CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- At least Cory Booker gave the audience a heads up.
"I'm glad the cameras are running because I'm about to get very controversial here," the Newark, N.J., mayor told folks attending a Planned Parenthood Action Fund Rally just outside the NASCAR Hall of Fame Tuesday.
Then he set his scene. "I usually come home late at night, I DVR Jon Stewart and I DVR Stephen Colbert and I sit down with my closest friends at that hour, Ben & Jerry, and I watch TV," he said. "Last week I decided I was going to watch, not my normal Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, [but] I was going to watch the Republican National Convention. Ben, Jerry does not mix with Mitt and Ryan."
Booker noted how some of the RNC speakers said that they loved women, how they had a mother, how they had a sister. "That's like saying you're not a bigot because you have a black friend," he said to cheers. "That's like saying I love Latinos, I go to Taco Bell every week."
He argued that Republican policies denigrated the very people they claimed to love. "So I don't understand how somebody can say, 'I love women,' when they are denying women access to healthcare, when they are denying women strategies to protect their life, when they are implementing policies that undermine all the ground that we have gained, not just as women, but as a nation," Booker said.
He was joined by women's right activist Sandra Fluke and "House" actress Lisa Edelstein, among others, at the event.
