. Booker still lives in Newark’s Central Ward today, where the median household income is less than $15,000.
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At 29, Booker was elected to the Newark City Council, where he challenged the city’s entrenched political machine and fought to improve living conditions for city residents, increase public safety, and reduce crime. His first year in office was a struggle. “I was having a really bad time,” he said in a 2008 interview. “I was even having a bad time justifying being a city council person because I wasn’t feeling like I was making the kind of change that I was elected to make and even people who believed in me thought that by electing me a city council person I could get things done. I felt like they were losing faith or getting frustrated as well.” So Booker went on a hunger strike. The longtime vegetarian fasted for 10 days, aiming to draw attention to crime. While doing so, he lived in a tent. He went on to live in a motorhome for a summer, going from one crime-ridden corner of the city to another in an effort to draw attention.
As Newark's Central Ward councilman, Booker introduced dozens of pieces of legislation and resolutions that have impacted housing, youth, safety, jobs and created better government. He has earned a reputation as a leader with innovative ideas and a willingness to take bold actions. Booker lives his politics, often in unconventional and creative ways. In the summer of 1999, he went on a 10-day hunger strike in one of the most drug-infested housing complexes in Newark, an effort that resulted in increased police presence and improved security for residents. For five months in 2000, Booker took to the streets; he lived in a motor home and parked it on the worst drug corners in the city, inspiring residents and businesses to fight against drug dealing and crime.
Mayoral Career in Newark
On January 9, 2002, Booker announced his campaign for mayor of Newark rather than running for reelection as councilman. That pitted him against longtime incumbent Sharpe James. James, who had easily won election four consecutive times, saw Booker as a real threat and responded with mudslinging. At one campaign event, James called him "a Republican who took money from the KKK [and] Taliban …" The race didn’t turn Booker into a winner - he lost by 53%-47% - but it did turn him into a national figure and a symbol of a new generation of African American leadership. Filmmaker Marshall Curry chronicled Booker's 2002 mayoral campaign in the documentary Street Fight.
Starting in 2006, Booker served as Newark’s mayor for more than seven years. On February 11, 2006, Booker announced that he would run for mayor again. Although James filed paperwork to run for reelection, he announced shortly thereafter that he would instead cancel his bid to focus on his work as a state senator, a position to which he was elected in 1999. At James's urging, Deputy Mayor Ronald Rice decided to run for mayor. Booker's campaign, raising over $6 million, outspent Rice's 25 to 1, for which Rice attacked him. Booker, in turn, attacked Rice as a "political crony" of James. Booker won the May 9 election with 72% of the vote.
During his tenure, the city entered its largest period of economic growth since the 1960s. In addition, overall crime declined and the quality of life for residents improved due to initiatives such as more affordable housing, new green spaces and parks, increased educational opportunities, and more efficient city services. Booker took office as mayor of Newark on July 1, 2006. After his first week in office, he announced a 100-day plan to implement reforms. One of Booker's first priorities was to reduce the city's crime rate. Booker was a member of the Mayors Against Illegal Guns Coalition, a bipartisan group with a stated goal of "making the public safer by getting illegal guns off the streets". According to The New York Times, Booker and Zuckerberg continued their conversation about Booker's plans for Newark. The initial gift was made to start a foundation for education. The gift was formally announced when Booker, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and Zuckerberg appeared together on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
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Booker also distinguished himself as an advocate for charter schools. In a 2000 speech at the center-right Manhattan Institute, he said: “Public education is the use of public dollars to educate our children at the schools that are best equipped to do so - public schools, magnet schools, charter schools, Baptist schools, Jewish schools.” In a 2014 interview he said this meant he “became a pariah in Democratic circles for taking on the party orthodoxy on education”. However, he noted, it also meant he gained “all these Republican donors and donors from outside Newark, many of them motivated because we have an African American urban Democrat telling the truth about education”.
Some considered the timing of Zuckerberg's donation a move for damage control to his image, as it was announced on the opening day of the movie The Social Network, a film that painted an unflattering portrait of Zuckerberg. On October 10, 2010, Booker established Let's Move! Newark as part of First Lady Michelle Obama's national Let's Move! In October 2011, Booker expanded the Let's Move! Newark program to include Let's Move! On April 12, 2012, Booker saved a woman from a house fire, suffering smoke inhalation and second-degree burns on his hands in the process.
Throughout Booker's mayoralty, Fairleigh Dickinson University's public opinion poll PublicMind asked New Jersey residents whether they had heard of Booker and whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of him. Booker's mayoralty and celebrity drew substantial media attention to Newark. While he had high ratings from Newarkers, his legacy has received mixed reviews.
Election to the U.S. Senate
On June 3, Lautenberg died of viral pneumonia; five days later, Booker announced his intention to run for Lautenberg's seat in a 2013 special election. On August 13, 2013, Booker was declared the winner of the Democratic primary, with approximately 59% of the vote. On October 16, he defeated Republican Steve Lonegan in the general election, 54.9% to 44.0%. Booker was the first African-American to be elected to the Senate since Barack Obama in 2004.
In October 2013, Booker won a special election to represent New Jersey in the United States Senate. In November 2014, Senator Booker was re-elected to a full six-year term. As New Jersey’s junior Senator, Cory Booker has brought an innovative and consensus-building approach to tackling some of the most difficult problems facing New Jersey and our country. He has emerged as a national leader in the effort to fix our broken criminal justice system and end mass incarceration, helping craft the most sweeping set of criminal justice reforms in a generation, the First Step Act, which became law in December 2018.
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Leading up to the 2016 presidential election, Booker endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Booker supported fellow New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez when Menendez faced trial on federal corruption and bribery charges. During the trial, Booker was a character witness for Menendez, and praised him effusively. After the judge declared a mistrial, Booker argued that prosecutors ought not to try Menendez again. When Menendez ran for reelection, Booker said he was "so grateful for Bob Menendez and that I get to work with him and stand beside him". He downplayed the corruption allegations, saying "to try to continue to try to throw this kind of mud at him, it's not going to stick."
In 2018, Politico named Booker part of the "Hell-No Caucus", along with Senators Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, after he voted "overwhelmingly to thwart his [Trump's] nominees for administration jobs" (including Rex Tillerson, Betsy DeVos, and Mike Pompeo). In April 2018, after the FBI raided the hotel room and offices of Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, Booker, Chris Coons, Lindsey Graham, and Thom Tillis introduced new legislation to "limit President Trump's ability to fire special counsel Robert Mueller." Termed the Special Counsel Independence and Integrity Act, the legislation would allow any special counsel, in this case Mueller, to receive an "expedited judicial review" in the 10 days following being dismissed to determine if said dismissal was suitable. If not, the special counsel would be reinstated.
Political Positions and Advocacy
Booker supports single-payer healthcare. In September 2017, he, Bernie Sanders, and 14 other co-sponsors submitted a single-payer plan to Congress called the "Medicare for All" bill. Booker opposes abolishing private health insurance. Along with Senate Republicans in 2017, he voted against a measure to allow cheaper prescription drugs to be imported from Canada, citing concerns about the safety of Canadian drugs, which lead to the measure's defeat. He faced progressive criticism for his vote.
Booker has expressed consistent support for Israel. He has said he was "a supporter of Israel well before I was in the United States Senate". Booker supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2019, Booker said that he and the president of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC "talk often" and "text message back and forth like teenagers". In the same year, he told an AIPAC audience, "We need leadership in both parties that is about uniting Americans around a common cause. And what greater tradition has there been in America, going back to the founding of Israel that we have common cause with the state of Israel."
Presidential Campaign
On February 1, 2019, Booker announced his campaign for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in the 2020 presidential election. and suspended his campaign on January 13, 2020.
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