"Conservatives think he’s too liberal, and liberals tend to think he’s too conservative. His coziness with Wall Street rankles his party’s left flank. He has championed school choice, atypical for a progressive. He has had one notable
brush with scandal—an accusation, which he denies, that he took a salary from a law firm that did business with Newark. And he’s 48 and single, a
teetotaler and a
vegan, with a monkish, ascetic streak, all of which might strike many in Middle America as odd or unrelatable. But then there is this—the open question of whether the love-talking Booker is the right fit at a time when angry, rattled Democrats are hankering for combative, fight-fire-with-fire, anti-Trump rhetoric. And the Democratic
gains in Tuesday’s elections in
Virginia,
New Jersey and elsewhere have only fueled that rage. What chance, some worry, would Booker’s “conspiracy of love” have against an opponent who wields as one of his most powerful weapons a schoolyard talent to demean?"
