In the crowded field vying for the 2020 Democratic nomination, Senator Cory Booker is still looking for a breakout moment—and he hasn’t got it, not even close. He pledged not to take contributions from corporate PACs or lobbyists, and now his campaign is desperately short of cash. In fact, it could even fold, very soon. But Booker is an accomplished candidate on the stump, and he’s certainly not short on ambition. His agenda includes sweeping criminal-justice reform and a three-trillion-dollar climate package. He came up in politics as the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, a city that suffered badly from the loss of manufacturing jobs, and from abandonment, poverty, violence, neglect of every kind. As mayor, he succeeded in revitalizing Newark’s downtown, and he oversaw a drop in the notoriously high crime rate. Then there was the time that Booker rushed into a burning house and saved the life of one of his constituents. He seemed to have a knack for making the right move at the right time.
The timing of Booker’s interview for The New Yorker Radio Hour was also notable, coming two days before the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, endorsed an impeachment inquiry against President Trump, spurred by the revelation that Trump had sought to pressure Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, into investigating the former Vice-President, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter. Booker, who supported impeachment efforts well before Pelosi’s announcement, explained his rationale during the interview. “This is a moment of constitutional vandalism like I’ve never seen in my lifetime,” he told David Remnick.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Listen: David Remnick interviews Cory Booker on The New Yorker Radio Hour.
DAVID REMNICK: You are polling now at two per cent, and you just put out, essentially, a plea for more funds. Otherwise, you’re not going to be able to continue your campaign. You ask for—you are looking—for $1.7 million, I believe, by the end of September, which is fast upon us. What’s been the problem? And what are the prospects?
Well, two things. I want to just talk about polls first, because we polled everywhere from two to six per cent, usually around No. 6 in all the polls. But the one thing that most folks know—and it’s the truth of my life, your life—is that nobody in the Democratic Party who’s ever been polling ahead right now in a Presidential race has ever gone on to be President. The people we’ve elected—Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama—were all considered long shots, some of them barely registering in the polls, who then went on to an upset, usually in Iowa or New Hampshire, and then go on to the nomination. So polls, widely, are not what people should be looking at. What we’ve been building this campaign to do is to win. This wasn’t a vanity play. The way you win is by going directly to the grassroots. And we built what everybody from the Des Moines Register to Iowa Starting Line unequivocally said: the two best teams in Iowa on the ground are Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren. And, more than that, in Iowa and New Hampshire, we’re leading all candidates in many endorsements of local elected officials, mayors, state representatives, even state senators. We lead in both states, and so we are showing our ability to win. But the one thing is, the people who are at the top of the polls right now are the people that walked into this with, you know, Bernie and Biden, one-hundred-per-cent name recognition.
But is the problem ideological? In other words, I think the electorate, even modestly engaged, knows that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren represent the so-called progressive wing in the Party. And Joe Biden represents the so-called moderate wing of the Party. Where are you in that? And are you projecting it in a clear enough way?
So I just resist that orientation, because of what people I talk to, you know. I know that that’s the way Washington thinks, and all the pundits think, but you talk to people on the ground—in fact, you can see this data-wise. Look at who’s supporting Elizabeth Warren right now. You see people coming from Biden; you see people coming from Bernie. I think what people really want is somebody they believe can beat Donald Trump. And what I’m finding—the reason why I think we’re doing so well in Iowa with commitment-to-caucus cards, endorsements—is because people want somebody that can excite the whole electorate, that can energize and heal this country, that’s not just about who’s got a better fifteen-point policy plan. For me, this is about a revival of civic grace. How do we have a more courageous empathy in our country? How do we create a context for new American majorities? Not in a partisan sense but in the history that I love in our nation that’s allowed us to advance on to beat Jim Crow. When Sputnik was up, to go to the moon first. These weren’t partisan majorities that did these things. These were people that had a moral imagination that were able to cite that in our country, where we all join together in common cause. So I just think that the theme of this election is not “Fight fire with fire.” I ran a fire department in Newark. That’s not a good way to put out fires, but it really comes down to the core of King, one of my favorite quotes from King, which is, “What we have to repent for in this day and age is not the vitriolic words and violent actions of the bad people but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people.”
I’ve got to ask you a question about a book. Richard Ben Cramer, long ago—the late Richard Ben Cramer—wrote a book about a Presidential campaign that, on the surface, did not seem to be the most exciting campaign of all time. It’s called “What it Takes,” and the strength of that book is that through profiles of all the candidates and really deep reporting you got a sense of what it really takes to run for President in terms of endurance, almost the physicality of running. The granular details of running for President. What has surprised you? And what can you tell us about that human experience of running for President, even in these early months?
Well, it is a physical-endurance test, and it does reveal who you are and how you deal and what kind of campaign you run. My political training—you know, there’s an Oscar-nominated documentary about it called “Street Fight.” My political training comes from the roughest of rough campaigns: tires on my car slashed, windows smashed, my phones tapped.
You were greeted as an outsider by the political machine in Newark.
Underdog. I mean, everything imaginable against us—national political people coming to campaign against us.
It reminded me of Barack Obama’s attempt to beat Bobby Rush in Chicago.
It is so similar. I hope people watch the movie because it is—you just won’t think it’s America, the kind of stuff we had to go up against. And it is such a great way to learn that it has to be retail, grassroots. So much of this in those early primary states is about that. People want to kick your tires, they want to—
Anybody slashing them?
No, but—
What’s the experience? You’re obviously not getting your tires slashed, but what is surprising you about the experience of running for President?
The goodness of people. Like, we—
You don’t get the opposite.
God, I don’t. In fact, when I was walking through the Iowa steak fry, as a vegan—we put out there that we were not going to campaign if we couldn’t raise money. I had people in other T-shirts—other candidates’ T-shirts—saying, “Oh, I’m an X-person supporter, but need you in this race, man! I gave you five bucks.” And there is a decency, and a goodness, and even my campaign team, we got together and said, “Cory, you know the sentiment of folks is, they don’t want to beat Donald Trump. They would like to eliminate him from the planet Earth, and you’re going to start this campaign talking about more courageous empathy? A revival of civic grace?” I still remember one of my favorite moments in the campaign is, I’m going to the stage in Iowa, it’s a big town hall, we’re blown away by how many people showed up. A big guy sees me—I’m a big guy, former tight end for Stanford—and puts his arm around me, thinks he’s going to have sort of a bro moment, and says, “Dude, I want you to punch Donald Trump in the face.” And I look at him and I go, “Dude, that’s a felony.” And I just said, “Sit down and let me explain to you why that’s the exact wrong approach to beating Donald Trump.” And I made the case, like I do in every town hall, that I know I’m angry. I’m hurt. And if you look around America right now, if America is not breaking your heart, you don’t love her enough. Let me make the case to you that the way we’ve beat demagogues and bullies and fearmongers—
Is how? Michelle Obama tells us, “When they go low, we go high,” and that was tried in 2016, and maybe that didn’t work out so well. So where are you on that?
Well, let me just make you two historical points to you. The first one is about what sentiment wins, McCarthyism to Governor Wallace, his bigotry and hate and fearmongering. We didn’t beat Bull Connor because we brought bigger dogs and bigger fire hoses. We didn’t beat him because we demeaned and degraded him personally. We had artists.
Is Donald Trump Bull Connor?
I mean, his brand of white supremacy, his brand of bigotry and racism that he’s preaching from the highest office in the land? He sounds more like George Wallace than he does George Washington. But, remember, we beat Bull Connor by artists of activism who called to the moral imagination of this country and created, excited, and ignited new majorities. You can go from “How do we beat the fearmongering of McCarthyism?” We don’t beat it by playing on their turf, on their terms, using their tactics. This President will not be beaten by us outnicknaming him or by demeaning and degrading. That’s playing into the darkness that he’s trying to drag this country into.
You grew up in Jersey, about ten minutes from where I did, and the town you grew up in was was almost completely white. If I remember, it was pretty, well, pretty damn white. And you come from a family of the first black executives at I.B.M. How did your parents talk to you about race in those particular circumstances, at that particular time? And then how do you think about it today, with what they were telling you? You must have been gravely, gravely disappointed by 2016, to put it unbelievably mildly.
Look, my parents were not in any way hesitant at telling my brother and I about the wretchedness and bigotry and hate in this country. When I was about to get my driver’s license, I remember my parents having a conversation with me that I thought was—I made my normal wry teen-age jokes, and the seriousness in their eyes and the fear in their eyes helped me understand that I would have a different experience. As it turned out, they predicted right with police officers. But this is the thing that—
Predicted right. What was your experience?
Oh, my God. I couldn’t come over with the George Washington Bridge in the eighties without being pulled over. I mean, this was the days that people used to go over to Washington Heights, buy drugs, come right back over. You and I came from the same area. A black guy alone in a car? Pulled over all the time. Palisades Parkway, car surrounded. Yeah, I can tell horrible, indignant stories. We’re just walking into Jersey malls and being followed. You’re not a young black man in the era of Willie Horton and all the fearmongering about superpredators. You just couldn’t be young. My twenties have painful stories. But this is what my parents told me. They said, “What defines us, not just as a family but as a country, is not that there’s bigotry, hatred, and racism—there’s always been—but how we respond to them. You talk about me being in the first black family in an all-white town—as my father affectionately called us, the four raisins in a tub of sweet vanilla ice cream. We got there because of white people who saw that we were getting turned away in town after town. Every time my parents, in 1969, tried to buy a home—
In Bergen County, New Jersey.
In Bergen County, New Jersey! And so what happened—they found a group of mostly white people, some blacks, who met in a living room on the weekends and decided to do a sting operation that sent my parents out with a volunteer white couple behind them. When my parents were told the house was sold, or pulled off the market, the white couple found out the house was still for sale. In the house I grew up in, the white couple put a bid on the house, bid accepted, had papers drawn up. On the day of the closing, the white couple did not show up in the real-estate agent’s office. My father did, and a volunteer lawyer named Marty Friedman—white guy, Jewish—and they march in the real-estate agent’s office. And, by the way, the real-estate agent didn’t capitulate. He stands up and punches Marty Friedman in the face and sics a dog on my dad.
This is not Montgomery in 1950.
No, this is Jersey, 1969. My parents fought violence and racism to grow up in my house. My parents told me that story. But they also told me the story about the good people who understood that patriotism is love of country. But you can’t love your country unless you love your fellow-countrymen and women, and love isn’t sentimentality. Love is sacrifice, it’s service, it’s saying, “If your kids don’t have a great public school to go to, my kids are less well off.”
This is a very hard question to ask, but, again, it goes to the Obama experience in Chicago when he first ran for Congress. He was running against Bobby Rush, who was a fixture of the South Side. He’s still in Congress. Obama, you know, came from Hawaii, he was living on the South Side, had been an organizer, a state senator, and he comes into Bobby Rush’s district, and he is told repeatedly that he is—and it’s a horrible phrase—not black enough. Over and over and over again. And he lost, by a big margin. You had the same thing happen when you came to Newark. The first time around, you got beat like a drum.
No, no, no, no.
By people in town.
No, no, no, please. The evolution is much different than that.
Go ahead.
I came in as a tenant organizer, worked with tenant leaders all over the city, who then said to me, “Run for office.” And I said no. And we got into, not a fight—these are elders in my community—but I finally said, “O.K., I will be your candidate.” We ran in the Central Ward of Newark, where there is the most public housing, the most dense poverty, for a city-council seat at a time that, in general, city-council people didn’t leave office unless it was death or conviction, running against a guy forty years older than me in an impossible election. And we won in the majority-black ward, in the lowest district, so I served four years on the city council before I took on Sharpe James. And that’s when the—
Believe me, I understand. But why did the rhetoric kick in so bad? And it wasn’t just Sharpe James saying it. There were people all over the city that were, I remember well, really hard on you, in a city where—in my growing up, if I remember correctly—every mayor of Newark went to jail until you.
Yes.
Addonizio, Ken Gibson, eventually Sharpe James.
Look, the reality is, we had a hard-fought, close election, and our opponent used every possible, imaginable tool. I mean, you remember on ABC-TV, saying, “This guy is a tool of the Jews.” I mean, just—remarks we found stunning. He’s, like, using comments that were so objectionable: “K.K.K. member.” “Oh, the C.I.A. planted him in our city.” Come on! We are American politics. You know, as we know, the paranoid style that has been written about by—
Richard Hofstadter.
Yeah, exactly, so we know that is a lever that many politicians have tried to use—including the President of the United States right now—to try to divide people against their opponents, to make you afraid. I’ve already mentioned Willie Horton. And you can go through all the people that used appeals to racial solidarity, or appeals to fear, insecurity. I’ve gone through it all and, in many ways, the best lessons I’ve got in my political career came from losing to Sharpe.
First time around.
Yes, first time around.
You also work in the Senate every single day, and have for a while, and your Republican colleagues have—almost to a man and a woman—stayed extremely loyal to not only Trump but to Trumpism. Not only to the President the United States but the way he behaves, or quashes subpoenas, or his rhetoric, and all that. What does that tell you, that the number of senators who are Republicans in general who have actually broken from the President really add up to a number of retirees?
Yeah. Corker. Flake. Sadly, McCain. I want to—
I mean, what does that tell you? What is going on?
Fear, fear—
Fear of what? Fear of their own jobs?
Well, there is—
Is the job that great?
Well, look, I say life is about purpose, not position. And when you lose that perspective, and it becomes position, not purpose, that corruption is at the soul level. You should be willing to give up your position to stay true to your purpose. And that’s what frustrates me right now. There’s a reason why “Profiles in Courage” is such a thin volume. It’s because I’ll hear people talk to me in hallways and in private settings about how outrage—like, I’ll give you an example, just a very pragmatic example. We in the Senate passed a bipartisan spending bill, and then Trump comes in and says no. And he says, “This is not the right thing to do,” and shuts the government down. That was one of the few days I heard people saying, “How could he do this?” There was an empathy for lots of different issues that would be affected by this, but there is a fear.
I’m sorry, but a fear of what?
The same fear that had people who, after the “Access Hollywood” tape, withdrew their endorsement, and then, when they saw how people turned on them, they put the endorsement back. You can’t say that that’s about anything other than your fear of your reëlection—that you saw what was happening was morally objectionable and you removed your endorsement, and now you’ve changed your mind and put your endorsement back because you’re afraid of losing your office. That’s my problem right now. What does it benefit a man to gain the world and lose their soul? And that’s my faith speaking. I fully think we are in that moment.
You think McConnell is losing his soul?
Look, I think that this is what they might lose. I think this could be the moment where you see the destruction of the Republican Party as a national party—that this could be the Rubicon with which there’s no going back.
What shape does that take?
It takes—No. 1, young people now are abandoning the Republican Party—at rates that are astonishing—to become independents or Democrats, in pretty dramatic ways. The demographic shifts. You can’t run your party on racism and think you’re going to get Latino, Asian, immigrant, African-American voters. The future of this country is a much more diverse future than the Republican Party base. The overwhelming majority of Republican House members—look at it—when you see the House split, is white men. They’re not even doing well with women. And, by the way, you see women more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate. A state like Texas is on the verge of flipping permanently blue for Presidential elections. Not to mention Georgia, North Carolina. And I can go through other elections. The way they’re conducting this party is contrary to what—I think it was 2013, in their autopsy—in which they said, “The only way we’re going to stay a relevant party is to deal with the issues that the majority believes in.” The majority is with us on climate change in the Democratic Party. Raising the minimum wage. Common-sense gun safety. I can go through the things they constantly are putting themselves on the wrong side of the people on, because their narrow band of electorate and the corporate power brokers—corporate gun lobby, and others—are dictating to a party and are pushing them into a corner in which they will become irrelevant on national elections in the future.
Do you think that more people should have gone to prison for their role in what we now call the Great Recession?
Absolutely. Look, we have a national criminal-justice system where, as Bryan Stevenson says, you get treated better if you are rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. And, as a guy, again, that lives in a community where I see people going to jail for doing things that two of the last three Presidents have admitted to doing. Remember, George Bush and Barack Obama—it wasn’t just some pot. Both of them did some pretty serious drugs, and yet lives in my community are destroyed. No difference between blacks and whites for using drugs or—
Who should have gone to jail from Wall Street?
Well, look, I’m not about to do what I think Donald Trump does, mistakenly, and tries to think that he’s not only the executive but he is the judicial branch as well. There’s something called due process. But let’s be clear: there was fraud, massive fraud, going on. Insurance companies raiding trash as treasure. I watched my community being taken advantage of—a mortgage industry that was immoral. And you remember these ninja loans—they were luring people into homes, giving them cash on signing. You get thousands of dollars just for signing the payment.
Of course, but the Obama Justice Department, no matter what you think of Barack Obama, did not prioritize coming after this.
And, I’m telling you, if I’m President of the United States, the pharma industry—we should hold people criminally liable for perpetuating this. This opioid crisis—
Like the Sackler family.
If you are purposefully violating laws to fuel what is lowering the life expectancy of Americans, yeah, there should be criminal investigations. And I find—this is something, you know, from the beginning of my career—talking about the justice system and how dramatically biased it is, where we have a different standard for different people. And when my community, not just Newark, when the larger African-American [community had] more marijuana arrests in 2017 than violent-crime arrests. And so for the Department of Justice to somehow have a different standard for white-collar crime when I see people going to jail for theft at a smaller level—out of desperation, by the way—I find that unacceptable. So one of my main missions in life, whatever position I hold, is to make, when we pledge allegiance to liberty and justice for all, that we actually have a criminal-justice system and that reflects that.
You’ve talked about how history will look back on the Trump Administration, and I wonder how history will look back on the Trump Administration and the Trump family—particularly the Trump family—in legal terms. We constantly hear that there’s a grift going on, essentially, that Donald Trump and his family and confederates are profiting, making business of being in the White House. Do you see that?
Yes. And I wonder what the emoluments clause is all about. But we’re seeing it coming out now, about everything from foreign dignitaries understanding that “Hey, we need to pay the President’s business enterprises, stay in their hotels, resorts, etc.” We see government expenditures being used in making side trips to Scotland, so to speak. All of the stuff is not just despicable but it’s also, I think, a violation of our laws.
You’ve known the Kushner family for an awfully long time.
Twenty years.
How has your view of that family evolved?
Look, this is deeper, in many ways, than that for me. And it is a test, in many ways, of the principles with which I live my life. So when I needed to pass criminal-justice reform, and was negotiating to get that bill done—I’m proud to have led that in the United States Senate on the Democratic side—I still remember the battle to get the last thing I was trying to force into this bill, which was a ban on solitary confinement for juveniles. I was negotiating with Jared Kushner, who I’ve known since, I think, he was eleven, twelve, thirteen years old, right?
And just so the listeners know, the Kushner family has a real-estate business not far from Newark. Now they’re more in Manhattan.
I think the better thing to know is that this was one of the biggest Democratic Party fund-raisers. They were fixtures.
Gave money to your campaign.
Gave money to every major Democrat in America. They were No. 1 on the D.N.C. list. This is a significant Democratic Party set of people, but my experience with them was very different. When the whole state establishment was going in a different direction, I had a meeting years ago—2001, maybe—with Charlie Kushner.
Jared’s father.
And he just said, “I hear a lot about this guy. Tell me who you are.” And he must have sat there and listened to me for twenty, thirty minutes. And the more I talk, the more I thought, “This meeting’s going wrong.”
Was going wrong in what sense?
Because he looked so angry as I was talking to him.
Just in general?
Yeah. And then, at the end of the meeting, he just looks now like he’s done with me, and he pushes some button or makes some call to his assistants and says, “Send in my business partners.” And they sat down, he goes to them, “We’re about to make a really bad business decision, but this guy is a righteous man and the guy he’s running against is a blankety-blank-blank.” And he goes, “I’m going to support you, and I want you to tell people I am.” And he—it did hurt him. Sharpe James blocked his appointment to the Port Authority and a lot of other things. Again, this is a decade-plus before what we know now, and I still remember when he got into his legal trouble. When you are in trouble in life and you’ve done things wrong—I just will never sanction bad behavior, and I will speak up against it, I don’t care who you are. But I remember still talking to him in prison, and writing letters with him. And when he came out I credit him with being a guy that was so moved by what he saw in the criminal-justice system that we went together to—this is, again, way before—
You saw salvation in them, in a sense.
He took me to Rikers Island.
We’re talking about Charlie Kushner or Jared Kushner?
Jared’s a kid. Takes me to Rikers Island. First time, I’m a Jersey guy, and I meet with young black men to talk to them and I still remember going around, “How long you’ve been here?” “Six months.” “A year.” More. Not even had your trial yet. And I was so angry when I walked out of there that it fuelled me even more in my quest to end this mass incarceration and to see the torture, because those kids—in fact, there’s a very famous story of one of them who committed suicide when he got out, was in solitary confinement in almost for two years for stealing a backpack and then, eventually, the charges were dismissed. And it’s always—
This is Kalief Browder, who was written about in The New Yorker, by Jen Gonnerman.
Yeah. Yes. And so Kalief’s story, of the psychological harm that’s done when you’re in solitary confinement, and to be there and witness that with other young black and brown people, I’ll never forget that trip to Rikers. It made me more determined to end this nightmare.
And the irony of that is I was sitting with kids that were in school, and flash-forward to now: the Kushners becoming Republicans, you know, the family’s marrying with the Trump family, and fast-forward all the way to me, arguing with Jared Kushner about ending that practice that I saw with his father. Solitary confinement.
Did that feel weird to you? That you’re negotiating with Jared Kushner, the son-in-law?
So, at the end of the day, I’m a person of faith.
And practicality.
No, look, there’s a Jewish phrase, “Gahm zeh l’tovah.” In everything there is something good.
A purpose.
Yes, some good. And so I don’t question where God puts me sometimes, but I know I’m there for a purpose. And I don’t know about this. Like, this is the stuff of a novel, to have me now—the rivals, so to speak, in everything I’m trying to stop, in the Trump Administration. But I will never [accept] vilification of individuals wholesale. Like, you know, Lindsey Graham and me. I could write a dissertation on my disagreements with Lindsey Graham. But when it came to negotiating that criminal-justice bill, he was on my side. I still remember him saying to the White House, “Give Cory Booker whatever he wants, because you can’t get this bill done without it.” And so we’re in this moment in American history where we are—I’m hurting and I’m angry, angry. But I will not fall into the trap, as my parents taught me, as my mom and Sunday school taught me, to never let somebody pull you so low as to hate them.
But this is interesting. You were really rough on Joe Biden, totally understandably, about his relationship—or the way he described his relationship—with some segregationists.
It was more than that.
And he thought he could, you know, you could find some common ground and all the rest. You were really rough on him.
But that wasn’t the reason.
Go ahead.
I think it’s just that some misreporting—
What I’m saying is, how do you deal with people that are colleagues of yours in the Senate who were, who may not be—Jim Crow is not available to them, but you think of them, not in the back of your mind, in front of your mind, as stone-cold racist? Do you deal with them, or you don’t?
So, the Biden construction: As a guy who has said publicly, “Every major crime bill from the seventies until now, major and minor, that passed through the Congress had my name on it.” Now picture me, in 1994, when the crime bill was done, I’m a young black man in my twenties.
Although a lot of black politicians and intellectuals were for those crime bills, however misbegotten they were.
I’m not saying anything but my experience growing up in America. We talked about it already. I had a very different experience as a twentysomething black man in this country at a time that there was all of these people stoking fear, and witnessed the mass incarceration that was going on. A black man.
Including the Clintons.
At the same time, I’m at Yale, watching people do drugs, sell drugs—percentage-wise, just as many black and white drug dealers.
With impunity.
With impunity! You know, I always say that the problem, often, with our experiences, is a problem is not a problem until it happens to us. And that’s a problem with empathy. That is I think one of the reasons with gun violence, which we can talk about, but I’m sorry. I don’t care, Democrat, Republican, I felt the party and the country was betraying the truth, that we thought we could just throw people away, destroy lives. And, remember, the war on drugs wasn’t just a war on black people; it was war on certain communities. That where you now have one out of every two black men that were taken away from their families, that now when they come out, it’s a life sentence. You can’t get a business license, can’t work at a fast-food restaurant, because you have a nonviolent drug conviction. And so, yeah, I feel some kind of way about people that participated in that. But you know what? As a guy who lives the ideals of redemption, I was upset that Joe Biden would not come forward and say, “I was wrong,” and just speak to that.
I understand that. But how do you work now with people in the Senate who, in some form or another, you consider modern segregationists? Or do you not?
You have to work with people who you fundamentally disagree with.
But it’s more visceral than just—you’re not disagreeing with them on the margins of a tax-policy debate. You are fundamentally, morally, viscerally—
Donald Trump signed my bill. I worked with him and his White House to pass a bill that liberated thousands of black people from prison. When we took the crack-cocaine/powder-cocaine disparity that they moved from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1—which is still offensive, in my opinion, and racist—they didn’t make it retroactive. The bill we got done made it retroactive, liberated thousands of people; ninety per cent of them were black. So tell that liberated person that Cory Booker should not deal with somebody that he fundamentally disagrees with on on more things. That’s the problem in this country, because—look, Chris Christie, who I disagree with you on a lot of things—he’s not a racist in any way, but he’s a friend and I disagree with him passionately. But he was the governor of the state. I had to find, we had to find common ground. He told me the story about how he lost ten points in New Hampshire when he was running for President. Not any policy issue— the super PACs against him kept running a commercial of him hugging Barack Obama.
After the flood.
But think about this for a second. We’re at a point in our country—we’re hugging another human being. Just touching somebody that’s not in your tribe. We vilify each other so much. I felt this in a lesser way when I hugged John McCain on the Senate floor and the backlash on Twitter from people in my party for hugging a “baby killer” was what some of the comments, outrageous comments, were.
How often do you look at Twitter?
I mean, now I don’t. Honestly. I look at the tweets—I used to live on it. It was a platform with which I used constructively to help my city.
__What drove you away? Was there a morning that you went on and you saw something that just said, “You know what I think? I’m not going to swim in these waters anymore.”
I think energy is so important. And my own energy was just drained by it, at seeing—I think it’s the challenge people who are in law enforcement and others—you need to do something to protect your spirit and your soul.
__Let me ask you another criminal-justice question. There’s now a movement afoot—admittedly, not hardly a majority movement, even in the Democratic Party, called the abolitionist movement, which is, essentially, if not to clean out all all jails and prisons completely, close to it. The idea that the whole history of discipline-and-punish and imprisonment is misbegotten. Where do you stand on that?
Well, first of all, if you look at other successful models of incarceration around the globe, we are way out of step with our our peers, and by leaps and bounds. What we do here is inhumane, shackling pregnant women when they’re giving [birth], children in solitary confinement, which we may have gotten effectively gone on the federal level, but it still goes on at the state level. So, look, this whole field, the whole Democratic primary field, is not going far enough for me. We identified seventeen thousand people who are in federal prisons right now who do not belong, factually, if you just look at the case. And so let me give me an example who some of these people are. There are aspects of the criminal-justice-reform bill that we passed that eighty-seven senators said, “This sentence is way too long.” And they adjusted those sentences down. And now you have the outrageous injustice of people with the same crime who have dramatically—five, ten, fifteen years, life sentence—years further in prison than somebody who committed the same crime. We should make those sentencing changes retroactive and give those people pathways out of prison. So I’m very far in this field about what we should be doing.
No, I know, but those are, with respect, liberal or reformist views of what we’re talking about. I’m asking a more radical question about the abolition.
Seventeen thousand people getting clemency isn’t radical?
Out of millions.
No, no, no. The federal prison population is not millions.
O.K., but we have, over all, in the state system, etc., we have millions of people who are incarcerated in this country.
Yes.
And a crazily outsized proportion of them, of course, are black and brown.
And poor.
And poor.
And mentally ill. We overincarcerate the mentally ill, we overincarcerate the addicted, we overincarcerate women.
Systemically, what do we do about that?
We radically change the ideas of crime and punishment in this country; we emulate what works.
Is there a foreign model that you see as attractive for the United States?
There’s a guy I knew from law school, Nick Turner, who runs an organization here in New York called the Vera Institute, who takes tours of prisons in other countries and has actually gotten people here, in this country—wardens—to go look at other models and come back and change the way they’re doing things. So there are a number of models that I hope that, when I go on state visits, that visits prisons. It’s part of my faith, too: “Did you visit me in prison?” To bring attention to the better ways of doing this. Because our society, while our infrastructure was crumbling, between the time I was in law school, at the time I was mayor of the city in Newark, we were building a new jail or prison every ten days. There are more people in the South that are in prisons and jails than in college campuses. We now have more African-Americans in this country under criminal supervision than all the slaves in 1850. We have created a destructive criminal-justice system that’s costing us more—in fact, Villanova University did an amazing, compelling study where they said we would have twenty per cent less poverty in America if our incarceration rates were the same as our industrial peers’. So most Americans do not understand the self-inflicted harm it does. And you shouldn’t have to wait, you know, until you go to prison or some family members [do], to see how unjust this is. Again, going back to the Charlie Kushner story, empathy should not be created only when something happens to you. We should have a more courageous empathy in the country to understand that, right now, as you and I are having this conversation, there are children in solitary confinement. There are people who are addicted, in desperate need of treatment, who are stuck in prisons and jails. There are veterans disproportionately represented in our jails and prisons who need mental-health care. I can go through the shameful things going on in our society that should prick all of our consciousness, to make us all activists to end the nightmare of what is American mass incarceration.
Finally, the issue that seems to be the most divisive—up on the debate stage, anyway—is not the environment, where people are competing a little bit to see how strongly they can get behind this issue in terms of spending, in terms of imagination, and all the rest, but on medical care.
Yes.
And you have, certainly, you have Bernie Sanders, who, as he tells us, wrote the damn bill, and Medicare for All is the rubric under which his position comes in. To almost the same degree, Elizabeth Warren. And then you have Joe Biden over here saying, “Basically, what we need is Obamacare-plus, Obamacare improved”—I’m a little unclear. Again, I don’t want to make this too simplistic, but I’m a little unclear on where you are in those polarities.
But it is simplistic, the way people are trying to break it down, and I’ve tried to say that from the debate stage, twice. So let me just first say, since I was a mayor—this is the wonderful thing about Twitter, is now I have memorialized, my staff showed me tweets I was doing back then, as a guy on the ground, looking at this jaggedly broken system, when I was saying, “We should have a single-payer system. It’s just, this is so broken. We’re spending so much more money, we’re incentivizing all the wrong behaviors, we have people getting primary care in emergency rooms.”
All the time.
All the time.
Broken system. Other countries doing it, getting better outcomes for far less money than we are. Now, let me just put on the hat of reality. Everybody on the debate stage believes we should have universal insurance coverage. In fact, I might be able to go as far as saying that everybody on that debate stage thinks that health care should be a right to all Americas. But the question is how you get there.
That’s exactly right, O.K.? So my belief is that the best way to get there is Medicare for All. But I’m also one guy that will tell you right now that we’re not going to get there right away. That it’s going to be a process. I think the best process is, first and foremost, doing common-sense stuff to drive down prescription-drug costs, to drive down the cost baked into the system, but providing a vibrant public option first will help people. I think, as a first step, to understand that we could deal with the hospital-reimbursement rates that people are afraid of right now. If we do Bernie’s plan, hospitals will collapse. We can begin to show that private insurers have a fifteen per cent overhead. Medicare has a less than two per cent overhead. So I just am a pragmatist and a guy that sees, in my community, people rationing their insulin, dealing with, as black communities do, disproportionately difficult health-care rates. My community doesn’t have time to sacrifice progress on the altar of purity. They need help now. They need progress now. They need affordable inhalers now. If I’m President of the United States, as a guy who was a mayor, I’m a fierce pragmatist: every day of my Presidency, I will expand health-insurance coverage, get us closer and closer to the goal where health care in this country is a right and a reality for everybody.
Senator Cory Booker, Thank you.
Thank you.
