Cory Booker surprised by the need to fight for that New Jersey Senate seat.

Politico observes, noting there's a debate today:

For Booker, it’s a chance to show he is engaged in the race, and not the celebrity candidate who’s off giving speeches at colleges, as Booker has, during the waning days of the campaign...

Working in Booker’s favor is the fact that the debate is on a Friday, in the middle of the day. It won’t be widely broadcast, meaning most voters will learn about it from the media. It minimizes the potential impact of any gaffe or slip-up....

Cory Booker does standup.

"The Newark mayor and candidate for an open U.S. Senate seat in New Jersey was one of five political performers who appeared at the annual Stu Bykofsky Candidate Comedy Night in Philadelphia."



"I'm kind of tired of people comparing me to President Obama... I coordinated neighborhoods; he organized them." Can someone explain that joke?

"Why don't you ask me next time before writing that I'm either malicious or dumb?"

Asks Charles C. Johnson, the Daily Caller writer whose article I critiqued yesterday in a post titled "Young Cory Booker — groping women or appeasing women?"

Here's the point in the comments where Johnson shows up. I answer him, he responds to that, and I respond.

Just thought you might like to know about the action in the comments.

Young Cory Booker — groping women or appeasing women?

The Daily Caller, apparently hungry to make Cory Booker look bad, has an article with the headline "In college column, Cory Booker revealed time he groped friend, and she resisted." I think we're supposed to find it significant that when he was 15 and making out with a willing partner, on a bed, he put his hand on her breast and she rejected the move. This is nothing, of course, but it's something not because he "groped" a girl, but because he used the incident, years later, to score with women.

He was at Stanford, in peak feminist times — post-Anita Hill, pre-Monica Lewinsky — and the column was titled "So Much for Stealing Second." In the manner of the time, he told his "own personal story" to "make a point" and "make people think":

“When grandiose statements entrenched in politically correct terminology are made, many may listen but few will hear,” Booker continued. “When I hesitated in writing this column, I realized I was basking in hypocrisy. So instead I chose to write and risk.”

Booker the 15-year-old may have been awkward, but Booker the college student is slick, speaking to his female peers the way they wanted. Eschew abstractions and grandiosity. Confess your male transgressions. Within the 1992 feminist environment, getting personal — "risking" — was the inroad to favor. He expresses regret about his susceptibility to "messages that sex was a game, a competition," and he'd seen getting the hand onto the breast as reaching "second base." Ironically, he was still trying to score with women, this time the college women, and admitting that he thought of sex as a game was a way to compete in the new game.

The Daily Caller writer, Charles C. Johnson, was probably a child when Booker wrote that column. Johnson doesn't seem to understand the context at all. Or maybe he understands and he's just shamelessly appropriating this material to launch the rumor that Booker is a sex offender. Is Johnson dumb or malicious? The result is malicious, but I suspect Johnson is dumb, because look at this:

"After having my hand pushed away once, I reached my ‘mark,’” Booker wrote.

Booker didn’t elaborate on what his “mark” was, but whatever happened, it was enough to haunt him for years to come.

His "mark" was obviously the breast. The column is titled "So Much for Stealing Second." I know these kids today have relabeled the bases, but how can you not understand what "mark" means in that context? Or does Johnson understand but maliciously intend to insinuate that Booker reached some other part of the woman? Clue to Johnson: Third base was fondling the genitals, and to get the penis into the vagina was to reach home.

I got to Johnson's nonsense via Instapundit who teased it with "Reverse the sexes and there's no story here." But there is no story here! Instapundit quotes 2 sentences of Johnson's and repeats the words "groped" and "grabbed" to refer to what the 15-year-old did to the girl's breast. But Booker writes of a very slow and gentle move of a hand toward the breast of a female who had intruded on him with "an overwhelming kiss" when he'd offered her a hug at midnight on New Year's Eve. So actually, the sexes were reversed, and Instapundit — in the midst of his sarcasm about how we overlook female sexual aggression — overlooked female sexual aggression.

If anyone was assaulted, it was Booker: "As the ball dropped, I leaned over to hug a friend and she met me instead with an overwhelming kiss." Then: "As we fumbled upon the bed, I remember debating my next 'move' as if it were a chess game." He was 15, fumbling, and thinking about chess. How old was she? How did they get to that bed? Booker was using what he had to make his feminist points to Stanford women in 1992. He had nothing, but he made something out of nothing for rhetorical purposes to lecture college men about how they ought to behave toward women.

If he did anything wrong, it's that he sought so earnestly to please women, adapting to the preferences they seemed to express, first, by trying to perform appropriately for the woman who imposed "an overwhelming kiss" on him and, then, by trying to talk the talk of the college feminists.

Lefties who fear that Cory Booker is "a Manchurian candidate who, while running as a nominal Democrat, is and has been deeply entrenched with the vulture capitalists..."

"... and their disaster capitalism education 'reform,' grew up in and has never rejected the religious right (while selling himself as gay-friendly, he's cultivated the same extremist movement that has promoted homophobia in Uganda and benefited from their mythology of Newark's 'transformation'), is steeped in Wall Street money and philosophy and is deeply admired by the usual right-wing think tanks."

"Eight staffers at Cory Booker's tech start-up have started looking for new jobs as the company is expected to shutter."

"The video aggregation company is said to be losing cash quickly and it is supposedly being kept alive through early November so that it's closure doesn't hurt Booker's chances at winning the New Jersey Senate race."

(We were talking about Booker and his company Waywire yesterday, here.)

"Booker's stake is a bribe."

"He gets money, the bribers er 'donors' or 'partners' get control and access over public policy, at the expense of the voters. This is blatant graft and of a type that used to be common in the late 19th century, which in so many ways our politics and economy seem to be moving back to."

That's the comment ranked highest by readers of the NYT's embarrassingly puffy piece on Cory Booker, "Tech Magnates Bet on Booker and His Future."

Here's the second-highest-ranked:

“Cory is the inspiration architect,” Ms. Ross said. “He really is the thought-leader soul part of the business.”

Translation: he does nothing but we're throwing money at him to buy influence.

And really? Yet another video sharing platform? The tech sector - which I suppose now includes 99% of everyone under 25-years-old - just keeps going deeper and deeper into the well in an endless feedback loop of self-aggrandizement but what they produce becomes less and less relevant or important to society. But they sure can market junk, can't they?

Here's Waywire, by the way(wire), so check for yourself if it's haywire. You can't tell from one look how long these items have been at the top, but the timelessness of the subject matter makes me think: a long time. I mean: "7 Great Beatles Performances," "Top 15 Most Patriotic Songs," "30 Best Summer Songs"...? These seem to pre-date the Internet! But let's be fair and watch "Top News, August 8," which appears in the upper left-hand corner of the grid. It starts off (for me, now, anyway) with a grainy 38 seconds of a guy in a suit drawing all the pingpong balls for a set of Powerball numbers. (That fits with "betting on Booker.") It then proceeds to another video, a minute of Obama on Leno, then another (showing "Suffering in Syria"), then something about Egypt, something about Dustin Hoffman, something else about Egypt, and ending the run through the top news that you need to know today, August 8th, with "Toddler Beaten to Death by Foster Mother." We see her sad face in a thumbnail.

I'm drawn back to the NYT article, which blithely drops the news: "Waywire has put Andrew Zucker, 15, the son of Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, on its advisory board and given him stock options." Kid luck. It's a crapshoot.

Most Embarrassing Sentence in Major Media, 2013.

And the first nominee is:

But hanging in the air was an electrifying sense of being in the presence of an ascendant politician they believed understood the potential of the new digital world they were shaping.

"It’s time for me to be mature."

Says the 89-year-old Frank Lautenberg, ceding the stage to Cory Booker.

Chuck Schumer tells Cory Booker: "Frank deserves the time and respect to make his own decisions."

Let the 89-year-old Senator Frank R. Lautenberg decide when it's time to yield to the younger generation, the Dems are saying to the 43-year-old Newark mayor. They're saying that publicly anyway. I'm sure nobody wants to get caught showing any disrespect for the the old man, despite the absurdity of his intransigency. Privately, they must be dying for him to go.

"Should Elderly Politicians Make Like the Pope and Quit?"

Asks David Weigel.

Pope Benedict is three years younger than Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who's puttering around condemning the very idea of Cory Booker running against him....

[C]overage of Lautenberg... high-fives him for his vigor. A recent Philadelphia Inquirer story pointed out that the senator had returned from "a cold that became the flu" and was "wielding a cane -- which he insisted he didn't really need," but otherwise focused on his "feistiness."

Weigel mixes 2 topics: the individual's decision to continue despite age and infirmity and the way the media (and the rest of us) "play along." Nothing about what the Pope is doing changes the playing along part of it. We've come to believe that age discrimination is wrong, and we've allowed that to mean too much.

Age discrimination isn't like race discrimination! Age takes a toll on people and it matters and affects their performance. A specific individual may be doing relatively well for his age, and we ought to see him as an individual, but age matters. Statutory law prohibiting age discrimination tells us not to take age into account in some situations, but that doesn't include electoral politics. Feel free to boldly assail Lautenberg for clinging to his Senate seat. (And feel free to criticize judges who seem to be hanging on too long, especially Supreme Court Justices.)

Is the Pope any help here? He waited until he was 85 to step down. And he began the onerous work when he was nearly 80. The previous Pope — immensely admired — made a point of sticking with the job through a long, painful decline. I think both of these Popes encourage people to keep going and not to cede the work to the less old.