New Jersey Sen. Cory “Call Me Spartacus” Booker is running for president, to the surprise of no one.

In a political era that seems long ago, Booker was one of the more interesting figures in the Democratic Party.

He began his career by taking on an established Democratic machine, failing in his first bid to be mayor of Newark. Incumbent Sharpe James was the old guard using every strong-arm tactic in the book to keep power, and Booker was the young, fresh-faced Rhodes scholar determined to show that city government could be more than just a corrupt, favor-dispensing fiefdom.

After being elected mayor, Booker quickly became master of the dramatic announcement. Perhaps his biggest was in September 2010, when he joined then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” to accept an eye-popping gift: $100 mill­ion to reform Newark public schools, with local philanthropists and others matching it and raising it to $200 million. Few big-city mayors have ever had a day that good.

A study completed in 2017 found that the Zuckerberg gift was neither a complete failure nor a rousing success. But by 2013, Booker was already off to the Senate.

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Booker didn’t just murmur disagreements with the way the Obama campaign attacked Mitt Romney’s work in the private sector, he denounced it.

“I have to just say, from a very personal level, I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity,” he said. “To me, it’s just we’re getting to a ridiculous point in America, especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people are investing in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they’ve done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses.”

But within a few days, Booker backtracked almost completely. It was a key early indicator Booker was willing to defy his party to stand up for what he believed was right . . . until it became difficult.

At the end of that year, The New York Times noticed the social media star mayor had succeeded a lot in promoting himself but not so much in improving daily life in his troubled city:

“When snow blanketed this city two Christmases ago, Booker was celebrated around the nation for personally shoveling out residents who had appealed for help on Twitter. But his administration was scorned as streets remained impassable for days . . .

“In recent days, Booker has made the rounds of the national media with his pledge to live on food stamps for a week. But his constituents don’t need to be reminded that six years after the mayor came into office vowing to make Newark a ‘model of urban transformation,’ their city remains an emblem of poverty.”

You probably recall Booker’s stories of his old friend T-Bone, who probably doesn’t exist. He raves about the joy of pedicures. He’s been vegan since 2014. His very limited release of his tax returns revealed he made more than $1.3 million in paid speeches while being mayor, and getting $700,000 as part of a confidential separation agreement from his old law firm — a firm that just happened to have contracts with two city agencies. Despite all of this, Booker gets some of the most glowing coverage.

Once Booker entered the Senate, he got somewhat more predictable and partisan in his stances. Year by year, Booker stopped being the genuinely surprising and unpredictable urban reformer and became the guy who tries too hard to get his party’s base to love him.

In the Trump era, Booker quickly realized his party had absolutely no interest in nominating a lawmaker who had cultivated a bipartisan image, and so he had to transform himself into the Trump administration’s biggest foe.

After previously cosponsoring legislation with Jeff Sessions, Booker chose to testify against his confirmation to be attorney general, the first time in Senate history that a sitting senator testified against another sitting senator for a cabinet post during a confirmation. By 2018, Booker insisted that supporters of Brett Kavanaugh were “complicit in evil” — and this was before the allegations of Christine Blasey Ford were revealed.

Now he’s trying to out-#Resistance the rest of the Democratic field, who are all attempting to metamorphize into the ultimate anti-Trump. The painful irony is that early-stage Booker would stand out in this giant field of candidates, offering a genuinely different option as a more pragmatic problem-solver, willing to defy liberal orthodoxy in search of solutions that worked best.

Adapted from National Review’s Morning Jolt newsletter.