NJ DNC Delegates Get Pep Talk, Warning And History Lesson On Final Day
by David Madden
ESSINGTON, PA (CBS) -- Mixing politics with history...and a little entertainment. Just part of the presentation made to New Jersey delegates on the last day of the DNC.
They heard from the state's two United States Senators.
Senior Senator Robert Menendez wondered aloud about what a Morning in America would look like after the November election, fearful of what a President Trump might do to institutions like the Supreme Court. Not to mention foreign policy.
"When I see a Donald Trump, who says that Vladimir Putin and Russia should ultimately create a hacking of e-mails of a presidential candidate which is in essence espionage, I consider that an act of treason that cannot be accepted," Menendez told a room full of delegates and guests at the Airport Renaissance Hotel in Essington.
Cory Booker took a different approach, laying a little guilt on fellow Democrats, suggesting it was complacency that allowed Chris Christie's ascension to the Governor's office in 2009. Booker hopes the party has learned its lesson, and won't allow New Jersey's history of voting Democratic in a Presidential election to affect strategy.
"We've got to make sure that we in New Jersey are bedrock blue," Booker said, "that we in New Jersey have the blues so bad B.B. King would be jealous."
The delegation opened its final meeting together with a little history lesson. Actually, a play performed by three re-enactors portraying leaders from the earliest days of the United States. The actors, from the American Historical Theatre, portrayed Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, with Adams's wife Abigail in the middle.
Perhaps this exchange between Abigail Adams and Jefferson demonstrates what they were trying to do.
Abagail says, "Who says a ruler or a monarch or a supreme magistrate need necessarily be a man?" That led Jefferson to respond, "Well, that's the way it has always been." Abigail's counter? "No it has not."
The 17 minute skit demonstrated parallels between the concerns of leaders just after the adoption of the US Constitution and those of the present day, including the need for regular change and concerns over one man rule.
