By Ed Kilgore 
 
 So despite facing two veteran members of Congress and arousing a lot of protests from progressive activists, Newark Mayor Cory Booker won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey by close to 40 points, winning 59% against Frank Pallone’s 19% and Rush Holt’s 17%. He’ll now face Tea Party activist Steve Lonegan (last seen challenging Chris Christie from the right in a 2009 primary) in a special general election on October 16, which is not expected to be close. Booker will, however, have to do it all over again next year, when the term Frank Lautenberg was elected to in 2008 expires. 
 
 The bigger issue for a lot of observers is whether Booker has national ambitions. For admirers, he’s the next Barack Obama, a charismatic African-American pol with possible transpartisan appeal. To detractors, he’s an unholy combination of Harold Ford, Jr. and Joe Lieberman, beholden to Wall Street and Silicon Valley. So his first steps in the Senate will be watched closely. ||||| People who know nothing else about Cory Booker know that the 44-year-old Newark mayor is going big places. 
 
 The next big entry on his résumé will very likely be junior U.S. senator from New Jersey, after Booker easily won Tuesday's Democratic primary for the special election to replace the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.). How easily? Booker took 59 percent in a four-person race against two U.S. congressmen and the speaker of the New Jersey State Assembly. 
 
 Booker's opponent in the October election will be Republican Steven Lonegan, a former mayor of Bogota, N.J., who promises to run a vigorous "line-in-the-sand campaign between a conservative and an extreme liberal." That's an odd strategy to employ in New Jersey, which hasn't voted to send a Republican to the U.S. Senate since 1972. 
 
 But such a campaign will also probably rankle a good number of liberals. Given that Booker will replace a Republican stand-in senator appointed by Gov. Chris Christie, and that Booker will be only the fourth African American elected to the U.S. Senate, "you would expect that progressives would be excited by Booker's candidacy and his eventual rise to the Senate," says Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway. You would be wrong. 
 
 Salon's Alex Pareene wrote perhaps the most widely cited liberal takedown of Booker, but he's hardly alone. The liberal critique of Booker is essentially that he's too chummy with Wall Street bankers and Silicon Valley moguls, is using those connections and his mayoral perch to enrich himself, and tries to hide his elitist and corporatist tendencies by relentlessly and narcissistically promoting himself as a liberal champion of the little guy. 
 
 The progressives are basically right, says David Weigel at Slate. "A Booker victory will mean the replacement of a reliable, plodding progressive with a less reliable neoliberal." In fact, Weigel says, "the only progressive argument for Booker" is that he's black and "the long-term interests of a party that depends on huge minority turnout adding to white liberal turnout are served by promoting nonwhite stars." 
 
 But not every liberal is so down on Booker. The Newark mayor "might vote like a Goldman Sachs executive and break John McCain's record for appearing on Sunday morning shows," says Martin Longman at Booman Tribune, but in the Senate, he'll get stuff done. If you're a liberal and "he agrees with you on an issue, he's going to be a valuable advocate." 
 
 His parents were some of the first black executives at IBM, so Booker wasn't raised in the Hood. He also wasn't sent to any elite prep school. He was a star football player at a well-regarded public high school. He was good enough and smart enough to land a gig at Stanford University, where he became class president. He won a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at Oxford, where he received honors. Then he got a law degree from Yale. Along the way, he found time to do charitable work wherever he went. And then he won a seat on Newark's city council and started butting heads with some seriously corrupt politicians, including the joke of a mayor, Sharpe James. 
 
 It's true that spending part of your life studying with kids at Stanford, Yale, and Oxford will color how you view things, but let's not pretend that Cory Booker hasn't been excellent at pretty much everything he's done so far in his life. [Booman Tribune] 
 
 And even if many lefty columnists and bloggers still hate Booker, the Newark mayor probably doesn't need to worry. "Their sentiments don't seem to be shared by the voters," says Outside the Beltway's Mataconis. Booker's poll numbers have stayed consistently high despite attacks from his more liberal rivals. Credit Booker's name recognition and carefully curated "aura of celebrity," Mataconis says. 
 
 ...there's something of a disconnect between these progressive pundits and the voting public. Much like pundits on the right have their ideal candidates, writers such as Pareene do as well, and Booker quite obviously doesn't fit into that definition. Perhaps it's because he hasn't said the magic words on NSA surveillance or some other issue.... Perhaps it's just because there was never really any suspense in this election and they needed something write about. Whatever the reason, the animus toward Booker on the left has been more than a little surprising especially considering that he is going to be a reliable Democratic vote for as long as he's in the Senate. Given that it's New Jersey and Booker is relatively young, could be quite a long time. [Outside the Beltway] 
 
 That's why liberals are breaking out the Sturm und Drang now, says Elspeth Reeve at The Atlantic Wire: 
 
 The point doesn't seem to be to stop his election to the Senate — that looks impossible — but to make the case for why he shouldn't climb any higher in Democratic politics.... For the Booker un-endorsers, what's at stake in the New Jersey special election is the idea of who the Democratic standard-bearer will be after President Obama. [Atlantic Wire] 
 
 Booker, as it turns out, doesn't really seem to disagree with his liberal critics. Raymond Hernandez explains at The New York Times: 
 
 As [Booker] campaigned, he portrayed what his opponents saw as a weakness — that he was insufficiently liberal on issues important to Democrats like gun control and unions — as a strength. He argued that his pragmatic brand of politics, favoring practical solutions over ideology, had enabled him to lift the fortunes of Newark, the state's largest city. [New York Times] 
 
 Since he didn't have to fend of a strong primary challenge from the left, Booker did what most politicians would do positioning themselves for a general election: He ran as a uniter, not a divider. As we've learned, it takes two to unite, but few big-time politicians have ever been punished for pitching that ideal to the masses. ||||| Today New Jersey Democrats will decide who will be their nominee for the United States Senate. The winner of today's primary election will be the heavy favorite in the general election. If any New Jersey voters are reading, and they have not yet voted, consider this a desperate plea: Don't vote for Cory Booker. He's going to be a very annoying senator. 
 
 It's fine if you like Booker. He's personable, charming, really good at Twitter, and he has done lots of stunts designed to make people aware of poverty, or at least to make people aware of Cory Booker's awareness of poverty. He is a Good Liberal on many issues. 
 
 But he's also an avatar of the wealthy elite, a camera hog, and a political cipher who has never once proposed anything to address the structural causes of the problems he claims to care so deeply about. He represents the interests of both Wall Street and Silicon Valley, two very prosperous industries full of incredibly arrogant rich men who believe that the world's problems would be solved if arrogant rich men exactly like themselves were given free rein to make as much money as possible by any means necessary. They see, in Booker, a peer -- a smart man with the right qualifications and the correct worldview. Booker and his crowd believe that the charity of the benevolent elite -- people who know they are rich because of their innate skill, their brilliance, their work ethic, everything besides fundamentally inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities for economic advancement -- is the only acceptable and effective means of addressing the needs of the lower orders. 
 
 Cory Booker became a millionaire because this is how the economy works for people of his class: Rich people give other rich people money to do nothing, simply because they "deserve" it. He is the worst sort of Democrat, and Democrats should be doing everything in their power to wrest control of the party away from people like him. 
 
 But that is why Cory Booker is bad as a phenomenon. What about his fitness for the specific job he is running for? It is, admittedly, probably not the job he was hoping for. Governors get to have more fun. Time's Jay Newton-Small says Booker would miss retail politics and direct constituent interaction once he's a senator: 
 
 Senators don’t fix potholes. Never mind flaming buildings–they rarely even kiss babies. Senators spend their days in meetings: with lobbyists, with interest groups, with other senators, with the administration, with fundraisers and with their leadership. They’re inside operators. 
 
 OK, but how do we actually think Booker spends most of his time? Fixing potholes personally, or attending meetings with rich, influential and important people? (Like Jeff Zucker's teenage son?) 
 
 In many ways, Booker is perfectly suited for the United States Senate. He won't be expected to accomplish anything. He will have so many more opportunities to spend time with even more rich people with elite backgrounds and worldviews similar to his. He will have much more access to television studios and Sunday shows and cable news cameras. 
 
 He will, in short, be the worst kind of senator. The kind that has no power and no real desire to exercise power on behalf of the people the senator ostensibly represents, but the kind that always expresses opinions on television about whatever national issues people on television care about that day. He will be on "Morning Joe" and "Meet the Press" constantly. He has even already said that he might consider Rand Paul and Ted Cruz as models for how a freshman senator might make "big marks." Not "big marks" in the sense of any sort of lasting legislative legacy, because Ted Cruz does not care about legislation or policy, but "big marks" in terms of media attention and stunts designed to appeal to a core of supporters who prefer their senators brash and loud. Another one of those senators will not help anything. 
 
 It's not like there aren't any other options. Rush Holt would be a fine senator. He's an actual physicist, which is neat. He cares very strongly about global warming, which is probably the single most pressing issue of our era. He will probably not use the Senate seat as a stepping stone to the White House, which means he may actually stick around long enough to gain seniority and someday actually achieve things. 
 
 So don't vote for Cory Booker.
– Cory Booker now looks poised to become Senator Cory Booker in this fall's special election in New Jersey, a feat that would make the high-profile Newark mayor only the fourth black person elected to the Senate. So why are there so many raspberries coming from the left after last night's primary win? Because he "is loathed by some progressives in a way that's only now being noticed," writes David Weigel at Slate. "A Booker victory will mean the replacement of a reliable, plodding progressive with a less reliable neoliberal." Or as Alex Pareene at Salon put it, Booker is "an avatar of the wealthy elite, a camera hog, and a political cipher who has never once proposed anything to address the structural causes of the problems he claims to care so deeply about." He'll follow that same superficial path in the Senate, predicts Pareene. Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly sums up the Booker phenomena thusly: "For admirers, he’s the next Barack Obama, a charismatic African-American pol with possible transpartisan appeal. To detractors, he’s an unholy combination of Harold Ford Jr., and Joe Lieberman, beholden to Wall Street and Silicon Valley." The bigger issue for critics, he adds, is whether Booker has White House ambitions. For more on the liberal unease with Booker, see the Week.