Cory Booker stresses love, unity and stopping ‘evil’
PHILADELPHIA — Cory Booker preached love and unity at the Democratic convention here Monday night, a message aimed not only at a divided country but also at a divided party.
The New Jersey senator’s remarks, in a marquee slot just before a speech by first lady Michelle Obama, were a critique of the Republican claim to ownership over patriotic sentiment. “You can’t love your country without loving your countrymen and countrywomen,” Booker said.
But his pleas that “We must find common ground” were more appropriate for the delegates arrayed before him inside the Wells Fargo Center, where hundreds of delegates loyal to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont continued to voice their opposition to presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton on the floor throughout the day.
The fallout from the long and divisive primary fight between Sanders and Clinton continued, despite exhortations from Sanders himself in an afternoon speech to his ardent supporters urging them to unite behind Clinton to beat Republican nominee Donald Trump in the fall.
Booker’s task in the evening, then, was to build toward the theme of the night: healing the wounds inside the party and overcoming wounded and raw emotions among those who still loved Sanders. Sanders’ speech at the end of the night was the capstone, but Booker was the first in a succession of heavy-hitters to start the prime-time unification effort. The first lady was followed by two of the Democratic Party’s most beloved progressive firebrands: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn. And just before Booker’s speech, comedian Sarah Silverman told Sanders supporters in the hall that they were being “ridiculous.”
The 47-year-old Booker’s personal brand — one he has studiously built and burnished over the past decade — is one of overcoming division anyway. And so those lines came naturally. But still, during his speech, there were still rumblings from the California delegation to Booker’s right, especially early on, when he mentioned Clinton’s name.
More broadly, Booker called on Americans to move past tolerance and to strive for the higher standard of loving one another.
“Love knows that every American has worth and value, no matter what their background, race, religion or sexual orientation. Love recognizes that we need each other, that we as a nation are better together, that when we are divided we are weak — we decline — yet when we are united, we are strong. When we are indivisible, we are invincible,” he said.
Bookers call for party unity came just days after he was passed over for the vice presidential slot, and the crowd greeted Booker with chants of “Cory, Cory, Cory.”
But the unification effort also included — from Booker and other speakers — an indictment of Trump.
Booker quoted Trump at length more than once, isolating in particular Trump’s criticism of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a year ago. Trump knocked McCain, a Navy pilot who was shot down and held prisoner by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam war, for being captured, and called him a “loser.” He ran through Trump’s mockery of the disabled, his shady business dealings with contractors, and his demeaning of women and immigrants.
Trump’s candidacy contradicts the United States’ deepest and oldest values and traditions, Booker argued.
“Americans, at our best, stand up to bullies and fight those who seek to demean and degrade others. In times of crisis, we don’t abandon our values — we double down on them,” Booker said.
He quoted the poet Maya Angelou, in a crowd-pleasing rebuttal to Trump: “When Trump spews insults and demeaning words about our fellow Americans, I think of the poem by Maya Angelou. You know how it begins: ‘You may write me down in history/With your bitter, twisted lies,/You may trod me in the very dirt/But still, like dust, I’ll rise.’”
To close, Booker talked of Clinton’s personal commitment to helping others and ran through specific policies intended to appeal to the Democrats’ progressive liberal base: a higher minimum wage, education reform, paid family leave, criminal justice reform and college loans.
Booker’s original speech had planned to invoke together both Clinton and Sanders’ ideas on the issue of college tuition. His prepared remarks said Democrats should work to support, “Bernie’s ideas, Hillary’s ideas, our shared ideas” on the subject. But this section was removed, and instead, Booker said only that the party should support “all of our shared ideas and values together.”
He ended by urging Democratic voters not to stay home in the fall, implying that Trump’s candidacy represents “evil.”
“My fellow Americans, we cannot fall into complacency or indifference about this election, because still, the only thing necessary for evil to be triumphant is for good people to do nothing,” Booker said.
It was striking that a speech about love and bridge-building ended with such a stark and morally judgmental indictment of the Republican nominee for president.
As Democratic convention aides distributed handheld signs reading, “Stronger together,” and “Rise together,” Booker brought the crowd to its feet when he said, in a play on Trump’s last name, “Let us declare that we are a nation of interdependence, and that in America, love always trumps hate.”
_____
Related slideshows:
On the ground at the DNC — a photo report >>>
How newspaper’s covered the DNC’s first big day >>>
Demonstrators protest outside the DNC >>>
