{"id":57,"date":"2019-03-03T18:27:21","date_gmt":"2019-03-03T23:27:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drjonathancummings.com\/blog\/?p=57"},"modified":"2019-03-03T18:27:28","modified_gmt":"2019-03-03T23:27:28","slug":"cory-booker-ppc-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drjonathancummings.com\/blog\/prospective-presidential-candidates\/2019\/03\/cory-booker-ppc-4\/57\/","title":{"rendered":"Cory Booker PPC #4"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Re-posting of Cory Booker thoughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I should preface this one by saying that I arrived a bit late and ended up outside the main hall in an overflow area for about have of the event.\u00a0 So, I didn\u2019t see the first half, and while there was a speaker in the overflow area I wasn\u2019t able to fully hear everything due to background noise and conversation.\u00a0 I was able to fully catch a good portion of the Q & A, and stuck around after to ask my question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Cory Booker has going for him is his ability to connect and\nempathize and inspire from that place of connection.  I think empathy is a vastly undervalued trait\nin our society, so I\u2019m excited to see and hear it from a potential\npresident.  He spoke a lot about how\neveryone can make a difference, and even if you can\u2019t do the big things, there\nare things that you can do to make things better.  He phrased it something like you lead from\nbig ideas and deep moral values, and you make progress by taking the smaller\ntactical steps that are doable to get you there.  For example, universal health care is a need,\nand the aim, but if what is doable is lowering the age for Medicare then do\nthat first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Cory Booker wasn\u2019t really short on addressing policy or\nspecific, his focus was much more on his vision for relationships in the United\nStates, and the need for building and uniting and working together as a nation of\nindividuals who see problems and work together to fix them.  He wants people to believe in themselves and\neach other and their power to realize their vision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the media scrum afterword, I asked \u201cHow do you, and how will your staff make decisions?\u201d.\u00a0 He focused on being a value-based decision maker, making decisions that achieve and support his values.\u00a0 He also noted that he is clear about his values with his staff and surrounds himself with others who share his values. \u00a0I followed up by saying I was asking because I am a decision scientist, to which he stopped me to ask what a decision scientist is.\u00a0 I really need to get better at having an elevator speech explanation, but I said something about how it is an approach focusing on how to make decisions by identifying your objectives, or values as he described, what alternatives are available, and then using prediction to bring the two together and evaluate which best achieves your objectives.\u00a0 This elicited a discussion from him about the need to weight trade-offs, and how that can be a difficult thing to do.\u00a0 Unfortunately, I don\u2019t remember this concluding bit very accurately as the circle of news cameras, as well as my swirling mind that was still thinking about how to describe decision science distracted me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edit: The encouraging part about this response is that Cory Booker seemed willing, interested, and capable of learning and applying decision science. The disappointing part is that it is not a terminology, or seemingly methodology that Cory Booker is familiar with.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Summarizing:\u00a0 Inspiring and empathizing speaker who seems capable of bringing people together to address big things.\u00a0 His presentation itself doesn\u2019t give you a lot on his politics, so I\u2019ll have to follow-up to learn more.\u00a0 Disappointed by the lack of knowledge about decision making, but at least he is values focused and was interested and able to respond logically about what I was talking about.\u00a0 High end Tier 3 for now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ranking of those I\u2019ve meet so far:<\/p>\n\n\n\n