file photo by Boyd Loving

The close makes the man

By Jason Rhode | July 6, 2017 | 10:55am
Chip Somodevilla

Cory Booker, the Senator from New Jersey of the Closed Beaches, has decided to stop taking money from Big Pharma. For the time being.

Big Pharma loves Booker. Booker loves Big Pharma. But for now, their romance must be the love that dare not speak its name. Booker wants to be President. He needs to base to support him. Hence the freeze-out.

To heal his career wound, Booker needs a medicine more expensive than the ones he helps Big Pharma with. This would be delicious irony, except this sort of thing keeps happening to a certain set of progressive politicians: they are boosted as the last best hope of Earth, before being found out as centrist sellouts. If Booker’s disgrace is poetic justice, then it is poetry which rhymes—no matter how these plastic reformers start, their ends are the same. We need a term to describe the interval of time between initiation as a progressive politician and discovery that the politician is not so progressive.

I call this concept the Booker Window.

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/07/how-the-booker-window-explains-centrist-implosion.html