Foolish obsession
Anybody who watched the clumsy histrionics of Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) at last week’s Senate grilling of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen had to feel a little sorry for him.
His overacting was on full display before the Senate Judiciary Committee and TV cameras. Booker posed, pretended, preened and generally made a fool of himself shouting at Nielsen about President Donald Trump’s latest inexplicable comments regarding immigrants from certain parts of the world. In releasing his almost-comical wrath, Booker’s performance was so awful and cringe-worthy that I actually felt embarrassed for him. He even copped to weeping “tears of rage.” The pain and drama of it all was just too much. And it’s only January. The first presidential primary is more than two years away.
Booker’s rant is only an early taste of many more to come from an increasingly clamorous field of Democratic presidential hopefuls. The Democratic Party is lurching irreparably to the left and has nothing to offer voters in 2020 other than outrage over Trump’s latest tweet.
It’s too bad Nielsen couldn’t have punctuated Booker’s rant with a well-played stage yawn, giving his self-serving jeremiad the treatment it deserved.
Anyway, Booker may have been the most wincingly awful to watch, but he is by no means the only Democratic White House hopeful jockeying to position himself or herself as the most liberal, the most outraged, the most synthetically sincere of 2020 contenders. Booker’s pinwheel-eyed fulmination takes its place alongside similarly shameful rants from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez and other liberal one-uppers stumbling over themselves to prove their anti-Trump bona fides.
For months, I have written about the Democratic Party’s dangerous lurch to the left.
The fact that Democrats are abandoning any notion of compromise and refusing to appeal to independent and moderate voters should come as no surprise. The party has been hijacked by radical voices from within, and what we are seeing now is only the beginning of what is to come.