Booker: Floods in Midwest Happening Because We Don’t Have ‘More Courageous Empathy’

EXCERPT:

BOOKER: "And look, we now need more than ever after this President, more than ever we need a revival of grace in our country, revival of civic grace in our civic spaces. And we need — this election, that’s what I tell Democrats. You can’t make this election just about one office and one person, about what we’re against. We need to talk about what we’re for. And if we reduce this effort to just being we’re going to beat Republicans, no, this election has to be about uniting Americans again, and common cause and common purpose. When I talk to folks in Iowa, I mean they’re right to be angry. Attacks on public education, attacks on labor. Here in this state, the loopholes to get around Davis-Bacon. Attacks on farmers. Farmer suicide rates are as high as they have been since the Great Depression. Just down the street here you see the rivers rising. Historic floods happening year after year after year. All of this stuff is happening because we are not seeing with a more courageous empathy the suffering of our neighbors. So we need to have politics where we say, hey, we’ve got common cause. We definitely have common pain. But this campaign, this time in American history more than ever we need to reunite in a common purpose and put more indivisible back into this one nation under God."