Jeff Brown

When a blizzard dumped 2 feet of snow on Newark, New Jersey, just after Christmas in 2010, Cory Booker, who was then mayor, carefully monitored the storm from his Twitter account. He responded to tweets from residents, and he mobilized city workers. And when resident Linda H. (@msxmasbaby) tweeted, “Is there NE city volunteers 2 dig some1 out? I’m going 2 have medical procedure done,” he showed up with a shovel. That’s the way Booker rolls. He was early to social media and has made prolific use of it (47,500 tweets and counting) to connect with voters. So when he arrived in the US Senate in 2013, he was dismayed to discover just how out of place he was when it came to his tech-forward approach to government. The legislative body seemed stodgy and alarmingly behind the times, even by government standards, he says. “When they told me I couldn’t sit on the Senate floor with an iPad—that the technology wasn’t even permitted—I breathed deep and knew that I was going to have to start pushing.” To that end, he has recently teamed up with Missouri senator Claire McCaskill to ask for seven reforms. These include streamlining the requirements for email newsletters, letting Senate offices use analytics services to track social media, and adapting the Congressional Record to a more accessible XML format. There’s no telling how likely they are to succeed. But this heavy lifting won’t require a snow shovel.

One Man's Path to the Senate

1992 A football player and class president, Cory Booker completes bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Stanford

1997 Finishes law school at Yale, having already studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.

1998 Starts political career as a city council member in Newark, New Jersey.

2006 Becomes mayor of Newark, promising to reduce crime and encourage economic development.

2008 @corybooker sends first tweet, plugging an appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show.

2013 Wins US Senate seat in a special election to replace the late Frank Lautenberg.

Why now?

I am very respectful of the Senate’s important traditions, but it also has to keep up with the times.

What can’t you do that you would like to do?

A lot of things!

What’s the deal with the Senate ban on social media analytics tools, which could help senators surface issues from constituents?

Right now, if I ask my constituents questions on social media, it’s treated as if it’s a poll. And that’s just ridiculous.

The Senate just wants to prevent members from using online polling as a campaign tool. But the analytics ban inadvertently prevents lawmakers from identifying voters’ priorities.

Every sector of society looks at digital analytics in a productive way. Limiting my ability to use them is just unacceptable. And by the way, Congress conducts polls using traditional methods. No one is using social media analytics as a substitute for that.

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What else would you like to change?

We’re not providing information to the public in a format that is useful. Lobbyists, for example, are all the more powerful because they have information that citizens generally don’t.

Because they attend Senate hearings and develop relationships with committee members?

Right. We should be upset about that. There should be easily searchable databases of the Senate’s business. If you live in New York City, you can go into a restaurant and use an app that gives you complete transparency about the health record of that restaurant. It’s there because the Bloomberg administration released the bulk data from its health department, which innovative people used to make apps.

We are not doing that, but just imagine if we did.

You could have an app that alerts you every time legislation that’s important to you is being marked up in committee and when it makes it to the floor for a vote—and what poison pills might be slipped into it.

Do you think the American public is more tech-savvy than the government gives it credit for?

I don’t think there’s that conscious critique going on. There are no digital natives in the Senate. There are Gen Xers like me who are starting to pop up, people born around 1970, who have a lot of experience using these tools.

As mayor, when I gave more tools to my constituents to make their city better, they leaned into that. Residents knew if they tweeted me about a pothole it would be addressed. It became a powerful tool for me to make my city offices accountable.

__What prompted you to join Twitter? __

A woman named Sarah Ross got Ashton Kutcher to call City Hall. I thought I was being punk’d. Kutcher explained the potential for someone on a local-government level to increase their level of service, and he thought it could help change the world’s view of Newark.

Urban spaces are so often disrespected by traditional media—talk show hosts always make fun of cities. One night Conan O’Brien, who was then host of The Tonight Show, criticized Newark.

I recorded a short response video and posted it to YouTube, bragging about Newark, and then I basically said, “By the power vested in me by the city of Newark, I hereby ban Conan O’Brien from Newark Airport.” My last line was: “Try JFK, buddy.”

Conan responded on his show by banning me from the Burbank airport. The kerfuffle grew so big that Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, told us in her own video, “The time has come to make peace.” Conan and NBC ended up giving $100,000 to a Newark charity.

My point is, when we embraced social media, we took more control of the Newark narrative. We increased responsiveness toward residents. We drew more of our constituents in to participate in government and improve our cities.

You asked the Senate to approve buying targeted advertising on the web so that you could communicate more effectively with constituents. So if you wanted to make a specific group of people aware of a tax break, you might be able to connect with them more cheaply and quickly through Facebook ads than in a letter, is that correct?

Yes, that tool would allow Senate offices to more effectively reach people who need government services. Sending letters to constituents is a waste of taxpayer dollars and it’s not as effective at targeting the ones who actually need the service.

The Senate doesn’t allow cloud-based services either, right?

This is an example of where the Senate is not just behind the rest of the nation, it’s behind the rest of the government. Cloud-based services are less expensive, more secure, more efficient, and faster. The Department of Defense uses the cloud.

Are there other areas where government isn’t keeping up with technology?

We have an FAA that is slowing down the exploration of drone technology. We have other offices that, because of their slow movement, threaten the next wave of innovation. Our patent office has a backlog of applications in the hundreds

of thousands.

What could politicians learn from those in tech? And what could techies learn from politicians?

I want more of my colleagues to understand the limitless potential technology offers us to deal with a lot of our enduring challenges as a democracy. On the flip side, the growing cynicism about government among tech innovators is not helpful. In fact, it’s hurtful. People like Ben Franklin, the great innovators of their time,

were directly involved in shaping their government. Innovators reimagine our world in so many areas. We need them to help reimagine what government can and should be.