Taking On Cory Booker
Until February, Jeff Bell hadn't lived in New Jersey for 31 years.
He rented a home in Leonia last winter and announced he was running for the U.S. Senate the same day he signed the lease.
“As soon as I had residency,” he said. “It was an odd method of running.”
For the past four years, Bell was a policy advocate with the American Principles Project in Washington DC, a conservative think tank. His wife still lives in DC.
“She’s supporting me, so I can’t ask her to come with me yet,” Bell said. “I had to quit my job to run for the Senate and I don’t have the option of giving $30,000 speeches like Sen. Booker does as a candidate.”
On the campaign trail, Bell made a stop to court Hispanic voters at Pio Pio, a Cuban restaurant in West New York, N.J. He ordered orange juice, but the servers brought him a side of fried por called chicharrones. Bell couldn't stop eating them.
“I hope I live long enough to have it again,” he said laughing.
The Republican is 70 years old. He stands tall, but hunched over, and with broad shoulders that make him look like he’s constantly shrugging.
He’s a Vietnam Army vet and a social conservative who opposes gay marriage and abortion, including in instances of rape and incest.
In West New York, he had a popular message that few conservatives espouse. Bell is pro-immigration and he supports issuing more green cards and expanding a seasonal guest worker program.
“We need to be a welcoming party, the way Ronald Reagan was,” he said. “I worked for him over a 12-year period and I take his example. He believed this country has a lot of immigrants because we are a shining city on a hill, and we have to get back to that vision.”
Political scientists credit Bell with starting the wave of defeats that eliminated liberal northeastern Republicans from the Senate. He beat Sen. Clifford Case in a 1978 New Jersey primary. He lost the general election and then lost again in the 1982 primary, but the trend of making the Republican Party more conservative continued.
In 1982, Bell raised $2.4 million for his primary bid. This time around, he’s raised a little more than $400,000, he said.
“It surprised me how little money I was able to raise,” he said. “But also the acceptance of my coming back has been better than I expected, so one thing balances the other.”
Cory Booker, the prolific fundraiser, has $3.5 million cash on hand. And the latest Monmouth University poll shows Booker having a double digit lead over Bell.
At an African American Voter’s Coalition rally in Bergen County, Booker playfully introduced himself as, “The most handsome man that I know,” with “one of the best looking bald heads in all of Congress.”
Booker has been serving the remainder of the late Frank Lautenberg's Senate term. He’s now asking voters for a full, six-year term.
In his short time in the Senate, he co-sponsored more than 140 bills. Booker added Cumberland County in New Jersey to a federal program that helps homeowners avoid foreclosures, and he worked with Tea Party Republican Rand Paul to introduce the REDEEM Act, which would allow nonviolent offenders to receive food stamps, automatically seal juvenile records, and restrict solitary confinement for juveniles.
The former mayor of Newark says those are his top accomplishments in the Senate.
“In a short 11 months actually delivering real things for the state of NJ,” he said. “And then also I’m just proud of working across the aisle. We don’t need more entrenched partisanship in Washington.”
There isn’t anything too remarkable about introducing a bill with bipartisan support, says Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University. He says getting hearings and getting bills passed is the true measure. But that may not be the best assessment in this Congress.
“You can’t really apply to Cory Booker, or any other Senator, really, a fair measure of accomplishment because nobody is getting much done, frankly,” he said.
On the campaign trail, Booker supporters don’t seem to care all that much about what the freshman member has done or plans to do. Everyone just wants to take a selfie with him.
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