About a month before his election to the U.S. Senate last October, Cory A. Booker arrived at Rider University in New Jersey to greet a group of high school and college-age students who packed a crowded auditorium to hear the candidate speak about his plans to improve the country’s educational system.
“How can we have a democracy in which we create, in a sense, an educational apartheid, where kids born in certain zip codes get great educations and kids born in other zip codes are trapped in schools?” Booker asked the students, sounding more like a sage pragmatist instead of a novice political partisan vying to become the first Black U.S. senator from New Jersey.
It’s that kind of starry-eyed optimism and rhetoric that first catapulted the former mayor of Newark, N.J., to the national stage, where he now seeks to be known as the education senator, much like the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
His fame has kept pundits monitoring his every move, even as they speculate about his political future. Simply put, they want to know if the former Stanford honors student, Yale Law School graduate and Rhodes Scholar has ambitions of someday becoming president of the United States of America.
It’s a fair question, considering Booker’s political trajectory. Some suspect that he may indeed want to someday follow in the footsteps of Barack Obama, who entered the U.S. Senate in 2004 little unknown outside of Illinois but quickly became a formidable candidate for higher office and went on to defeat John McCain, a veteran senator and Vietnam War hero, to win the White House.
But if Booker has political aspirations that stretch beyond the U.S. Senate, he won’t say, at least not now.
