-You talk about, in all seriousness,
in so far as we talk about politeness,
which will be an interesting thing
in this campaign going forward,
you talk about civic grace
and you talk about courageous empathy.
Can you speak a little bit to what you mean by those ideas
and also the difficulty in expressing those,
in practicing those at a time
where the opponent will likely not be using those?
-Look, I was running on an Iowa stage, and we were so psyched.
Hundreds of people there.
I'm about to jump up, and this guy sees me,
a former tight end for Stanford University.
He's a big guy.
He puts his arm around me and he goes,
"Dude, I want you to punch Donald Trump in the face."
And I stop in my tracks and I go,
"Dude, that's a felony, man."
[ Laughter ]
And, you know, this -- Donald Trump is a guy
who you understand he hurts you, and my testosterone sometimes
makes me want to feel like punching him,
which would be bad for this elderly, out-of-shape man
that he is if I did that. [ Laughter ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
This physically -- physically weak specimen.
A physically weak specimen.
But you see what I'm talking there?
That's his tactics.
And you don't beat a bully like him fighting him on his tactics,
on his terms, using his turf.
He's the body shamer.
He's the guy that shows -- tries to drag people in the gutter.
And I -- This is a moral moment in America.
And to me, what we need from our next leader,
especially after the time of moral vandalism
that we're in right now,
is we need a leader that's not gonna call us to the worst of
who we are but call us to the best of who we are.
And we need to be, as a party --
[ Cheers and applause ]
In this moral moment,
we need not to talk about necessarily what we're against,
but what we're for,
and the best way of looking at this is just our history.
The gardens of our democracy have never been free of
the weeds of bigotry, hatred, a demagoguery.
Every generation has had them.
I literally had an elder friend of mine text me, saying,
listening to Donald Trump's rally last week,
that he was talking -- the words he was using
reminded him of a George Wallace rally
that he watched in black and white
and now it's in living color.
But how did we beat them before?
First of all, don't mistake strength for --
to be strong, you need to be mean.
We beat Bull Connor, for example, in Birmingham
not by bringing bigger dogs and bigger firehoses
and matching his demagoguery with more.
But these were incredible artists of activism
that called to the moral imagination of a country,
that called us to a greater -- a revival of that civic race
that pulled black folks and white folks
and more folks together that relegated that demagogue
to the ash heap of history.
We will not beat Donald Trump by trying to be more like him
but by showing that we are not like him.
We are not weak morally. We are not weak mentally.
We're a strong nation, and we're a nation that unites.
[ Cheers and applause ] -It does seem like --
Obviously, it's going to be a difficult undertaking
for whoever the nominee is to take back the White House.
It might even be more statistically difficult
for the Democratic Party to take back the Senate.
So, let's say you're in the White House,
but Mitch McConnell is still running the Senate.
Where does -- Where can you find any optimism to think
that you can get something done as long as Mitch McConnell,
who has been incredibly effective,
no matter what you think about him,
effective in sort of having this Republican platform
that has been a wall that's been impossible to break through.
-So, that's a distinction of my record.
Look, I was the mayor of New Jersey's largest city
in the middle of a recession
where people told me what we couldn't do,
and now from transforming our school system
to the biggest period economic development in 60 years,
we got things done people said couldn't be done.
I got to the Senate.
One of the things that drove me there
was the fact that we have
one of the most shameful criminal-justice systems
on the planet, where we say we're the land of the free,
but we incarcerate 25% of the globe's incarcerated people.
And I went there to do something about it.
And I remember people in my own party telling me,
"You're never gonna get legislation like this passed
through the United States Senate,
especially freeing people from prison at a time
in the aftermath of Willie Horton,
where everybody is gonna be afraid to do that."
Well, with Mitch McConnell there,
I led from the Democratic side
a bill that not only got passed but right now, last week,
we saw thousands of people being released,
the overwhelming majority of them being African-Americans.
-This is the First Step -- -The First Step Act.
And, so, I do not resign myself ever
to people saying things can't get done.
And why I fight so hard in this election, I tell people,
I know that the number-one thing people want in my party
is just to beat Donald Trump.
But I'm like, "That is a floor. It is not the ceiling.
We have to have bigger aspirations."
If we make this election all about him,
that's a small man, one office.
That's not what I want this election to just be about.
We will beat him. I will beat him.
But we've got to make this more of a movement election
to create new American majorities.
And I'm not talking about Democratic majorities.
But the fact of the matter
is we actually agree on more than we disagree.
The lines that divide us,
they're not as big as the ties that bind us.
And so, I think our generation now, and this election
and this moral moment has to begin not to resign ourselves
to a fractured broken government
but aspire to do what our ancestors did.
We just came off a weekend
where they created the new American majority
to defy the limits of human potential
and put a person on the moon.
It's time for our generation to begin to reject
divisive tribalistic politics
and inspire people so that we in our generation
can defy gravity as well
and do the things that other people think are impossible.
-Alright. Well, thanks for making the time.
I know it's got to be busy out there.
-Thank you.
-Best of luck in the next round of debates.
That's Cory Booker, everybody.