'We have so much pain': Cory Booker makes 2020 Iowa debut
At an event designed to stoke presidential speculation, the New Jersey senator rallied Democrats after the Kavanaugh confirmation, calling for “universal love” as a response to President Trump.
By David Weigel October 7 at 12:57 AM
DES MOINES — Hours after casting his vote against confirming Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) was looking out at Iowa Democrats, quoting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and urging them not to give into despair.
“I heard a president mock and laugh and jeer a survivor for telling her story,” Booker said. “I know there’s a lot of folks hurting right now. When I was walking through here, I had survivors walking up to me, telling me what the fight meant to them.”
Booker’s Iowa visit, the first by a Democrat considered a top-tier presidential candidate in 2020, was rapturously received by activists who had lost nearly every office in their state. The New Jersey senator had quietly agreed to keynote the party’s gala eight months earlier, shortly after joining the Senate Judiciary Committee; he planned to stay in the state through Tuesday, as Democrats kicked off their 30-day early-voting period.
His speech, delivered to about 1,400 Democrats at an event designed to stoke presidential speculation, dealt with the anguish over Kavanaugh’s confirmation with a digression into Booker’s personal story — a suburban kid who became an organizer and later mayor in Newark — and stories about his Iowa relatives, who had made friendships across racial lines, “folks coming together with their cloth to do a quilting bee.”
Booker compared the anger many were feeling about Kavanaugh’s confirmation to what he had felt watching a young man die of a gunshot wound, and then the despair he’d felt at President Trump’s inauguration.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/10/07/we-have-so-much-pain-cory-booker-makes-iowa-debut/