Liberal pundits don't like Cory Booker. Can the Democrat still succeed?

People who know nothing else about Cory Booker know that the 44-year-old Newark mayor is going big places.

The next big entry on his résumé will very likely be junior U.S. senator from New Jersey, after Booker easily won Tuesday's Democratic primary for the special election to replace the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.). How easily? Booker took 59 percent in a four-person race against two U.S. congressmen and the speaker of the New Jersey State Assembly.

Booker's opponent in the October election will be Republican Steven Lonegan, a former mayor of Bogota, N.J., who promises to run a vigorous "line-in-the-sand campaign between a conservative and an extreme liberal." That's an odd strategy to employ in New Jersey, which hasn't voted to send a Republican to the U.S. Senate since 1972.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

But such a campaign will also probably rankle a good number of liberals. Given that Booker will replace a Republican stand-in senator appointed by Gov. Chris Christie, and that Booker will be only the fourth African American elected to the U.S. Senate, "you would expect that progressives would be excited by Booker's candidacy and his eventual rise to the Senate," says Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway. You would be wrong.

Salon's Alex Pareene wrote perhaps the most widely cited liberal takedown of Booker, but he's hardly alone. The liberal critique of Booker is essentially that he's too chummy with Wall Street bankers and Silicon Valley moguls, is using those connections and his mayoral perch to enrich himself, and tries to hide his elitist and corporatist tendencies by relentlessly and narcissistically promoting himself as a liberal champion of the little guy.

The progressives are basically right, says David Weigel at Slate. "A Booker victory will mean the replacement of a reliable, plodding progressive with a less reliable neoliberal." In fact, Weigel says, "the only progressive argument for Booker" is that he's black and "the long-term interests of a party that depends on huge minority turnout adding to white liberal turnout are served by promoting nonwhite stars."

But not every liberal is so down on Booker. The Newark mayor "might vote like a Goldman Sachs executive and break John McCain's record for appearing on Sunday morning shows," says Martin Longman at Booman Tribune, but in the Senate, he'll get stuff done. If you're a liberal and "he agrees with you on an issue, he's going to be a valuable advocate."

And even if many lefty columnists and bloggers still hate Booker, the Newark mayor probably doesn't need to worry. "Their sentiments don't seem to be shared by the voters," says Outside the Beltway's Mataconis. Booker's poll numbers have stayed consistently high despite attacks from his more liberal rivals. Credit Booker's name recognition and carefully curated "aura of celebrity," Mataconis says.

That's why liberals are breaking out the Sturm und Drang now, says Elspeth Reeve at The Atlantic Wire:

Booker, as it turns out, doesn't really seem to disagree with his liberal critics. Raymond Hernandez explains at The New York Times:

Since he didn't have to fend of a strong primary challenge from the left, Booker did what most politicians would do positioning themselves for a general election: He ran as a uniter, not a divider. As we've learned, it takes two to unite, but few big-time politicians have ever been punished for pitching that ideal to the masses.