Cory Booker’s Imaginary Friend

Go back and listen to Cory Booker’s stump speeches over the years, and, as in those of any politician, you’ll hear many of the same stories. But Booker’s are more dramatic and heart-rending than most. They draw heavily on his experiences in Newark, N.J., where he moved in 1995 after his second year at Yale Law School. They have also helped to make him a political celebrity and put millions of dollars into his campaign war chest and Newark’s coffers.

Booker’s tales of his trials and travails on the streets of Newark, the city that twice elected him mayor, are familiar, and they have helped to breed an almost mythological aura around the Stanford, Oxford, and Yale graduate. He did, after all, rescue a woman from a burning building last year, sustaining burns in the process. But sources tell National Review Online that the central character in one of Booker’s oft-repeated stories — T-Bone, the drug pusher who the mayor has said threatened his life at one turn and sobbed on his shoulder the next — is a figment of his imagination, even though Booker has talked about him in highly emotional terms and in great detail.

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