The ‘Big Pharma’ candidate? As he runs for president, Cory Booker looks to shake his reputation for drug industry coziness
WASHINGTON — It was a political rally on Cory Booker’s home turf, meant to showcase support for the Affordable Care Act. But the chilly afternoon in January 2017 ended in a way the New Jersey senator did not anticipate: with him being heckled by constituents as a pawn of “Big Pharma.”
Rather than ignore their jeers, Booker’s staff invited roughly 10 protesters to join the senator in a hotel conference room across the street from the Newark rally. He sat for an hour, as the progressive activists berated him for accepting more campaign funds from the drug industry than any other lawmaker and for, just days earlier, voting against a symbolic measure to allow American patients to import prescription drugs from Canada.
Finally, Booker asked the question his constituents had been waiting for: if giving back those campaign funds would make them happy. The response was a full-throated yes, capping off a day that was by many accounts an awakening for Booker — and a harbinger of what was to come as
