Booker Is More Liberal Than His Reputation

Since I’ve been banging this drum for a while, I’m glad to have Michelle Goldberg on board:

If you were cooking up a candidate in a lab to take on Donald Trump, you might come up with someone a lot like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. (Well, except for the unmarried vegan part.) Like Pete Buttigieg, Booker was a Rhodes scholar and the dynamic mayor of a city afflicted by industrial decline, and unlike Buttigieg, he’d be sure to increase African-American turnout. He’s more talented than Joe Biden or Beto O’Rourke at summoning an inspiring and unifying civic gospel. His criminal-justice record is better than Kamala Harris’s. He is near the top of Greenpeace’s ranking of Democratic presidential candidates on environmental issues, behind only Jay Inslee and Kirsten Gillibrand.

His voting record is excellent. Ideologically, I’d rank him behind Warren and Sanders but ahead of anybody else with the possible exception of Inslee, Harris included. Obviously he’d be infinitely preferable to Biden. And on the issue where he’s clearly the best in the field — criminal justice reform — is an area where the president has a lot of discretion to act even if Republicans control Congress. He’s not my first choice for the nomination, but right now I’d just as soon have him as the nominee as anyone but Warren, and he would be infinitely preferable to Biden. And, needless to say, if you’re on the nominal left and hold him in contempt while going gaga for the Pray Away the AIDS grifter, you’re saying a lot about your priorities, and they don’t include “climate change” or “criminal justice reform.”