Cory Booker’s Four Standing Ovations in Des Moines
DES MOINES, Iowa—Cory Booker was supposed to get here on Thursday. Then it was moved to Friday. Then Saturday. He ended up on the ground about an hour before he was due onstage, straight from the Kavanaugh vote to the Iowa Democratic Party dinner, courtesy of a fast flight on a private plane that his aides were exhausted from working out logistics for and not at all eager to give details about.
Welcome to presidential campaigning in Donald Trump’s America. It’s going to be on Trump’s terms, on Trump’s schedule. “He makes the weather,” as an operative working for one of the other likely candidates put it. Everyone else has to deal with the cost, the stress, the change-ups, the absolute inability to define what the topic of conversation is.
“There’s nothing I can affect tomorrow. And in the Trump world, I hate to say this, we don’t know what next week will look like. I’m staying focused the best I can,” Booker told me, the next morning, at the almost cliché local hot spot Java Joe’s, a few minutes before heading to a three-hour church service at the old congregation where his grandmother, a bona fide Des Moines native whose family had come from Alabama to mine coal in nearby Buxton, once belonged.
“He’s a variable in this
