I’ve known about Newark Mayor Cory Booker ever since my friend Raoul worked for his inaugural mayoral campaign (captured in the great documentary Street Fight). And if I had to come up with three adjectives to describe Mr. Booker, they’d be
- Hard-working
- Bright
- Ambitious
These are admirable traits, but they’re also traits that you could use to describe politicians who arguably haven’t achieved as much as they might’ve liked:
- Hillary Rodham Clinton
- Al Gore (pre-Inconvenient)
- Quasi-reformed overachievers too numerous to count
It’s hard get passionate about people who keep their nose clean, play by the rules, and work harder and longer than everyone else. It’s more fun to rally behind a witty, charismatic leader with a sense of humor.
Which is why Booker’s recent tete a tete with Conan O’Brien (whose humor I’ve always felt necessitated the use of quotation marks — “humor”) is brilliant: it rebrands him as a more interesting, personable, with-it political leader. He’s not just a Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon’s character in the movie Election; he can get good grades and launch wisecracks on command.
I discovered this Booker-O’Brien “tussle” because I’m a Booker fan on Facebook and he’s been keeping his 14,000 supporters updated with YouTube videos. It’s an intelligent application of social media within an excellent marketing campaign, and I look forward to seeing what comes next.
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