Cory Booker, a would-be bachelor president, says Americans are 'open to lots of different types of f

[Mosby]

Cory Booker, a would-be bachelor president, says Americans are ‘open to lots of different types of families’ in the White House


NEWARK — A banged-up Dodge Caravan pulls up next to Sen. Cory Booker, who’s out for a walk in the banged-up city center where he’s lived for almost a quarter-century.

“How you doin’, Mr. President!” shouts the driver, a middle-aged man with a huge smile.

These streets are Booker’s sweet spot, where he was mayor for seven years, where he still has a small house, where seemingly everybody knows his name and wants to shake his hand, and where, on Saturday, he will appear at a rally to officially announce his campaign for president.

It’s also a place where Booker doesn’t feel he needs to explain his private life. He’d prefer to discuss justice reform, education, all his issues — and not why he might be the first bachelor president since Grover Cleveland married in the White House in 1886.

“I hate it that people assume I’d be a bachelor president,” Booker says with a big laugh on this March afternoon. “It’s literally 700 days from now. You never know.”

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The son of two IBM executives, Booker was raised as one of the few black people in the New Jersey suburb of Harrington Park, where he was a star football player. After graduating from Stanford University, Booker spent two years as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in Britain, then earned a degree at Yale Law School.

In his third year at Yale, he moved into a run-down rooming house in Newark’s Central Ward, where he says his car was broken into the day he moved in. Later, he moved across the street to a 16th-floor apartment in the Brick Towers housing complex, a notorious symbol of neglect, rats and drug-dealing. He lived there for eight years.

He was elected to the Newark city council in 1998 representing the Central Ward, then was elected mayor in 2006 and a U.S. senator in 2013. Brick Towers has since been torn down, but Booker can see where it stood from his front door.

Booker says he chooses to keep a home in central Newark, rather than the wealthy areas where many of his Yale Law friends moved, because “this really is home for me.” He acknowledges that choosing to live in a grim public housing project for almost a decade complicated his dating life, but he said it made him a better senator and presidential candidate.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/cory-booker-a-would-be-bachelor-president-says-americans-are-open-to-lots-of-different-types-of-families-in-the-white-house/2019/04/12/96c612cc-5a01-11e9-a00e-050dc7b82693_story.html