The sight of New Jersey Senator Corey Booker imploring fellow Democrats last week to reject passage of a bipartisan bill drew nearly as much outrage from fellow Democrats as it did Republicans. It became just the latest in a long line of incidents that many of the Garden State legislator’s critics say only are meant to draw attention to him and not to any actual accomplishments. It also left many wondering if Booker was merely posing for the cameras ahead of a possible Presidential run in 2028. Award-winning NorthJersey.com columnist Mike Kelly is among the unimpressed, as he recently penned a column speculating on last Tuesday’s stunt. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to explain why Booker is the poster boy for what is wrong with the Democratic party.
Kelly told host Larry Mendte why he thought Booker’s approach was the wrong track to take for someone trying to assert himself as a party leader: “I thought Corey Booker’s speech was a major mistake, because what it did was it drives fissures right into the Democratic party, and right now that party needs some measure of unity. They’ve got to find some kind of common ground, common sense if issues and directions that they can proceed on. Rahm Emanuel has been talking about this for a while now… and I think he makes a very good point by saying the Democrats are just all over the place and they haven’t figured out what they want to be, and until they do, they’re gonna be like this.”
Kelly says going after Democrats rather than Republicans shows just how adrift the Democrats are right now. “He went after his party; it was an interesting message- he went after his party in a speech that says, ‘We’ve got to get tougher, Democrats’. I understand where he’s coming from, but I just think it really is the wrong message and it just underscores why the Democratic party can’t get its act together now.”
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