Cory Booker’s email frames a fight against a “dark force” that could cast Lisa McCormick as the hero

In the grand and often grubby theater of American politics, the most compelling drama is not always found in the clash of parties, but in the quiet challenge to a story a candidate tells about himself. Such a scene is unfolding now in New Jersey, where an anti-establishment progressive is asking if the state’s senior senator has forgotten the price of the ticket he used to board his own train to power.

Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat, recently sent forth an appeal for donations, a common enough ritual in this digital age. In it, he spoke of a nation’s frustration and anger, and pointed to the heroes of American progress who found their way through the dark.

“Suffragists were demoralized. Union activists were demoralized. Civil rights activists were demoralized. The activists at Stonewall were demoralized,” Booker wrote. “But the history of this country is woven with people who, in the midst of despair, chose to rise up.”

It is a stirring sentiment.

But Lisa McCormick, a progressive Democrat who challenged Booker’s close ally, the disgraced former Sen. Bob Menendez, in the 2018 primary and is now weighing another Senate run, hears a profound irony in those words.

McCormick suggests the email is a better description of her own Democrats for Change team than of the former Newark mayor, whose path to the Senate was paved not with cobblestones from a grassroots movement, but with the smooth, cold marble of big-money donors.

McCormick poses a simple, sharp question: Is the senator, whom she calls a loyal servant to the “plutocratic parasite billionaires” that have waged a class war on American workers for fifty years, aware of the contradiction in his latest missive?

It is the kind of question that hangs in the air, unanswered, pointing to the central tension in modern political life. There is the language of the outsider, the protester, the riser-up—a language that resonates with a deep and authentic American spirit.

And then there is the machinery of the insider, which often runs on a different kind of fuel altogether.

Booker’s email framed the coming election as a fight against a “dark force” in the person of Donald Trump, a fight to magnify a collective light. It is a message designed to unify and to rally.

Yet, from the left flank comes this reminder that the story of “rising up” is not one that can be claimed without a certain credential of origin.

McCormick’s camp argues that their effort, a persistent challenge to the established order within their own party, embodies that very spirit of defiance against long odds, a spirit they believe has been co-opted by a political class that rides in first class.

The senator has not responded to this particular critique, his focus firmly fixed on the national contest ahead. But the exchange, such as it is, lays bare a struggle over narrative.

It asks what it truly means to rise up, and whether one can champion the cause of the demoralized from a position forged and maintained by the most powerful interests in the land.

In the end, the voters of New Jersey may well see this as a family squabble.

But it is a squabble with a point, one that goes to the heart of who gets to tell the story of American struggle, and who gets to write the next chapter.