“Inconsistency with ourselves is the greatest weakness of human nature.”
John Addison
"Morning Joe" Host Joe Scarborough's analysis of Cory Booker's first Apology Video following his appearance last week on "Meet The Press" DID in fact make him appear as if he were being "held Hostage".
Cory Booker's recent Admonishment by the National Democratic Party for speaking out on "Meet The Press" proves Independent Minds are NOT welcome in 21st Century Politics.
Its 100% Partisan Politics or Else!
The Democratic Party’s recent Attack on Cory Booker hurts his Political Brand & Disrupts his legacy of Helping the Poor and being able to reach across the Aisle as an Effective Bi-Partisan Leader.
As a result Independent Voters have been Turned off by how Poorly Booker was treated by Democrats following his "Meet The Press" comments.
Cory should NOT have Apologized!
I don't know WHO advised him (Male or Female) to Apologize but they offered him some very Damaging Career Advice.
Instead he should have just reiterated his Stand for Pres. Obama & also reiterated his Support for Private Equity.
However he should NOT have Apologized.
Here's Why.
During his appearance on "Meet The Press", Mayor Booker criticized Both Political Parties for Negative Ads which further Divide American Voters.
Millions of Voters & Political Leaders from all walks of life and ethnic groups agreed with Cory's Straight-From-The-Heart comments.
Voters are so tired of Politicians saying ANYTHING just to get Elected & Re-elected.
Thus when Cory Booker spoke so eloquently about Negative Campaign ads which revisit the Jeremiah Wright drama & attacks Private Equity, the Clouds opened up for American Voters.
However while Independent Voters were Lauding Booker, Leaders within the Democratic Party and many within Pres. Obama's Re-election camp obviously viewed Cory's comments as a Spotlight stealing gimmick.
It Wasn't!
Cory Booker has primarily been a Staunch Advocate of Pres. Barack Obama, even when he was just Senator Obama.
So why would he suddenly become a "Turn Coat" or a Traitor to Pres. Obama?
Cory merely stated an Opinion. An Independent Opinion.
How could an Honest Opinion in which he criticized the Negative Actions of Both Political Parties, cause Cory's Loyalty to Pres. Obama's Administration to be Questioned?
I thought all American Citizens regardless of their Ethnicity, Economic & Social Status were legally Afforded Freedom Of Speech rights as provided by the U.S. Constitution.
Hold It!
Cory Booker was an Obama Surrogate right?
Apparently Political Surrogates are NOT allowed to Express their Own, Independent Opinions.
Especially NOT BLACK, Political Surrogates within the Democratic Party.
You see its acceptable for WHITE Political Surrogates to Express their Independent Opinions once in a while, but BLACK, Political Surrogates are ALWAYS expected to do as they are told versus practicing Independent Thinking.
i.e., Slavery Group Think Mentally!
In essence Cory Booker largely known for being an Effective Bi-Partisan Leader, was Forced by the National Democratic Party and by some of his Inner Circle Socialite Friends to become a completely Partisan Political Leader or ELSE!!!
In other words pick a side or we will Black List You!
Sure sounds like "Hostage Politics" to me.
Cory Booker was Celebrated by Independent Voters for his "Meet The Press" comments because not only did he speak from the Heart but he demonstrated a Human trait so many 21st Century Politicians have lost.
How Sad such an Admirable Human Relations Trait is no longer welcome in the world of Partisan Politics.
Both Parties!
Partisan Politics are to blame for a Broken Congress & a Dysfunctional Executive Branch Government.
Booker sees American Citizens NOT just as Voting Blocks or as Separate Voting Groups, but Cory Booker sees American Citizens as Individual HUMAN BEINGS Created in GOD's Image.
Cory Booker was Admonished for simply Daring to be Independent & for Daring to be Human versus a Political Machine.
For that Mayor Booker's Political Career has been Damaged, All the Good he has done to help Clean Up a Corrupt Metropolitan City Forgotten & his Once shining light as a Rising Political Star Dimmed.
In 2008 Barack Obama was Praised by Registered Independent Voters for being a seemingly Effective Bi-Partisan Political Leader, willing to Compromise for the sake of the Collective American Electorate.
Fast forward to 2012.
Cory Booker another rising star within the National Democratic Party is Whipped, Admonished & Blacklisted for attempting to be an Effective Bi-Partisan Political, also willing to Compromise for the sake of the Collective American Electorate.
Perhaps there will Always ONLY be room for just ONE rising, BLACK Political Star within the National Democratic Party at a time.
I suggest Cory Booker choose some New Inner Circle Social Friends (Male & Female) and....a New Public Relations Adviser.
I also suggest Cory Booker decide if he should remain a Staunch Democrat or consider becoming a Registered Independent like one of his Mentors Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
After all what is the use of remaining a Staunch, Loyal Democrat Surrogate if the Democratic Party will treat you like Horse Manure if you choose to "Step Out Of Line"?
i.e., Political Slavery!
i.e., "Held Hostage"!
But Republicans shouldn’t laugh at this latest misstep by Democrat Leaders.
Key GOP Leaders have also been known to recently Attack rising Republican Leaders & Candidates who stray off-message.
So much for Authentic American Democracy.
So much for Bi-Partisanship.
So much for Independent, Critical Thinkers.
Dear God Help Us!
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Cory Booker’s truth — and its consequences
The past several days of Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s life have been painfully amusing to watch.
Painful because Booker, a rising Democratic star, is such a good guy. Amusing, because rarely are Americans treated to such premier seats in the political theater of truth and consequence.
That is, tell the truth and beware the consequences.
Booker has gained much unwelcome attention from his own political party, while being nearly sanctified by Republicans, for the singular offense of telling the truth.
And then untelling the truth.
And then . . . stay tuned.
To know Booker is to like him. He’s one of those political figures whose persona telegraphs “honest broker.” Educated at Stanford, Oxford and Yale Law School, he’s also a popular mayor in one of America’s toughest, most challenged cities. Open-minded and solution-oriented, he’s what we hope for in public officials. Or say we do.
But honesty is not always a rewarding trait in politics, especially during high-stakes election years, as Booker promptly learned when he recently spoke from the heart on “Meet the Press.” He said that attacks on Bain Capital, where Mitt Romney made a fortune, were “nauseating” to him, as were similar attacks from the right to resurrect the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
“I have to just say from a very personal level, I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity,” Booker said. “To me, it’s just this — we’re getting to a ridiculous point in America, especially that I know. I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people are investing in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, it ain’t — they’ve done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses.”
Hearts leapt.
While regular folks shielded their eyes from the blinding light of Truth, political operatives left and right shifted into warp speed. Republicans produced an insta-ad capitalizing on Booker’s remarks — See? Even Democrats dislike President Obama’s attack on Bain — while their counterparts on the left began launching correctives.
David Axelrod promptly made the rounds and explained to talk show hosts what Booker really meant. (As though Americans can’t understand what they plainly hear.) Others pointed out Booker’s own cozy relationship with equity capital political donors. And Booker, obviously scrambling to recapture favor with the Obama campaign, posted a YouTube video before another sun had set.
What he “really” meant: “Let me be clear. Mitt Romney has made his business record a centerpiece of his campaign,” Booker says in the video. “He’s talked about himself as a job creator. And therefore it is reasonable — and in fact I encourage it — for the Obama campaign to examine that record and to discuss it. I have no problem with that.”
Commentators have all cast their ballots as to whether Booker should have corrected himself. Almost unanimously, the answer was no.
Obviously, if you’re a surrogate for the president, as Booker described himself on “Meet the Press,” your job is to regurgitate talking points. No wandering around the reservation, no independent thinking, certainly no personal confessions. You absolutely do not declare the centerpiece of the president’s attack on his opponent to be “nauseating.”
Unless it is. And unless it’s true. For you, you know when you’re alone with your conscience. Or having lunch with your private-equity donors, as the case may be. But definitely not while on TV!
On Rachel Maddow’s show, Booker dug a little deeper: “Obviously, I did things in the ‘Meet the Press’ interview, as I told you, that did not land the points that I was trying to make. And in some ways, you know, frustratingly, I think I conflated the attacks that the Republicans were making with Jeremiah Wright with some of the attacks on the left. And those can’t even be equated.”
Worse, from the party’s perspective, Booker described himself as an “independent Democrat.” Oops.
We may like independents in theory, but surrogates don’t get to be independent. You gotta pick one or the other. This has been the immediate lesson for Cory Booker. But the broader lesson for the public is that there’s no space in our body politic for an independent mind, even though more Americans describe themselves as independent than either Democrat or Republican.
Thinking outside the box may solve problems in the real world. But in the political realm, creative noodling will get you cast into the outer darkness. No matter which way you lean, The Machinery requires cogs, not cognizance.
Cory Booker’s Brand takes a hit
It only took 15 seconds on “Meet the Press” to turn Cory Booker’s gold-plated political brand into an imperiled commodity.
Booker has cemented a reputation as a rising Democratic star with crossover appeal, whose open secret is his desire to become either senator or governor.
But the Newark mayor may have done himself serious damage before he gets the chance to act on his long-held ambitions, thanks to his pointed criticism of the Obama campaign’s assault on Mitt Romney’s private-equity tenure, which he equated with the GOP using the Rev. Jeremiah Wright against Obama.
Booker’s words, combined with his painful, videotaped walk-back hours later, may have done the Democrat more harm than good.
“Mayor Booker forgets there’s Democratic primaries you have to [go] through before you get the nomination and statements like that don’t help you with the Democratic primary base,” said Julie Roginsky, a New Jersey-based Democratic political strategist.
Some Democrats, and Republicans, believe that the telegenic, African-American mayor emerged from the week — in which he called the attacks on Romney’s record at Bain Capital “nauseating” on “Meet the Press” — as a pragmatist, one who could work with the Republicans in the Democratic-leaning Garden State.
But while the mayor’s “No Labels” centrist appeal may work with donors and center-right voters, it will do little for him in a Democratic primary against, say, Sen. Frank Lautenberg in 2014 — especially if Obama is reelected, and holding onto a grudge.
“It is absolutely crazy to go and blast the president,” said one Democratic operative who knows Booker well, and asked not to be identified. “And he could have gotten away with it. He could have bemoaned negative campaigning. That would have been fine and that would have been great. (But) he compared the Bain attack to Jeremiah Wright. That’s crazy.”
Booker, who has fundraised heavily from the financial-services sector and is a player in the private-equity-financed, education reform movement, has been eyeing statewide office for years.
He is believed to most covet the governor’s office, although he would never challenge Gov. Chris Christie, who’s been a political friend and has deftly moved to co-opt the Newark mayor, unless the Republican was truly vulnerable.
A potential Lautenberg challenge is seen as likelier — and it’s a fact of which that the senator is keenly aware. Following Booker’s comments, the 88-year-old senator went on a media tour to rub salt in the wounds after the mayor’s walk-back, which was made after national Democrats contacted him.
“Now we have a different record,” Lautenberg cheerily told Roll Call of the difference between himself and Booker, accusing Booker of “sabotage” against the president.
Not everyone thinks Booker did himself damage.
“I just don’t see any situation where this really hurts him politically in New Jersey,” said Bradley Tusk, who managed New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s 2009 reelection campaign and who has worked with Booker on education initiatives. “I don’t think voters will remember this if he runs for office. I don’t think they’d care even if they did remember.
Nor do I think anyone would challenge him from the left.”
“I don’t think that will” damage him, agreed former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean.
“He’s a very attractive candidate — there aren’t that many of them around.
He is one of them. … I think what people like about candidates these days is when they’re honest — so what he said about ‘a plague on both your houses,’ I think it was very well received.
I don’t think it helped him or hurt him in the end.”
The counter-argument to why Booker has hurt himself, according to a number of Democratic operatives, is simple: he’s black and will pick up nearly every African-American vote, he can raise infinite sums of money, and he’s a terrific and tireless campaigner who has made good use of social media to grow his base of support. It’s the Obama playbook on a statewide stage.
Yet Kean pointed to what may have been the biggest problem for Booker out of last week — that his tortured-looking YouTube reversal of his “nauseating” remark, a nearly four-minute mea culpa in which he tried to stick with his original words while saying Romney’s Bain tenure is fair game — didn’t help someone trying to maintain a brand as a straight talker.
“The problem is he backtracked, so that makes him look like one of them, not one of us,” Kean said. “But I think the initial comments were on target. (I) don’t think they were critical of the president, they were critical of an ad strategy.”
Booker’s aides did not return calls for comment.
Booker’s words on last Sunday’s “Meet the Press” provoked a week of national scrutiny never before faced by the mayor criticizing the first black president.
He became the first Democrat to question whether the president should be launching attacks on private equity — which invests in New Jersey pension funds, and the Democratic Party — and was soon followed by other Democrats, such as ex-Rep. Harold Ford, and former Democratic National Committee Chairman Ed Rendell.
Although Democrats quickly piled on Booker — including Obama himself, stating clearly the Bain attacks would continue — Republicans embraced Booker as an ally. The GOP launched an “I Stand with Cory” campaign, and Romneyland has repeatedly emailed out his money quote, that the Bain attacks are part of a “nauseating” pattern of negativity in national politics.
It’s just a matter of time before Booker stars in a future Romney campaign ad, containing some version of this sentence: “Even Obama ally Cory Booker believes the Bain attacks are wrong…”
The two-term mayor, who’s in his early 40s, is at a crossroads in terms of his political future. A rising star for a decade, his chances for statewide office may start to dim if he doesn’t make a move soon.
Andrew Tisch, whose family runs the Loews Corp. and who is a major Booker donor himself, insisted that the mayor leaves this week in good shape, and is not running out of time.
“He’s 42 years old!” Tisch said. “When you say, name the great mayors in the United States, you start with Bloomberg, you go to (Rahm) Emanuel, you get to (Antonio) Villaraigosa, and then you get to Booker. He’s on the top of everybody’s tongue, and he’s made a hell of a name for himself at a very young age — and he’s one of the few people I’ve ever met in politics who has patience.”
But the “young gun/rising star” brand tends to have a shelf life.
“The challenge for Cory is, how many years can he keep his brand fresh and still be a viable statewide candidate,” said one Democratic operative.
One option is to run for a third term as Newark mayor, a city where he’s become famous for engaging with his citizens on Twitter, showing up to shovel people’s yards during a blizzard in 2010 and recently performing heroics during a building fire.
But Booker’s national presence and his social media prowess belies the fact that his own numbers in his city have not improved in recent years, and neither have some of the key indicators of urban success, most notably the perennial Newark crime scourge.
Crime statistics went down for his first years in office, but some rose again after the fiscal crisis. He only got about 59 percent of the vote in 2010 against a central rival who was soon after sentenced to prison.
He is not generally part of what one source called “the fabric of the Democratic party in New Jersey that wins elections.”
The $100 million investment that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg pledged to the Newark school system, during a famous Oprah Winfrey chat with Booker and Christie, is actually a matching grant. And while Booker has made major progress toward matching it, he hasn’t yet completed his end.
Booker’s close connections to donors across the river in New York City have given him an air of distance from his state, and while his ties to Christie have helped him nationally, they inspire some distrust among Democrats statewide.
Lautenberg, meanwhile, is, as one Democrat said, “no shrinking violet,” and he has the personal wealth to help fuel a bloody intraparty challenge.
Booker also has an insular circle, and tends to heed his own counsel — which is fine on a local level, but difficult to pull off more broadly.
What the mayor may have demonstrated in his Sunday show outing, said one Democrat, is this: “He may not be ready for prime time.”
Where Booker has been successful is as a communicator — he gives strong speeches, and was frequently deployed as a surrogate for Obama during the 2008 campaign.
“He’s a solid Democrat, but he’s built this (reputation) where he speaks his mind and is unafraid to speak is his mind,” said Republican operative Mike DuHaime, a top Christie adviser.
Kean raised the prospect of Booker becoming a Cabinet member in a second Obama administration if he doesn’t run for office again.
“There could be a number of Cabinet positions open, one of them might be attractive to him,” Kean said. “He could do what certain candidates have done in the past, these cable shows would love to have you. (A) number of ex-candidates who have done pretty well there.
There are a number of doors open to him if he wants to take them. He’s still an attractive, compelling candidate.”
But despite insisting that they welcomed the focus on the Bain debate, Obama aides were displeased with Booker. Several Democrats suggested he was more loyal to the donors who fund his campaigns and his education reform efforts than he was to the president, and that he simply showed where his sympathies really lie.
And Booker’s remarks helped muddy the message that Chicago was trying to deliver.
A second-term Obama administration may not inspire much more fear than the first-term one did. But there are ways that an incumbent president can make things difficult for an aspiring candidate.
Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf, who has handled New Jersey races, said that only time will tell whether Booker suffered damage this week — but that he can’t exist without the donors who would fund a statewide campaign.
“He did help himself with Wall Street,” Sheinkopf said. “You can’t buy TV ads with great compliments — you gotta pay cash.”
View Larger Map
Sources: AOL, Crooks & Liars, Huffington Post, MSNBC, Mediaite, Meet The Press, Politico, Washington Post, Youtube, Google Maps
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment