Cory Booker: At the 15th Hour, I Felt I Could Do It ... I Really Felt the Energy of a Lot of Folks

EXCERPT:

BOOKER: "Chris Murphy and I had a moment around the 15th hour when we were passing what we did together. I told Chris Murphy I wasn‘t going to sit down if he wasn‘t going to sit down, so I did everything that he did for me today to sort of — you have somebody running point for you, running interference for you. Chris was amazing, amazing today. And at the 15th hour, he came over to me and said, 'How are you feeling? And I really at that point felt like I could do it. I felt I could do it. And I will tell you, the reality is, is that I really felt the energy of a lot of folks. The gallery was filled. There were colleagues there. I had my cousin Pam, she stayed up in the gallery the entire 25 hours. So I was riding on some really great spiritual power from people around the country and from people that were there. And just — I feel really grateful for them. And then every time I read a constituent letter who — I mean, folks, just when they write a letter, sometimes they just really open up the most personal stories from their lives, share their fears, their worries, their anxieties, their demands, their anger. And reading those letters gave me a lot of strength, too. So I‘m just grateful right now, despite the fact that I‘m in rough shape."