New Jersey Senator Cory Booker was raised in tony Bergen County, New Jersey, by his mother and father, both IBM executives. He attended Stanford University, Oxford and Yale Law. Top-drawer, elite educational institutions. He moved to Newark in 1995 during his second year of law school. Ran for city council in 1996 and won, ran for mayor and lost. And then won in 2002. The former Mayor of Newark is currently a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a candidate for the nation’s highest office.
He has made quite a name for himself (he even has a movie actress girlfriend now).
People in New Jersey still remember what then Mayor Booker did to set himself apart from other politicians. Living in a housing project, going on a 10-day hunger strike, surviving on a $30 per week food budget, saving a woman from a burning building, shoveling out a snowed in elderly constituent. All true stories.
And then there’s T-Bone.
Ah, yes. T-Bone. Cory got himself a brotha from the ‘hood!
I haven’t seen many references to Senator Booker’s… friend? acquaintance? hail fellow well met? in the media (except for the popular conservative blog Instapundit) since he announced his presidential candidacy. It’s probably a topic “Spartacus” Booker would rather avoid. After all, who needs prying questions about a special friend, who may or may not have been a common street criminal, a drug dealer, or, worst of all, never existed (then again, when do the Democratic cheerleaders at CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, etc., ask prying questions of Democratic presidential candidates). In the crowded Democratic presidential field, many of the non-front runner candidates have to do something, anything, to stand out (for all the good it did Beto O’Rourke). However, Senator Booker would probably prefer to stand out from the other lower tier candidates, whose polling percentages equate roughly to the fat content in low fat milk, for something other than having an imaginary friend whom he apparently created to give himself “street cred” to Newark voters and liberal white supporters.
For those who don’t know, early in his political career Booker told various folks that T-Bone was a Newark drug dealer who either threatened to kill him or cried on his shoulder – or both. He told the Stanford alumni magazine in 2001 that when he first talked to T-Bone, he said to the purported street criminal “yo, man, whas’ up?” (you can bet he did not learn to talk like that in Bergen County or at Oxford). Long time Rutgers-Newark noted history professor Clement Price says Booker told him T-Bone was a composite character. Booker told Esquire Magazine in 2008 that T-Bone was real. State Senator and Newark native Ronald Rice told a journalist that Booker liked to spin the tale of T-Bone to the white, suburban audiences he addressed.
Check out Eliana Johnson’s 2013 article in the National Review, “Cory Booker’s Imaginary Friend” for more.
Have Senator Booker’s fables of his run-ins with T-Bone been consigned to the dustbins of his earlier campaigns? He hasn’t, to my knowledge, raised the specter of T-Bone during his presidential campaign. For instance, in the televised Democratic debates, he hasn’t promised black residents of down trodden, poverty and crime ridden communities controlled by Democratic politicians for the last several decades (Baltimore, Chicago and St. Louis come to mind) that if elected, he will sweep in with T-Bone at his side to clean up their neighborhoods. Does that mean he has cured himself of the compulsion to regale listeners with tales of his exploits at the side of Newark’s most fierce street criminal?
Or has he simply recognized that today, with every Democratic opponent, Republican opposition researcher or unemployed tech nerd lounging in his parents’ basement in his pajamas having ready access to the Internet, his prior attempts to downplay his upbringing in a stable, two parent, middle class household in a well-off suburb by hyping his supposed kinship with a mythical ghetto drug dealer could actually hurt him this time around? He should consider himself lucky; his current standing at the bottom of the bottom of the pack of Democratic candidates may account for the failure of his opponents or the media to question T-Bone’s existence (or lack thereof) during the televised Democratic debates or in press releases, interviews, etc. Having the veracity of and motivation for his T-Bone stories questioned could detract from his current efforts to portray himself as in complete and unquestioned solidarity with oppressed minorities, women, LGBTQ activists, climate warriors and whoever else is currently among progressive Democrats’ cast of favored victims.
I may be going out on a limb here, but Senator Booker is not going to be the Democratic nominee for president. But if he is the vice president nominee, he will certainly be asked about T-Bone by somebody at some point. It will be interesting to see how he handles it.
Yo, brotha, amirite ?