file photo Boyd Loving
Bad timing: Cory Booker contends with subpoena, bad press ahead of Senate election
POSTED AT 1:31 PM ON OCTOBER 27, 2014 BY NOAH ROTHMAN
New Jersey’s junior Senator and the former Democratic mayor of Newark, Cory Booker, will ask the state’s voters to send him back to the Senate next Tuesday to serve a full term. Booker was elected last year to fill the seat vacated by the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), and his aim was to keep his head down and make no waves as a new member of that august body.
Booker’s efforts to avoid being defined as a partisan political actor have not gone unnoticed, and the Garden State golden boy – the subject of glowing profiles in the press and documentaries which portrayed his tenure in Newark as nothing short of transformative and heroic — suffered something last week with which he is largely unfamiliar: negative press.
In a rather scathing post by The Daily Beast’s Olivia Nuzzi published last week noted that Booker has done little to demonstrate that he is anything other than a “congressional seat-warmer.” She added that Booker has benefited by the fact that the New Jersey GOP has been only able to recruit unknown candidates like former presidential speechwriter Jeff Bell or gaffe-prone figures like former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan to challenge the junior senator.
Nuzzi noted, however, that it is becoming increasingly clear that New Jersey’s newest senator is not as squeaky clean as he is portrayed by his admirers in the nation’s newsrooms.
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