michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt, and this is “The Argument.” This week I sit down with Senator Cory Booker, the 2020 presidential candidate.

cory booker

And so you want to know one of the reasons why we’re going to win? It’s because I’m going to bring a fight as President of the United States like they have never, ever imagined possible.

david leonhardt

Then Ross, Michelle, and I talk about his candidacy and the state of the Democratic race.

ross douthat

And I think there’s a narrative that he can offer that is an interesting counterpoint to Obama. And finally, a recommendation.

michelle goldberg

They will give you as many flavors as you want in a small. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

Cory Booker became famous as the mayor of Newark, and he’s now a senator from the state of New Jersey. He’s also running for president. Based on his experience, in the early polls he’s considered to be in the top tier of about seven or eight candidates who are leading the way among the 23 Democrats running for president. I recently traveled down to Charleston, South Carolina, which is one of the early voting states and where Booker was attending the Black Economic Alliance Presidential Forum. He and I sat down in his hotel suite there to talk about how he wants to change the country. Here’s our conversation. After you hear it Ross and Michelle will be back, and you’ll hear all of us talk about his campaign. Senator Cory Booker, welcome to “The Argument.”

cory booker

Thank you very much. It’s great to be on.

david leonhardt

It’s great to have you. So by my count, there are 23 Democrats running for president?

cory booker

You’re better than me. I’ve lost to count.

david leonhardt

I think it’s 23.

cory booker I now say that 2020 elections don’t stand for the year, the number of people running in 2020.

david leonhardt

And obviously, you admire a lot of them. Some of your friends, right? Kirsten Gillibrand came to your birthday party, gave you some shirts, I saw.

cory booker

Yes, yes.

david leonhardt

And so at the same time some of them are your friends and you admire some of them, you clearly think you’d be a better president than they would. Can you give us the short version of why you?

cory booker

Just to be succinct, I have spent my life running at tough problems, ones that I think are too often overlooked or just not addressed. I went to Newark, New Jersey, one of the toughest neighborhoods, where I still live, and began to take on problems people said were intractable and things that people said couldn’t be done. And by the time I was going on to the United States Senate, Newark had transformed its school system to the number one school system now in America for beat-the-odds schools, which high poverty kids going on to high performance. We took 60 years of population decline, decaying economy to becoming the muscle of New Jersey. When I got to the Senate, the same thing. I remember people literally counseling me, you are not going to get people out of prison. Well, now the only major piece of bipartisan legislation through this Congress was one that I led on the Democratic side with Dick Durbin through the Senate. This is a moment in America where I know we all have this feeling we must beat Donald Trump. But I try to remind people the reason I’m running is because I believe I can beat him. But that’s just getting us out of the valley. I got into politics to get us to the mountaintop where America works for every one in every zip code, especially ones like mine, where too many people are being left out and left behind.

david leonhardt

You talk a lot about justice in a bunch of different ways. And one of the things that really strikes me is you say, look, a lot of these problems predated Donald Trump as president, sometimes by a lot. One of the themes you talk about is economic justice. You’ve got baby bonds, you’ve got jobs guarantee, tax credits for work. We’ll get into a couple of these, but I’m kind of interested in the umbrella here, the larger theme, which is they all seem to be based on this idea that the economy doesn’t work for ordinary people the way it used to. Can you explain to us that larger change? Why doesn’t the economy work for people anymore? And when did that change happen?

cory booker

Well, if you want to really pull back, one of the most haunting things my dad ever said to me — I’d chosen to live in these high-rise projects for eight years, and it was a tough time when there was a murder in our neighborhood. And my dad and I were on the scene, basically, as a young man bled out, trying to stop him from bleeding. And my dad —

david leonhardt

What town was this in?

cory booker

This is Newark.

david leonhardt

This is in Newark?

cory booker

Yeah. And I’m one of millions of Americans who live in communities where this is an everyday reality, an everyday concern and fear. And you have communities that are traumatized as a result of this level of gun violence. And my dad grew up poor, black, in a de jure segregated community to a single mom. And he looks at me and says, I worry that a child born like me would be better off making it if they were born in ‘36 than being born today.

david leonhardt

Wow.

cory booker

And I’m a data guy, and on some indices he’s wrong. But I’m a lot he is right. My dad did not grow up in a time of mass incarceration. He did not grow up at a time where black men were being slaughtered at the rates they are. We live in a nation where black men are 6 percent of the nation’s population, but they make up the majority of the homicide victims. And a lot of things have changed about our economy since then. We ushered in, on the planet Earth at that time, the greatest entrance in the middle class of any other civilization in humanity, and that was done largely because we’d lowered the barriers to education. We created shared growth investing in things like research and development, investing —

david leonhardt

You’re talking about in the post-World War II era?

cory booker

Yes. And even if you were black in America, despite the overt racism and even terrorism of lynching, we in my generation have taken that inheritance, trashed it, and turned our back on those strategies that allowed so many people to have pathways. My father’s era, you worked a minimum wage job, you were above the poverty line. Well, minimum wage has not kept up with the cost of living. And now if you work in New Jersey, you need to work two jobs at minimum wage in order to make a living wage for your family. So many of the trends — even The New York Times had a great article which I thought was brilliant in pointing out how labor has been so crushed in our generation where they compared a janitor — my grandmother’s parents were domestics and a janitor — who worked for Kodak versus a janitor that worked for Apple. The economy was very different. A janitor that worked for Kodak actually worked for Kodak, got their benefit packages, got their tuition is assistance. And your article followed that person up to low middle management, but a great American story.

david leonhardt

What changed? Why did we abandon that old kind of economy?

cory booker

Well, the janitor that works for Apple, by the way, works for an outsource company. They don’t get the same wages. So you’ve seen an attack on unions. You’ve seen a short-termism that has come into corporate culture. You’ve seen concentrations of corporate power that we never would have allowed before. The tactics that they use to drive up quarterly profits, whether it’s things that were considered legal before like stock buybacks. You see how executives are being measured on those quarterly reports, not their quality of their company. I can go through dozens of things that have warped our economy, increased corporate strength, exacerbated disparities in income overall, and racial disparities, because in my lifetime, after going through years where we were closing the racial wealth gap, it’s now gone back to where I’ve been born. But what I point out to everybody is these weren’t things that were endemic to our economy. These were choices that were made— many of them began around the Reagan era — that changed the bargain, that changed the deal, attacking public schools, attacking unions, attacking the very dignity of work. And now we live in a society where we are scraping together. We are not even no longer the most R&D-intensive economy on the planet Earth. We’ve fallen from all of these things that are common sense investments. Even if you ran a business, you would invest in the quality of your employees, the physical plant, and staying out of the competition. Well, that’s education, that’s infrastructure, that’s R&D. In Newark, I had to make the tough decisions to cut the size of my government 25 percent, find efficiencies everywhere I could, invest in the things that I knew would grow my city, grow jobs. And I looked at some of my Republican colleagues and I said, I could tell you how to save five to seven taxpayer dollars — I can show you the data — if we just invested in things. Like, I have I have a policy about housing that I find stunning when I have to explain to people that it is more expensive for society to allow someone to be evicted over $500 or $1,000. We pay multiples the cost of that family being homeless or that child being moved from one school to another or having that kind of insecurity.

david leonhardt

I agree these policies tend to have good returns, the policies you favor and I generally favor. But there are still winners from the world that we live in, this sort of post-1980 world, to overgeneralize just slightly. It seems to me that in the past we had a society where leaders, corporate leaders and others, had a greater sense of stewardship and responsibility to the entire society. And I don’t think today we’re worse people than our grandparents were. In some ways, we’re better people. But we do seem to live in almost a greedier, more selfish world. And I’m sort of trying to figure out what is it that led us to this place where we don’t make these investments that do grow the pie. But business executives feel like, hey, it’s fine for me to try to make absolutely every last possible dollar I can. What got us there?

cory booker

I do worry that we have fallen away from the ideal in our country of creating a beloved community, which is we’re all in this together, that we have shared destiny and a common purpose, to now tribalism is coursing through our country where people are arguing it’s us against them. It’s a zero-sum game. It’s fear-based, and I think that’s in our corporate culture. I think it’s in our political culture. The head of A.E.I., a guy named Brooks, talks about this fetishization of capitalism as an end unto itself and forgetting that it is a theory to get us to the higher ideal of more shared growth, better distribution of opportunity and resources. And we have so perverted the ideal of capitalism that now we tolerate policies that are allowing a new era of monopolization, of oligarchies, that literally we have now empowered corporations in this country so much that they’re suppressing free speech. And so I see this election in two ways. Look, we have people in this campaign that are people I respect, things I’m most proud of. Some of the people in the race are my partners on this. I think this is about our policy and our ideas, but I really think that this election is ultimately about the character and the culture of our country. And it’s not a referendum on Donald Trump. This is actually a referendum on who we are and who we’re going to be to each other for the next quarter century.

david leonhardt

Let’s go through a couple of specific policies. So baby bonds, really intriguing policy. So basically, the idea is you would give — a kid’s born, you put $1,000 in a savings account. Every year you add more money. If they’re low income, you add more. By the time the kids are 18, I think the one analysis says they can have up to $46,000 in this account. And what’s been interesting is as you look at the people who’ve crunched this, they say this could go a long way toward narrowing the racial wealth gap because of the fact that kids with less would get more. And I have a hard time believing that we’re going to get slavery reparations in this country. But I do see how we could get something like baby bonds where we say, hey, we help everyone, but we help the people who need it the most more. Do you think that’s a fair analysis, that one of the ways to address racial gaps in this country, given our history of racism and the role that racism still plays in politics, is to have policies that are not race-specific but are designed to reduce racial gaps?

cory booker

So my short answer to that yes. Look, I was very conscious of the racial impacts when we were designing this because I live in a community that screens towards the impact of generations of bigoted racist policies. And it’s very hard to undo centuries of racial policies by suddenly saying, I’m now going to not be conscious of race in America. And so this is a policy that I think can be embraced by you, whoever you are, whatever your background. If you’re a struggling white family, this is an incredible opportunity to give your kids a fair start. And what most people don’t understand — in fact, I had my staff crunch the numbers, and even I was surprised at how much of our tax code is designed to give breaks to people who already have wealth to help them create more wealth.

david leonhardt

The mortgage interest deduction —

cory booker

Yes. So we shift over $600 billion of tax expenditures to people who have wealth helping them get more. Let’s finally have a policy that helps people without wealth build wealth because paychecks just help people get by, but wealth helps families get ahead. And so this is one of those strategies that is a powerful punch at wealth inequality and racial wealth inequality. And it is something that, as you said, let’s crunch the numbers. Columbia University said it virtually eliminates the racial wealth gap because blacks, as a result of policies for generations, are disproportionately poor. The fact that I’m sitting here as a family that, in order to buy a home, we had to get a white couple pose as us just shows you the extreme level that black families often have to go to. So this is a policy that — you’re right. It’s politically very feasible to get this done when everybody says, wait a minute my family’s going to have a fair shot to build wealth and to pass on generational wealth. I’m really confident in this policy. And the more folks that look at it, I think the more it’ll gain steam.

david leonhardt

Let me ask you about a policy idea that, I’ll confess, I like a little less, which is the jobs guarantee. So I worry that it would just be enormously complex. The federal government — and you’re in favor of pilot programs, in fairness, to start.

cory booker

Yes.

david leonhardt

So maybe your answer is, if it doesn’t work, you won’t do it. But the federal government going to guarantee people kind of a job making $15 an hour. Seems really hard. The federal government can figure out what kind of jobs should be created. People get the job no matter what their performance or their fit is. And I was interested — we’re here for this event. There was a poll of 1,000 black Americans as part of this event, and they gave them a list of 14 policies and asked them which ones they liked. And people liked almost all of them, but when you ranked them by how much they liked them, a federal jobs guarantee— not your one, but general, a federal jobs guarantee was near the bottom of the list. So there are other skeptics out there. I’m just sort of interested in what you think about that.

cory booker

And so you basically have pointed out the reality. My bill is not like, let’s do this. My bill is like, hey — this is how I started when I was mayor, too, is I said, what are the good ideas out there? And how can we pilot them in my city? And measure them, often getting foundations or universities involved in helping me, and let’s let the data lead us to what we engage in strategies. I see the culture in Silicon Valley, as a guy that went to Stanford, that rewards failure, rewards trying new things. And often counterintuitive things often end up tending to get major results, things that often I don’t think of. Why don’t we do this in the public policy space anymore? Finding ways to do small pilot projects, and then measure the results and let the data lead us and guide our strategies.

david leonhardt

So then if my skepticism is wrong, then you go ahead with it?

cory booker

Right.

david leonhardt

And if it’s right, then you look at other stuff.

cory booker

I’ve learned the hard way that no one has a monopoly on the truth, as great as I thought I was, and good ideas can come from almost anywhere.

david leonhardt

So we’ve been taught about economic justice. Let’s pivot to criminal justice. Your policy on guns is — I mean, it’s quite bold. I was looking at some of the analysis of it. You’ve been a leader on this issue. What you’ve proposed is a national licensing program for guns. And I’ve heard you talk about this before, that in the civil rights movement, they didn’t just succeed. This isn’t your line, but I’ve heard other people say it, that in the moment, the civil rights movement was an experience of failure again and again and again, and they kept going. And the only reason we’re able to look back on it as a success is because they kept going. The experience of gun control has been failure again and again and again. I’m interested, how do you see, as a country, we turn from failure to success? What is it going to take to finally have some of these gun control efforts work?

cory booker

So it’s hard for me to talk about this issue without just letting people understand why I have made this such a cause for me, because I live in a community where we hear gunshots, where we see shrines to dead children on our sidewalks, where people live in fear, where on my block, Shahad Smith. And we should say the names. Jake Tapper was in my neighborhood a few weeks ago, and he leaves and there’s a shooting a block from where he was standing. And he texted me and said something like, I can’t find this anywhere. And I just got angry. I’m just like, that’s because the world just keeps going as black children die, and nobody even reports on it.

david leonhardt

Meaning it got no attention. He couldn’t read about it.

cory booker

Couldn’t read about it. And so there is something that, when you see death and destruction — remember, I’m 50 years old. And in my lifetime there’s been more people slaughtered by gun violence in my lifetime than all of our wars, from the Revolutionary War till now, combined, and they are disproportionately people of color in urban and poor communities. And then you add on top of that now to they’re being slaughtered in churches. Children are now doing drills where they’re hiding under tables. And so when people tell me that this is the boldest gun safety measures presented by a candidate ever, I’m like, why did it take so long? Why have we had such meek ambitions that are being framed — this whole debate is being framed by the corporate gun lobby that has stolen this debate away from us and made us have small dreams and small ambitions. We are not going to win this debate if we do it on their terms. We need to start having a bolder vision. Martin Luther King wrote a whole letter to moderate whites about why their tactics were not working, and why we needed to confront the ugliness and the viciousness of people like Bull Connor head on with bold, bold ambitions to tear down segregation. And so you want to know one of the reasons why we’re going to win? It’s because I’m going to bring a fight as President of the United States like they have never, ever imagined possible. I’m going to activate with others, communities and constituencies that are going to be transformative. This is a fight, when I swear an oath not only to defend the Constitution, but governments are organized amongst human beings for the common defense. And right now, on that measure alone, we are losing. And I will not allow that to happen as President of the United States.

david leonhardt

Let’s talk about a tough criminal justice issue, marijuana. You’re in favor of legalization. I understand all the inequities that marijuana has brought to the criminal justice system. I also think marijuana is not particularly good for people when they use a lot of it, and I worry a lot about the message, when people talk about legalization, that kids hear, that, hey, this is O.K. How do you balance that? Or am I just wrong to have those worries?

cory booker

You’re talking to a guy doesn’t drink alcohol. You’re talking to a guy who’s never smoked marijuana. My approach to this issue is because of the profound moral injustice in our country. I saw tons of marijuana use at Stanford, at Yale. Nobody’s doing stop and frisk there. I saw lots of drug experimentation with drugs bigger — and people got caught, and now their lives are fine. Two of the last three presidents admitted to doing drugs much more serious. This war on drugs, this war on pot, is not a war on all Americans. It is a war on low-income Americans, and disproportionately black and brown ones. And it’s so grievous that African-Americans and whites have no difference for using marijuana or even selling it. In fact, some studies show that white Americans have a slightly higher rate because when you were in college or are in college, often the people you’re buying your pot from look like you. And so to now I know I live in a country where — I have children, I’ve seen this — whose lives are destroyed, sometimes because of the outrageous bail realities. They will spend months and months and months in jail waiting for trial where things are done to them that other countries consider torture, like putting them in solitary confinement. This is such an outrageous assault on ideals of justice. Think about this. Kids now in my community have criminal charges for doing things that presidents and Congress people and senators admitted to doing. They can’t get loans from their bank. This is so egregious. And what bothers me about that talks about legalizing marijuana is that all these states are doing it, and so many of them are not expunging the records of those kids who are still struggling. And that often is the beginning of a downward spiral for their lives, where they get caught in that underground economy. And so I believe that states should be able to make up their own mind. And if I’m president of the United States, the federal government is going to get out of the business of making this a Schedule 1 drug. And most people have no understanding that, because of the federal government’s policies, your theory of this being a bad drug and my theory that it might not have that as much or effect, we can’t even study it. There are limitations, because we make it a Schedule 1 drug, on even people doing the research necessary to find out what’s safe and what isn’t. This absurdity of our marijuana policies has devastated millions of lives, and it’s got to stop.

david leonhardt

One of our themes on the show is that Americans are quite progressive on economics, but they’re more moderate, and in many places more conservative, on social issues. Abortion is obviously a topic that’s getting so much attention right now. The Republican laws, in my view, are going way too far. But I also think there are a lot of voters out there, polling shows, who are pro-choice during parts of a pregnancy, but are also comfortable with some restrictions. What would you say to a voter who says, hey, I’m sort of in the middle on abortion. I’m with the Democrats on economics, but I’m really uncomfortable with how Democrats are basically saying they’re not open to any abortion restrictions. What would you say to a voter like that?

cory booker

First of all, I’m from the black community, and African-Americans are really often very conservative on this issue. And so I understand that there are people of good intention, good faith, on both sides of this argument. And that’s why I just try to say clearly to people, we share a goal in America of reducing the numbers of unwanted pregnancies, reducing the numbers of abortions in our country. And what frustrates me is that the way to get there is not by attacking poor women. And you know these laws, from the Hyde amendment to Alabama, is a tax on low-income women. And the way to get to the goal that we all share is not by taking health care, contraceptive access, abortion care away from women. It’s by doing the what the data shows us dramatically will reduce abortions in our country, which is by empowering low-income women to have better access to contraceptive care. The data out of Colorado, for example, where they did a program allowing low-income women to have free IUDs, has dramatically dropped the rate of abortions in the state, dramatically, by 40 percent to 60 percent, depending on how you measure it. And so this is a debate that frustrates me. Why can’t we all stand up and say, stop cutting funding to Planned Parenthood. Expand resources to Planned Parenthood. Stop attacking women’s ability to control their own bodies. Give them more power to have access to the contraceptive care and the health care that they need. And so I’m sorry. On this debate, I stand with women’s economic freedom, the liberty to control your own body, that government should not be dictating to a human being the control that they can have over their body. But I know at the end of the day, that when I go to my church or to the black community in which I live, that folk believe that we should be reducing the rates of unwanted pregnancies. I’ve seen the impact it’s had on girls in my — I still remember this bright light of a young lady where I live in the projects going up in the elevator, and she was in grade school when she looked at me and told me that she was pregnant, and walking out of that elevator, on my floor, and just crying, and just knowing the impact that’s going to have on her life. And I saw the testimony reported out of Alabama of a teenage girl, like the girl in my building, but this one talked about her being raped by a family member I will fight to protect my children and to give them the kind of resources they need to control their bodies and their destinies. And this may be a zero-sum game, some people think. I actually think there’s some common ground here, and we’re not seizing it like we should.

david leonhardt

Tomorrow’s Father’s Day. This will air after Father’s Day, but it’s a bittersweet day, I would guess, for you. You and I both lost our fathers in the last few years. So I just wanted to ask you if you could just talk about your dad a little bit, and what you learned from him and what you’ll be thinking about on Father’s Day.

cory booker

So my dad was this unique human being who came from the most difficult of circumstances. He would joke with me, boy, don’t tell me people I was poor. Tell them the truth. I was po’, P-O. Couldn’t afford the other two letters. I was just a po’ boy from North Carolina. My dad had this incredible humor where I learned very early on not to mistake wealth with worth. It was almost like my dad would delight in seeing people who are often marginalized in life. On the supermarket checkout line, before the food was rang up, he would be having this incredible conversation where the dignity and the light of him and the person would be on display. My dad loved folks and taught me that you can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people, you don’t have an authentic love for humanity, and that you don’t need a title to do that. My dad was often offended by my — what was the resume success. He would be like, boy, you got more degrees than the month of July, but you ain’t hot. Life ain’t about the degrees you get. It’s about the service you give. One of the reasons why I came out of Yale Law School and moved to an inner-city community, began to work on housing issues, is because my dad made me understand that I am in this great community— as my dad called us, the four raisins in a tub of sweet vanilla ice cream— because of the sacrifices of people who stood up for my family, and that you can’t pay that back. You’ve got to pay it forward. I am where I am in life because my dad challenged me as a young law school graduate to go to a community and fight for other people’s housing rights. And there I learned from the greatest heroes of my life and saw their dignity in the way my dad had. My dad was this guy who — at that point he was living, for so much of my time as mayor, in the more affluent suburbs of Atlanta. But he seemed to come alive when he came to the inner city of Newark. He would literally say, because I don’t drink, he goes— I’d be going home at night. He goes, I’m going out to the corner bar. And if I ever went back to see him, he would literally have bought a round of drinks for people, laughing and having a good time. And so I honor my dad by not taking myself too seriously, by recognizing that — I think a humorist once said, someone who’s nice to you but not nice to the waiter is not a nice person, and that in the end of the day what this country needs most is for all of us to be a lot kinder to each other and extend a lot more grace.

david leonhardt

I’m sure you think of him all the time as you’re campaigning.

cory booker

Yeah. I say all the time that death can end a life, but it can’t end a love. And my dad’s love lives on in my heart.

david leonhardt

Cory Booker, thank you for coming on “The Argument.”

cory booker

Thank you for having me.

david leonhardt

O.K., I’m back with Michelle and Ross, and now we’re going to talk about Cory Booker’s candidacy. So I feel like an interesting place to start, Michelle, is this theme that he has put on his candidacy of radical love. Is this a radical love moment Democratic primary voters?

michelle goldberg

I don’t think it is. And I think that that is why, while on paper, he should be such a formidable candidate. He certainly has every credential Pete Buttigieg has and more. The radical love thing, I think, both doesn’t match the moment and is a little bit internally incoherent. I think it doesn’t match the moment because we had a president, Barack Obama, who ran on themes of unity. And again, from the liberal perspective, it seemed like he was met with a clenched fist. And the word that Elizabeth Warren uses most often is fight, and I think that that really connect with people, that they think that a lot of things that progressives want they’re not going to get without a fight. And in some sense, Booker believes that also. When you heard him talk about gun control and gun licenses, he talked about he’s going to lead this fight. And I think there seems to be an internal contradiction between his, I’m going to reach out and I’m going to unify people. I can have dinner with Ted Cruz, and I’m going to lead my people in this kind of great battle for the soul of America. And to some extent, you can see— he uses a lot of language that comes from Martin Luther King, who also talked about love even as he was uncompromising in his fight for his ideals. So you can sort of see where it comes from. I’m not sure if it sort of gels in quite the same way when Cory Booker tries to adopt it.

ross douthat

I think it’s interesting since he is one of the candidates who you could see as sort of in competition for part of what is right now Joe Biden’s constituency. It’s interesting to compare and contrast that sort of love message with the kind of dealmaking message that Biden has lately been going around offering, to a lot of liberal derision, where Biden will say, I’m going to get in the room with Republicans, and the fever will break and they’ll make a deal, which was the kind of thing that Obama would sometimes say. And there’s no way to prove this, but I do sort of think that there’s a part of the Democratic Party that just wants to fight, and there’s a part of the Democratic Party that just wants to get back to normal, and Biden’s appealing to that part. And Booker is sort of stuck somewhere in between. I don’t think there’s any part of the Democratic coalition that wants to love right now. [GOLDBERG AND DOUTHAT LAUGH] I mean, is that — and in a way, I do think the Obama thing is — I think Michelle’s account of how liberals feel about the Obama era is right. I also think presidential candidates benefit from novelty. Pete Buttigieg’s as your story is interesting, but it’s also novel — first major gay candidate who’s also the small-town mayor from the Midwest, who’s also the meritocrat who went back to the heartland. Booker has been in the national eye for a while. He doesn’t get to be the first black president and have that narrative. And he needs people to sort of look again at a story that the press already told about him once, and that’s a challenge.

david leonhardt

Cory Booker likes to do these set pieces when he talks. He likes phrases, he likes sayings, he likes these little well-crafted anecdotes. And you often feel like he’s sort of heading toward a speech, even when he’s talking one on one. And I listen to a bunch of other podcasts with him before I did it, and my goal was really to try to get him to avoid that. And I was interested because as I heard him talk about the substance of his policies, and as I read, before the interview, those actual policies, I was more impressed with his candidacy than I had been before.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, I had the same response.

david leonhardt

Good. And I think this case that he can make, that I’ve been an executive — and parentheses, of a bigger city than South Bend, Indiana — and I’ve gotten some things done in the Senate, like the Criminal Justice Reform Bill, which he really was central to, it left me thinking, boy, I really would like to see him do less of the lines — the get folk woke — and the less of the stories that we’ve heard at this point, and more of the wonkiness because he didn’t have a perfect record as mayor of Newark. But Cory Booker as a wonk who’s run something, I think, is a really interesting figure, and I think could end up being a more interesting presidential candidate. Maybe he’ll have a moment where he rises up. Maybe he’ll do well enough that he becomes the nominee. Or maybe he’ll do well enough that he becomes a serious vice-presidential option because my instinct is there are a whole bunch of people in this race who, they’re running for president, but depending how it goes, they also are kind of plausible vice-presidential possibilities.

michelle goldberg

Right. I mean, the baby bonds idea is extremely intriguing. It seems to be kind of in the sweet spot of things that are both politically transformative and politically feasible under current conditions. And yeah, when he talks about that in specific detail, it’s really winning.

ross douthat

I think that they’re sort of a clear challenge for him here, which I think the baby bond policy stuff is an interesting way into, which is that you have a group of candidates who all want to be there if Joe Biden descends and collapses.

david leonhardt

Which is totally —

ross douthat

Which is a totally plausible strategy. For Booker, it seems like the obvious way that happens is that he becomes the candidate for African-American voters, who right now are much more likely to support Biden, or more likely to support Biden than they are to support other candidates. And there is, I think, clearly a way in which, relative to Kamala Harris, the other major African-American candidate in the race, Booker has a pitch that is sort of, I can be a policy wonk for black America. Harris has all this baggage of sort of potential prosecutorial overreach in her past, whereas Booker can stand up and say, I passed criminal justice reform. Booker has in the baby bonds idea, I think, a policy that is simultaneously universal and disproportionately beneficial to minority communities. And I think there’s a narrative that he can offer that’s pretty clearly in that zone that is an interesting counterpoint to Obama, where there is, I think, some sense in the black community, for all the great admiration, obviously, that they feel for Obama, that the Obama White House was so concerned about being perceived as not just the first black president, the presidency of all Americans, that it neglected some issues specific to African-Americans. Criminal justice reform passed under Trump, not under Obama. So I think there’s something there for Booker that’s really interesting, the wonk for black America. But there’s no real model in the past of a candidacy quite like that. I mean, Obama comes close because he was wonky, but he wasn’t making that kind of pitch. And certainly, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton weren’t really doing so. So I’m curious what do you guys think about that intersection of policy and politics for Booker.

david leonhardt

I’ll offer one very brief thought to agree with the Booker-Harris point, which is Booker’s vulnerability with progressives is on education because a lot of progressives don’t like charter schools. But African-Americans are much more supportive of charter schools, whereas Harris’s vulnerability is criminal justice reform, which is much more of a real vulnerability with African-American voters. So that’s plausible to me, Ross.

michelle goldberg

Yeah. I think that when he kind of elucidates his policies, and he definitely — Harris also talks about poverty, but he talks about poverty in a way that Elizabeth Warren doesn’t nearly as much. She talks much more about kind of middle class families and working families. And he does this very interesting thing that Obama also did, which is to talk about racial justice in a way that doesn’t seem to be blaming white America for it. Or that seems to kind of flatter at least white liberals, even as he’s talking about all of these systemic racist forces that have plundered black wealth. So I think it’s interesting what you said, that this is a way of getting some of the economic benefits of a policy of reparations would bring without the kind of inflammatory politics of reparations. But I also think that he is still — I understand that charter schools are not as toxic in the African-American community as they are with a lot of white liberals and supporters of the teachers’ unions. But I do still think that his Silicon Valley technocratic side feels a little bit like something of another era, that we just need to get the smartest people together and figure out what the right solutions and test them. And I like the idea of pilot projects for things like a jobs guarantee. But I still think he’s a little bit too married to a sort of Silicon Valley view of the world that I think a lot of people have become disenchanted with.

ross douthat

I think he’s absolutely in that sense a still a creature of the age of the wonk, which lasted roughly from 2006 through 2011. And that means that he’s not nearly where Warren is and others in terms of being sort of in sync with the deep Democratic base. However, as you see with Biden’s appeal and so on, there’s still plenty of room in the Democratic coalition for candidates who are seen as more moderate and don’t have sort of huge sweeping ambitions and so on. To me as an outsider who would enjoy maybe a little Democratic infighting, the question with Booker, as for all of them, but maybe especially for him, is, can he and will he draw contrasts with people who are to his left? Does his sort of love-based politics allow him to say on a debate stage or elsewhere, you should support me, moderate, white Democratic voter leaning towards Biden right now, because I am a technocrat. I’m not a revolutionary like Warren or Sanders. And I don’t know. That’s where, I think, the revolution of love — if somebody is going to emerge from under Biden’s shadow as a kind of candidate of moderate Democrats, if you’re Cory Booker, how do you throw elbows against Biden?

david leonhardt

I think he can go after Biden on some of Biden’s record. I mean, Biden’s record is law and criminal justice.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, criminal justice, certainly.

david leonhardt

And he’s said that. He said, look, I love Joe Biden. I think he used the L word. I love Joe Biden, but that was a bad bill. Look, I think there are 23 candidates, and there are a lot of them who really want to move up. And there’s still a lot of time. I was interested — when we talked about Elizabeth Warren, and after the interview with her, we were sort of wondering, why hasn’t she caught on. In some of the same way we’re talking about Cory Booker now. And then she sort of caught on.

michelle goldberg

Right. So he could.

david leonhardt

And so I do think he could, and I do—

ross douthat

Well, now that he’s been on “The Argument.”

david leonhardt

Yeah, exactly. [ALL LAUGH]

ross douthat

Q.E.D. I do think — I don’t know whether it’s going to be Booker. It’s probably unlikely Cory Booker, but I do think there are going to be some candidates who are going to have to go after Biden. The idea that we’re just going to sleepwalk into everyone being nice to Joe Biden seems extremely unlikely.

david leonhardt

O.K. We will leave it there and be back to talk about the 2020 campaign in an episode very soon. Now it is time for our weekly recommendation. Michelle, you get to go this week. What do you have for us?

michelle goldberg

All right. Well, it’s summer and I am an ice cream connoisseur, and I could talk about all different kinds of ice cream that’s available in New York City. But this week I’m going to recommend Amorino gelato, which is not just available in New York City. It’s available all over the place, I think. I first had it in Paris many years ago, and then they started opening outlets in various different countries and various different American cities. And it’s not just that it is great gelato, which is still harder to get in New York than it should be. The amazing, miraculous thing about Amorino gelato is that they scoop it in these kind of petals. And because of that, they will give you as many flavors as you want in a small. So you can get, like, six flavors, which is what I, at least, want when I’m having ice cream.

ross douthat

So there used to be a gelateria in Washington, D.C., that we would go to that was pretty good. But I have always felt that the chasm between the gelato that I’ve had in Italy and any gelato that I’ve had in the U.S. is so vast. How do you feel about the Europe versus America chasm here?

michelle goldberg

O.K. Well, first of all, there is an Amorino a few blocks from here, so you could just go find out. But—

ross douthat

Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. We’re not in a real place, Michelle. We’re disembodied voices. You can’t bring reality into it.

michelle goldberg

I think it’s close. Like I said, I had it several times in Paris where you can get lots of good ice cream. It’s not — I’m going to mangle a name — it’s not Berthillon, the ice cream that everybody lines up for. But it’s good. It’s completely passable. I feel like if you were served it in, maybe not a famous Italian gelateria, but an ordinary Italian gelateria, you would feel like you were being adequately taken care of.

david leonhardt

I feel like we’re sort of seeing a new side of you here. Why do you want to have six different flavors? Why not just do a combination of two or three that go together? I find that kind of a surprising aspect of your personality.

ross douthat

Her love for liberal pluralism.

michelle goldberg

I wouldn’t necessarily get six, but I would get caramel, hazelnut, stracciatella, and chocolate, or maybe two kinds of chocolate because they have many different kinds of chocolate, which is also something I appreciate about Amorino.

david leonhardt

So we now have the official gelato combination of “The Argument” podcast. Michelle, what, again, is the recommendation?

michelle goldberg

It is Amorino gelato.

david leonhardt

Thank you very much. That’s our show this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you have thoughts or ideas, please call us and leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. That’s 347-915-4324. You can also email us at argument@nytimes.com. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review in Apple podcasts. This week’s show was produced by Alex Laughlin, Kristin Schwab, and Wynton Wong for Transmitter Media, and edited by Michael Garofalo. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, and Ian Prasad Philbrick. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. Thank you for listening, and go get yourself some ice cream. [MUSIC PLAYING]

michelle goldberg

Is it Berthillon? Berthillon.

ross douthat

Berthillon.

david leonhardt

Berthillon. Sorry.

ross douthat

Tres fancy.

michelle goldberg