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It must sting to be compared so frequently to Barack Obama but then have the former president’s top strategist say, “Yeah, except for the ‘great speaker’ part.”

That’s what David Axelrod did Friday on CNN, shortly after Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., announced that he’s running for the 2020 Democratic nomination.

“[B]ooker is a very inspirational guy but sometimes he can get carried away and we saw that with his ‘Spartacus’ moment on the Judiciary Committee during the Kavanaugh hearings,” said Axelrod, referring to the embarrassing scene Booker put on last year, wherein he claimed he had released confidential congressional documents as an act of valor, even though the papers had already been cleared for release and didn’t contain the bombshell he’d promised.

Axelrod continued, “He can sort of move from being an inspirational figure to kind of a motivational speaker and sometimes it comes off a little tinny, so that’s a discipline that he’s going to have to deal with.”

This is a very polite way of saying Booker lays the theatrics on a little too thick.

A recent Rolling Stone profile on then-Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., featured a perfect example of Booker’s tendency to ham it up.

Recounting Heitkamp’s ultimate decision to vote no on the confirmation of now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Booker shared this sticky-sweet anecdote:

“There must have been 12 of us, maybe 14 of us, down in that SCIF, trading this piece of paper around … We’re reading, and she looks up and says to all of us, ‘I just can’t vote for this person,’” Booker recalls. “To me, it was a Martin Luther moment, where Martin Luther, after pounding his defiant words on a church door … Martin Luther, he writes, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me god.’ I felt that was what I was witnessing.”

Booker also described Heitkamp as “one of those people who stitches together the gaping wounds that often exist in this place.”

You can imagine the wheels grinding under great resistance in Booker’s head as he delivers the most overwrought answers to basic questions:

Senator, what can I get you?

Booker: “All I ask is that you give every boy and girl a chance to rise up to the heavens and fulfill their god given potential in this beautiful country we call America. A country we call home.”

Uh, s enator, this is Arby’s, did you want to place an order?