Columnist David Marcus writes that Sen. Cory Booker’s recod-breaking filibuster was a performative stunt and a perfect metaphor for the Democrats’ impotence.
Though it is a competitive category, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., may be the perfect personification of the utter political impotence of today’s Democratic Party.
On Monday and Tuesday, for reasons that remain unclear, Senator Spartacus took the floor of the upper house and talked for over 24 hours straight in a filibuster that could have come out of a movie.
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In fact, it did come out of a movie, one called “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington,” in which Jimmy Stewart played a senator making a marathon speech that came out 85 years ago.
That is exactly how old Booker’s performative nonsense felt this week.
Further precedent for the talk-a-thon came from segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond, whose 1957 record for longwindedness Booker smashed.
For anyone paying attention, and frankly, that was likely a very small number of people, the question while Booker prattled on and on was why? Was there some purpose to this diatribe, or was it essentially a political TikTok challenge?
Call me lazy if you want, but in preparing this column I did not actually watch or read all 25 hours of Babblin’ Booker’s remarks. If there were five people in the world who did, I would be shocked.
From the highlights, so to speak, we mostly see flailing arms and crazy-eyed proclamations that the Trump administration “is not normal,” and a bizarre confession that might have been the performance’s most telling moment.
“I confess that I have been imperfect.” Booker solemnly intoned. “I confess that I’ve been inadequate to the moment. I confess that the Democratic Party has made terrible mistakes that gave a lane to this demagogue. I confess we all must look in the mirror and say ‘we will do better.'”
Two things stand out here. One is the religiosity of his rhetoric. He could almost be at Mass beating his chest three times as he spoke. The other is the idea that extraordinary measures must be taken to stop Trump, a kind of “by any means necessary” approach.
Even the use of the filibuster itself betrayed this. After all, not long ago, Democrats insisted that this archaic Senate procedure is racist and must be abolished.
It was filibuster-friendly former Democratic-turned Independent Arizona Sen. Krysten Sinema who had the last laugh, quipping on X, Tuesday, “Maybe it isn’t an old Jim Crow relic, after all.”
Setting aside the situational ethics at work regarding when a filibuster is or isn’t racist, the more dangerous aspect of this is Booker’s insistence that our nation faces some dire peril in the form of Trump that must be thwarted, even with “non-traditional” methods.
Booker, importantly, did not come up as a fire-breathing radical. As mayor of Newark, N.J., he was thought of as something of a centrist. Back then he made goofy YouTube videos with the Republican former governor of the Garden State, Chris Christie.
What has occasioned this change, aside from an almost certain second run for president, is that Booker’s wing of the Democratic Party has decided that President Donald Trump is such an existential threat to America and all it stands for, that he cannot be worked with and must be politically destroyed.
This attitude on its face rejects the will of the voters who put Trump in office, but it also ignores the millions of Americans who did not vote for Trump but still want the Democrats to work with him to solve problems, not to keep screaming for four more years.
The reason that we see the old-timey protests today, where the well-worn songs of the struggles of the sixties are sung, is the same reason that Booker tore this cheesy filibuster page out of an ancient Hollywood playbook.
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The Democrats are trying to evoke a feeling from the use of these old symbolic forms, but the problem is that Jimmy Stewart’s iconic cinematic speech and the songs of Joan Baez were authentic expressions of their time. Today, there is no life in those forms; they are mere empty shells.
Perhaps the Democrats are reaping what they sowed. Perhaps when you spend your time tearing down traditions, toppling statues, and severing connections to our own past, as progressives are so wont to do, then the symbols of that past lose all of their power.
Sorry, Senator Booker, your record-breaking speech was not brave or inspiring, rather it was tired, played out and did not advance the interests of the American people one iota.
The time for performative stunts is over, the time to work with President Trump to help all Americans is at hand.