-You talk about,
in all seriousness,
insofar as we
talk about politeness,
which will be
an interesting thing
in this campaign going forward
you talk about civic grace
and you talk about
courageous empathy.
Can you speak a little bit
to what you mean by those idea
and also the difficulty
in expressing those,
in practicing those at a tim
where the opponent will
likely not be using those?
-Look, I was running on an Iow
stage, and we were so psyched.
Hundreds of people there.
I'm about to jump up,
and this guy sees me,
a former tight end
for Stanford University.
He's a big guy.
He puts his arm around me
and he goes,
"Dude, I want you to punch
Donald Trump in the face."
And I stop in my tracks
and I go,
"Dude, that's a felony, man.
[ Laughter ]
And, you know, this --
Donald Trump is a guy
who you understand he hurts you,
and my testosterone sometime
makes me want to
feel like punching him,
which would be bad for
this elderly, out-of-shape man
that he is if I did that.
[ Laughter ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
This physically --
physically weak specimen.
A physically weak specimen
But you see
what I'm talking there?
That's his tactics.
And you don't beat a bully lik
him fighting him on his tactics,
on his terms, using his turf
He's the body shamer.
He's the guy that shows -- tries
to drag people in the gutter
And I -- This is a moral momen
in America.
And to me, what we need from
our next leader,
especially after the time of
moral vandalism
that we're in right now,
is we need a leader that's not
gonna call us to the worst o
who we are but call us
to the best of who we are.
And we need to be, as a party --
[ Cheers and applause ]
In this moral moment,
we need not to talk about
necessarily what we're against
but what we're for,
and the best way of looking at
this is just our history.
The gardens of our democracy
have never been free of
the weeds of bigotry,
hatred, a demagoguery.
Every generation has had them.
I literally had an elder frien
of mine text me, saying,
listening to Donald Trump'
rally last week,
that he was talking --
the words he was using
reminded him of
a George Wallace rally
that he watched
in black and white
and now it's in living color
But how did we beat them before?
First of all, don't mistak
strength for --
to be strong,
you need to be mean.
We beat Bull Connor,
for example, in Birmingham
not by bringing bigger dog
and bigger firehoses
and matching his demagoguery
with more.
But these were incredible
artists of activism
that called to the moral
imagination of a country,
that called us to a greater --
a revival of that civic race
that pulled black folks
and white folks
and more folks together
that relegated that demagogu
to the ash heap of history
We will not beat Donald Trum
by trying to be more like hi
but by showing
that we are not like him.
We are not weak morally.
We are not weak mentally.
We're a strong nation,
and we're a nation that unites
[ Cheers and applause ]
-It does seem like --
Obviously, it's going to b
a difficult undertaking
for whoever the nominee is
to take back the White House
It might even be
more statistically difficult
for the Democratic Party
to take back the Senate.
So, let's say
you're in the White House,
but Mitch McConnell
is still running the Senate.
Where does -- Where can you find
any optimism to think
that you can get something don
as long as Mitch McConnell
who has been
incredibly effective,
no matter what
you think about him,
effective in sort of havin
this Republican platform
that has been a wall that's been
impossible to break through.
-So, that's a distinction
of my record.
Look, I was the mayor
of New Jersey's largest city
in the middle of a recession
where people told me
what we couldn't do,
and now from transforming
our school system
to the biggest period economic
development in 60 years,
we got things done
people said couldn't be done
I got to the Senate.
One of the things
that drove me there
was the fact that we have
one of the most shameful
criminal-justice systems
on the planet, where we sa
we're the land of the free
but we incarcerate 25% of
the globe's incarcerated people.
And I went there
to do something about it.
And I remember people
in my own party telling me
"You're never gonna get
legislation like this passed
through the United States
Senate,
especially freeing people
from prison at a time
in the aftermath of
Willie Horton,
where everybody
is gonna be afraid to do that.
Well, with Mitch McConnell
there,
I led from the Democratic side
a bill that not only got passe
but right now, last week,
we saw thousands of people
being released,
the overwhelming majority of
them being African-Americans
-This is the First Step --
-The First Step Act.
And, so, I do not
resign myself ever
to people saying
things can't get done.
And why I fight so hard
in this election, I tell people,
I know that the number-one thing
people want in my party
is just to beat Donald Trump
But I'm like, "That is a floor
It is not the ceiling.
We have to have
bigger aspirations."
If we make this election
all about him,
that's a small man, one office
That's not what I want
this election to just be about
We will beat him.
I will beat him.
But we've got to make this
more of a movement electio
to create
new American majorities.
And I'm not talking about
Democratic majorities.
But the fact of the matter
is we actually agree on
more than we disagree.
The lines that divide us,
they're not as big as
the ties that bind us.
And so, I think our generation
now, and this election
and this moral moment has to
begin not to resign ourselve
to a fractured broken government
but aspire to do
what our ancestors did.
We just came off a weekend
where they created
the new American majority
to defy the limits
of human potential
and put a person on the moon
It's time for our generation
to begin to reject
divisive tribalistic politic
and inspire people
so that we in our generation
can defy gravity as well
and do the things that other
people think are impossible.
-Alright. Well, thanks for
making the time.
I know it's got to be busy
out there.
-Thank you.
-Best of luck in the next roun
of debates.
That's Cory Booker, everybody.
