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The Battle for Newark ...continued
Sharpe James vs. Cory Booker

--BY Shakti Bhatt and Mark J. Magyar

This time, the housing police bundled her and the man with the Yankees jacket out of the room and out of the building. Other officials quickly escorted James into a chair in the front of the room. But the turmoil continued.

"I've never seen such dirty politics in my life!" one woman shouted. "I'm so disgusted I don't even want to vote. It's disrespectful to this man who has served on the council for four years," she said, nodding toward Booker. "It's disrespectful to the mayor for 16 years, and it's disrespectful to us as black people."
"Tell the truth!" a man in a veterans' cap shouted.

Another woman, a James supporter, was on her feet, pointing at Booker. "I've lived here all my life, I got two kids older than this man, my kids can tell me more about what's going on than he can!"

"Everybody, shut up, dammit!" Nannie Fitts screamed in frustration. "Everybody get out!" She shook her head and her shoulders sank. "You got no respect for anybody," she said dejectedly.

Suddenly, the turmoil stopped. It wasn't because of Nannie Fitts. No one was paying attention to her.

Booker turned and saw that James, sitting at the table, had motioned the crowd to silence. Booker haltingly resumed. For the first time in 30 minutes, he didn't have to shout over hecklers.

"We all agree we have a great city, a city worth fighting for," Booker said. "Passions are high among Sharpe James people and my people. I want to tell you about my vision. We can build on the progress of the last 16 years. I've seen how different policing strategies have worked to stop drugs and prostitution on city streets like Frelinghuysen Avenue.

"We've had 16 years of Sharpe James' leadership. A lot of good has happened in Newark," he said, praising James for the second time, this time with the mayor in attendance. "Sharpe James said Ken Gibson was his hero, yet he ran against him and won, saying four terms were enough."

James grumbled loudly, "Oh, come on." Booker ignored him and introduced his council running mates from the South Ward, Dwayne Warren and Marjorie Avant. "These people to my right and left are young, they're earnest, they're hungry. They want to make the Housing Authority respond as quickly to the needs of your building as to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. On May 14, you have a chance to stand with the status quo or vote for new leadership for the city. Please do not be distracted by name-calling, by lies, by underhanded tactics."

James stood up. "Can I pose a question for Mr. Booker before I go?" he intervened politely. "You talk about fighting crime and drugs. Your co-campaign manager was arrested for prostitution Saturday night? What are your plans for your co-campaign manager?" he asked with a big smile.

Booker stared at James, who now stood next to him, with a mixture of resignation and disgust. "First of all, this is what I'm talking about. No one on my staff was arrested for anything. The man was standing outside a bar when the police raided the place."

"Sights is NOT a bar!" James huffed. "Tell the truth to the people!"
"It's a strip club!" one woman yelled from the audience. "Strip club!"
"His co-campaign manager was arrested AND fingerprinted," James said, jabbing a finger in Booker's direction.

"This is not Š" Booker began, then stopped. His eyes blazed with fury. "Why don't we ask the mayor about his chief of staff, Jackie Mattison, who was arrested and convicted and went to jail! Why don't we ask the mayor about his chief of police, William Celester, who was convicted and went to jail!"

"Jackie Mattison served his time," James said indignantly, as if that fact erased the shame of the conviction.

"People in glass houses should not throw stones," Booker said with a smile.
"You want to debate?" James roared, as if challenging Booker to a fight.
"If this is a fair debate, I'll take you on any place, any time," Booker said with glee. He threw his jacket theatrically to an aide, carefully undid the buttons at the wrist of his white Oxford shirt, and slowly rolled up his sleeves.

James went first. "The Governor was here today in Newark," James said, reminding everyone that McGreevey had come to Newark to show his personal support at the mayor's announcement speech. "We all know Governor James E. McGreevey. Governor McGreevey says he's going to fund all of our Abbott (school) districts because of his partnership with us in Newark. The Governor said he's going to bring us the Arena. The Governor said he's going to bring more police. The Governor said he's going to bring more money. That's the Governor who was here!"

James pointed to accomplishments like the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and the Newark Bears baseball stadium, then talked about how his administration had turned drug-infested housing projects into apartment buildings in which people could live without fear.

This time Booker interrupted. "How many people know about drug dealing going on on Frelinghuysen Avenue? How many know about prostitution? The Governor is still going to be the Governor after I'm elected," he said, dismissing the inference that McGreevey would help Newark only if James won. "Sharpe James already spent $34 million on a baseball stadium. He wants to spend more on an arena. But what about you? Last year, 2001, the murder rate went up in Newark, the number of jobs went down. What about your property values?"

"Governor McGreevey is our Governor," James said, emphasizing every word. "This young man is a Republican."

"How can you come in here and lie about me?" Booker demanded. "I've been a Democrat since I registered at 18 years old."

"What you have here is a Republican in attitude," James insisted. "When we walked the streets for Jon Corzine, he walked with Bob Franks. When we walked the streets for McGreevey, he took Bret Schundler to his charter school. When we campaigned for the national Democratic choice of Al Gore, he endorsed Bill Bradley. Doesn't he believe the Governor of the State of New Jersey when he says he's going to help us?"

They sparred again over crime statistics. James argued that McGreevey had chosen Joseph Santiago, Newark's police director, to run the State Police because crime had gone down in Newark. Then he returned to his first point of attack:
"You can't elect someone whose co-campaign manager went into Sights and was arrested and fingerprinted. You can't have someone going into a place of prostitution and saying it's okay to look, but not touch," James said, conveniently forgetting his own visit to Sights the year before a visit that would inconveniently hit the newspapers two weeks later.

"What Sharpe James is doing is practicing the politics of divisiveness," Booker said. "I don't want to do that. People are concerned about crime in their neighborhoods. Are their neighborhoods getting better or worse? Is drug dealing half what it was or about the same?"

"We did a lot for neighborhoods, including this one," James said. "We tore down the high-rises across the street from here. The quality of the city is rising. We stood here when Elizabeth wanted to put up a wall to keep Newark away. Tell them about what we've done," James said, motioning Dwight Burns, the city's director of housing management, to the front.

Booker was mortified. "You can't speak here as a Housing Authority official," he whispered to Burns. "This is a political meeting."

"Are you threatening me?" Burns demanded angrily. "Don't threaten me!"
"But you can't," Booker said. "It's illegal."

The legal distinction barring city officials, while on the job, from speaking on behalf of the mayor as a candidate at a tenant meeting that had turned into a candidate forum was lost on Burns, and apparently on James as well.
"Go ahead," James said.

"I can't do this," Booker said and walked out, nodding to the three or four potential Booker voters in the room. It was as convenient a time to leave as any.
Ten minutes later, Burns was still addressing the crowd. "When your door was broke, we fixed it that very day. We can do a lot of things together. We can do a lot of things for you," he said slowly, looking from person to person.
The implication was as clear as the impression McGreevey left a month earlier when he told a Newark crowd, "You give me Sharpe James, I'll give you the arena."
You give me Sharpe James, I'll fix your door.
Welcome to Newark politics.

Sometimes, one scene, one confrontation summarizes an entire campaign. That was the case with the impromptu exchange between Sharpe James and Cory Booker at the Kretchmer Homes tenant meeting. Furthermore, it was a rarity, the only head-to-head confrontation so far of the entire mayoral campaign. James has accepted Cablevision's invitation to appear in a televised debate on May 8, but otherwise, he has determinedly dodged joint appearances with his young telegenic rival.

James makes no secret of his personal hatred for Booker, whom he regards as a grandstanding opportunist, and Booker, despite his repeated public protestations of appreciation for James, personally has grown increasingly resentful of James' tactics.

Newark's mayoral race is no genteel debate moderated by the League of Women Voters. It is a street fight of the first magnitude no rules, no holds barred and to the chagrin of James and his staff, it has become one of the most closely watched political races in the nation.

National reporters from Time, The Today Show and The Economist show up to profile Booker, and write how he could be the first black president. Booker makes the front page of the New York Times and is the subject of a New York Times Magazine profile in the same week; the Sharpe James story only gets a small promo on the front page and runs on B1.

"Thank you for giving us an equal shot," Pam Goldstein, James' longtime press aide, says with more than a little edge in her face when we ask to spend a day with the mayor. "The last reporter who called asked if I would put Mayor James on the phone to answer some of Cory Booker's questions. Not his questions. Cory Booker's questions."

In the world of the national media, Sharpe James is Joe Frazier to Cory Booker's flamboyant Muhammad Ali. James may be the reigning champion, but he's conventional, a straight-ahead puncher. He is interesting only as a worthy adversary whose defeat will elevate the Ali legend.

But this election isn't being decided by the national media or what suburban New York Times readers think. It is going to be decided on the streets of Newark, and James is banking that people like him enough -- and have enough questions about Booker -- to give him one last four-year term.

Cory Booker had just celebrated his first birthday when Sharpe James joined with Ken Gibson and other idealistic young black leaders to oust Hugh Addonizio and his corrupt political machine from City Hall and begin the task of building a new Newark from the polarized, riot-torn city in which 32 had died just two summers before. Gibson was elected Newark's first black mayor and James to the City Council.
Sixteen years later, while Booker was still in high school, James gave up his Council seat and ran on a reform platform, challenging Gibson, whose administration had been wracked by scandal, for the mayoralty. To the surprise of all the political experts, James won handily.

Now, sixteen years later, it is Booker who is raising the mantle of reform to challenge James, whose administration also has been wracked by scandal.
But Newark today is a different city than it was 16 years ago and 16 years before that.

The city that was stigmatized by the Newark riots today boasts the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, a new minor-league baseball stadium, a revitalized downtown, and is being promised a new arena for the equally resurgent Nets and Devils.

IDT Corporation and MNBA have joined the corporate anchors of Prudential, PSEG, Verizon and Horizon Blue Cross/Blue Shield in choosing Newark for their base. The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey is expanding; high-tech Science Park has been established, and Rutgers University and Seton Hall University built new law schools in the city. Continental Airlines continues to expand at Newark International Airport, and a new FBI headquarters is under construction, the cornerstone of a planned redevelopment of the Passaic River Waterfront.
Newark's failed federal housing projects have been demolished or turned into townhouses, as was the case with the Kretchmer Homes in which James and Booker debated. James is able to point to new supermarkets and mini-malls, movie theaters, a roller skating rink and swimming pools, modern town-house developments like Society Hill, and three new hotels under construction.
"Don't be confused!" James implores voters in his campaign kickoff speech. "Newark today is not the Newark of 1967. Don't be confused! Newark today is not the Newark of 1986. Newark today is making real progress; progress we can all be proud of."

To James, Booker's allegation that most of Newark's residents, particularly the poor, failed to benefit from that progress is not simply an academic public policy debate. It is a personal affront.

After 32 years in office, including 16 as mayor, Sharpe James sees himself as Newark. He interchangeably urges crowds to "Save Newark" or "Save Sharpe" on Election Day.

To James, his personal rise from poverty is a metaphor for the city's rise from the physical, social and psychological devastation of the 1967 race riot.
He talks about growing up a "poor boy, living on Howard Street in one room with a pot-bellied stove on which we heated water to take a bath. A one-room apartment with an outhouse in the backyard. I owned one pair of sneakers, one pair of pants and one shirt. We had little to eat and my brother and I had very few toys. But we did have a lot of love from our mother."

With his mother's encouragement, James went on to graduate from Newark South Side High School and Montclair State, got a master's degree at Springfield College, served in the Army in Germany, married a schoolteacher and raised three sons. He rose from gym teacher and track coach in the Newark schools to athletic director at Essex County College, from community activist to South Ward councilman to mayor.
As his mother had promised, "things will be better for you, my son, than they were for me," so James promises Newark, "our best years are still to come."
If it were not for Booker's impertinent challenge, these would be the best years for Sharpe James.

The boy who grew up in the cold-water flat not only owns a home in Newark, but also a $400,000 waterfront home in Ocean County, a condo in Florida's Port St. Lucie, and part of a Newark office building to which his political campaign pays rent. He owns two boats, a 1980 Rolls-Royce, an antique British MG sports car and a 1998 Honda Acura.

The more than $248,000 in public salary he earned last year -- $186,982 as mayor, $26,177 in a longevity bonus from the city, and $35,000 as a state senator -- made him one of the highest-paid public officials in the country.

Politically, James' clout today is at an all-time high -- just six years after his political future was clouded at best.

In 1995 and 1996, a series of federal investigations and corruption trials shook Newark. The trials did not touch James personally, but they scarred his administration. Council President Gary Harris and Councilman Ralph T. Grant, an ordained minister, were convicted of bribery. William Celester, James' handpicked police chief, was convicted of diverting police funds to pay for trips for his girlfriends. And in the case that hit closest to home, James' chief of staff, Jackie Mattison, a relative by marriage whose election to the state Assembly the mayor engineered, was convicted of bribery after $156,000 in cash turned up under the floor of the house he shared with his hairdresser girlfriend.

James was slow to condemn Mattison, in particular, and the wave of corruption convictions came as little surprise in a city and county in which patronage and nepotism were rampant. James' political fundraising practices -- specifically the annual birthday parties that gave city employees and contractors the opportunity to contribute -- had been the subject of an earlier probe by state investigators.
But James, unlike his predecessor Gibson, had full command of Newark's powerful Democratic machine, and his ability to deliver 75 percent Democratic pluralities, demonstrated clearly in the 1996 presidential and U.S. Senate races, made him one of New Jersey's leading Democratic power brokers and enabled him to quickly put the Mattison and Celester scandals behind him.

State Senator and Councilman Ronald Rice Sr. made corruption one of the centerpieces of his 1998 mayoral challenge, but Rice raised little money and his campaign at times seemed half-hearted. James won a fourth term easily.
A loyal Democrat, James delighted in being courted by President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, and when Gore ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2000, James not only endorsed him over Bill Bradley, but also went to Iowa on Gore's behalf to offer a scathing denunciation of Bradley's effectiveness as a U.S. senator from New Jersey.

That November, Newark's overwhelming Democratic vote, financed by Jon Corzine's multi-million-dollar get-out-the-vote operation, helped Corzine stave off Republican Congressman Bob Franks to narrowly win an open U.S. Senate seat. James' effort won him the everlasting friendship and reciprocal support of Corzine. He would win an even more influential friend the following summer, during the so-called "Twelve Days of Torricelli."

In July 2001, U.S. Senator Robert Torricelli, whom James had helped elect in 1996, decided to challenge Woodbridge Mayor James E. McGreevey, who had been unopposed for the Democratic nomination for governor. Torricelli met with James at the Newark Airport Marriott and believed he had James' assurance that he would remain neutral and not stand in Torricelli's way.

Exactly one week later, James and his chief of staff, Calvin West, were in the same Marriott, meeting with McGreevey and the state's leading Democratic power brokers, including Congressman Robert Menendez and Senators John Lynch and Ray Lesniak. The following day, James held a press conference to announce his support for McGreevey; when Menendez, the Hudson County leader, followed suit, Torricelli was finished and McGreevey's nomination for governor was assured. McGreevey won election handily last November, helped along by Newark's overwhelming Democratic vote.

"The governor knows who was there for him, and that's why he's here for me," James is quick to declare.

McGreevey was almost too open in his support.

The governor was forced to back off from an intemperate promise he made during a Martin Luther King Day speech. Speaking at Newark's George Washington Carver School in James' home South Ward, the newly inaugurated governor vowed, "Newark, you give me Sharpe James. (I give you) Devils and Nets."

But McGreevey nevertheless worked hard to hammer out an agreement with the YankeesNets organization to bring a new arena to Newark that he could announce before the May 14 election. Just as important, with James' message seeming to flounder and Booker benefiting from a national media lovefest, McGreevey made sure that James had the proper professional campaign support -- his own.

McGreevey's political consultant, Brad Lawrence of New Brunswick-based Message & Media, helped retool James' boring "Let's Continue the Progress ..." message into "The Real Deal," a double-edged slogan that affirms the mayor's credentials while questioning Booker's authenticity. James Benjamin, a get-out-the-vote specialist for McGreevey, took over as James' campaign manager. Another veteran of the McGreevey campaign, Ronald Lester, is the pollster. Press calls are answered by Richard McGrath, who handled the press for McGreevey and had until recently been working for the Democratic State Committee.

James can count on most of the New Jersey, Essex County and Newark political establishment, from Corzine and Menendez to Congressman Donald Payne, state Senator Rice, and eight out of nine City Council members -- all except Booker.
Clearly, James is in a much better position than the last two Newark mayors who lost reelection campaigns: Hugh Addonizio, who had to campaign out of a jail cell, and Gibson, who was too aloof to take control of the Newark Democratic machine.
James has the battle-tested Election Day machine, the right friends, and a record of accomplishment. He is, his literature proclaims, "the only Civil Rights veteran still serving as Mayor in America," and he would like to leave office on his own terms. Against any other opponent, James would be a shoo-in.

But Booker is not just any opponent. And that's what angers James the most.

It doesn't take much to get James off his second-favorite topic -- his record of accomplishment in Newark -- and onto his favorite topic: Cory Booker.

Just asking about Booker is not enough to throw James into a rage.

"He is a smoke-and-mirror poster boy," James fumes. "His living in the camper was a publicity stunt. Everything is a publicity stunt. That was five days of taking pictures. He said he was going to spend the whole summer. The neighbors said he came only for pictures. He did that to use it as a commercial. His whole campaign is a David Copperfield. He is playing the public. You can fool some people all the time. You can fool all the people some of the time. But you can never fool 51 percent of the people.

"He is a professional liar. To say, 'I graduated Yale, I graduated Stanford,' to say, 'I', a Rhodes scholar,' and then to run a smear and fear campaign! They want to make Sharpe James angry. They want me to stoop to their level and I refuse to.
"He called the mayor corrupt. He is the son of Sam, a no-good. He says all these things about me and then he comes to me, says, 'Hi, how are you?' and comes to hug me and embrace me. I told him, 'You are a hypocrite. Don't speak to me.'"
Councilman-at-Large Luis Quintana, who is running on the James ticket, calls Booker "a liar, a flip-flopper." Luiggi C. Campana, Newark's assistant business administrator, says the media created Booker. "He is badmouthing everything we have done. He has no track record. He does not know Newark. He says he's a Rhodes scholar. A lot of us have master's degrees. And a lot of us are in the process of getting our Ph.D.'s. He's not the only intellectual."

It is conventional political wisdom that elections featuring longtime officeholders are inevitably a referendum on the record of the incumbent.

Ironically, the Newark mayoral election may prove to be just the opposite.

After 32 years, Sharpe James is a mystery to no one. The real question for voters to decide is the authenticity of Cory Booker, both as a politician and, more interestingly, as an African-American.

James minces no words: "It takes more to be black than just skin color. It's your experience, it's what you've gone through. Booker says he's a Democrat, but he's really a Republican inside. He says he's proud to be black, but he hasn't had any of the experiences we've had."

Anderson Coppin, an information technology professional who supports James, agrees: "When the mayor calls Booker a white boy, he is talking about the mind, not the shade of a color."

Booker aides dismiss the race issue. "It's the old politics of black victimhood, the politics that says you can't succeed in the outside world and still be black," one said. "It's an outmoded idea."

There's a question how James' "blacker than thou" strategy, as one academic dubbed it, will play with the 46 percent of Newark voters who are not of African-American descent -- the Italian-Americans in the North Ward, the Portuguese in the Ironbound, and especially the rapidly growing Hispanic population. And in particular, there's a question how the gambit will play with young people, whether college-educated or not.

"We're the generation of young professionals that they told to work hard, get into college, then come back and give something back to the city," said Ron Rice Jr., who is running on Booker's Council slate while his father, and his father's generation, supports James. "But now that we're back, they want us to wait. Power never surrenders power willingly."

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