New Jersey Reporter

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

--BY Shakti Bhatt and Mark J. Magyar

There is no question about Booker's authenticity in the political power circles, in corporate boardrooms, in the entertainment capitals of America, which have contributed liberally to his campaign. Politically, Booker is hard to define: Democrat Bill Bradley and Republican Jack Kemp co-chaired one of his Washington fund-raisers.

Booker, Rice and their running mates speak the language of the "reinventing government" movement that has swept the nation over the past decade. Efficiency, innovation and change are non-partisan, they point out, citing successes of Republican mayors like Stephen Goldsmith of Indianapolis or Rudy Giuliani of New York as easily as they do the initiatives of Democrats.

Booker's outspoken support for charter schools and his earlier endorsement of school choice programs like the initiative in Milwaukee have raised the hackles of the teachers unions and liberal Democrats. Booker subsequently has emphasized that "New Jersey is not ready for a school choice program, and it will not be part of my agenda as mayor."

But he is constantly jumping from idea to idea in an intellectual style reminiscent of Bradley's.

Walking into Booker's campaign today is a little like walking into a Bobby Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern campaign headquarters three decades ago. The volunteers are young and earnest, only this time there is no Vietnam War for the volunteers to be impassioned about. Just the charisma of a candidate promising change.

"Cory has always been an activist," said Devin Desai, a Yale Law School friend who came in from California to volunteer. "He started working in Newark on housing issues when he was still at Yale."

"I was just out of college when I heard that Cory Booker needed people to help with his campaign," said volunteer Heever Ambrose. "I agreed immediately. There is such a need for change. We don't have to say it. We don't have to sell it. We want something different for our children."

That's what Booker's parents wanted when they moved from Newark to the lily-white suburb of Harrington Park in Bergen County the year Cory was born; it took a fair-housing lawyer to force the sale of the house to the young black IBM executives. "We were the only black students in the school," recalls older brother Cary Booker, an assistant dean of academic affairs at LeMoyne-Owen College who came up from Memphis with his wife to work on the campaign.

A star athlete, Booker played football at Stanford and won a Rhodes scholarship. While at Oxford University, he joined and was elected president of the L'Chaim Society. While at Yale Law School, he began commuting to Newark to work on tenants rights issues. He moved to the city fulltime after graduation, took an apartment in the Brick Towers housing complex, and ran for City Council from the Central Ward just two years later.

Booker raised $150,000 from affluent friends, put together a staff, and spent more than four months going door-to-door. Booker's opponent, 68-year-old George Branch, had served on the Council for 16 years and was unprepared for Booker's sudden emergence. Branch beat Booker by 340 votes in the election, but neither candidate received the required 50 percent plus one vote; it was with help from North Ward power broker Stephen Adubato, the Star-Ledger reported, that Booker won the runoff by 656 votes.

The 1998 election represented the beginning of the inevitable political shift from the civil rights generation of James and Branch to the new generation personified by Booker.

Booker refused to take a city car and challenged other Council expenditures. He joined with Ras Baraka, the son of poet Amiri Baraka, and a Council candidate in this election, to challenge the Council's refusal to allow citizens to speak during public meetings. The resolution pushed by the younger Baraka's Committee to Restore the People's Right to Speak in Newark was defeated 6-3. But for Booker, it was a political victory that established him as the main opposition to the business-as-usual politics of an entrenched Council that had become known for its high pay (a $58,415 annual salary that would rise to $64,766 in 2001) and lavish trips while governing a city with high infant mortality and unemployment rates, low school test scores and one out of every three children living in poverty.

It is the sincerity of Booker's concern for Newark's poor and the 1960's-style tactics he has used to draw attention to their needs that simultaneously excites the admiration of his supporters and arouses the disdain of Mayor James and his followers.

Booker's 10-day sit-in and fast at a tent outside the drug-infested Garden Spires housing complex during the summer of 1999 made national news, particularly when Joseph Santiago, then James' police director and now McGreevey's State Police superintendent, declined to provide police protection.

He followed that media event with a youth march three months later, then led his fellow Brick Towers tenants in a spring 2000 march opposing federal plans to tear down the housing project. That summer, he bought an RV and started camping around the city in different neighborhoods to call attention to various causes and needs, to show his support for community organizations, and, of course, to introduce himself to voters a few dozen at a time. It was the Booker version of the Clinton Bus Tour, and it worked: The Yale Law School graduate sleeping in the RV was a "natural" for the news cameras.

Where James and his Council running mates see publicity stunts, Father Angelito Rosales, youth director of St Michael's Parish, sees commitment. "Cory is very active with young people and anytime we need assistance, he's there to help us out. Sadly, the mayor has not made himself accessible enough to respond to our needs."

By October 2000, it was clear Booker would be running for mayor. The only question was whether it would be in 2002 or 2006, as the Star-Ledger's Nikita Stewart made clear in a glowing two-part biography of Booker that ran 8,729 words and covered six full pages -- perhaps the longest biography the Star-Ledger has ever run. James still bristles over "Nikita Stewart's fluff" and views the Star-Ledger's decision to cover the mayoral race with a depth and intensity usually reserved for presidential and gubernatorial campaigns as a sign of pro-Booker bias.

By the end of 2001, it was clear that Booker was not going to wait for 2006, and furthermore, he was assembling his own Council slate. Politically, it was a smart tactic for two reasons: It gave him a slate of running mates who could help push through his agenda if elected, but most important, it enabled him to raise campaign contributions for his slate in $15,400 chunks, instead of being limited to the $2,200 maximum for individual races.

"There are three things you need to be a credible challenger in any race -- money, money and more money," said veteran Statehouse lobbyist John Torok, a volunteer strategist for the Booker campaign. "And Cory Booker has all three."
Indeed, Booker expects to raise and spend $3 million, forcing James to strive to match that figure if he hopes to compete in what will clearly be the most expensive election in New Jersey history, other than statewide campaigns for governor and U.S. Senate. In fact, Booker has raised more money for this mayoral race than Bob Franks did for his 2000 U.S. Senate campaign.

Much of James' money has come from city contractors and employees, while Booker says his warchest is made up primarily of "love money" given by wealthy friends and acquaintances who believe in what he is doing for Newark -- an argument James views as incredulous. "These people are trying to buy Newark," he charges.
Booker and James have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into cable TV and radio ads, but as the Corzine-Franks Senate race showed, the real question on Election Day will be the get-out-the-vote effort.

It is a generational question. James, the self-proclaimed last mayor of the civil rights generation, is counting on the votes of the senior citizens who have voted for him for 32 years to give him one last hurrah. While James led Booker by just 46 percent to 44 percent among likely voters in a WABC poll taken three weeks before the election, he had a clear 51 percent to 38 percent lead among those who said they had voted in the 1998 mayoral election, and he knows senior citizens make up a significant portion of that support.

Booker, meanwhile, has spent months registering new voters and enjoyed a clear 57 percent to 36 percent edge in that category. Perhaps most alarming for James is the fact that of the 184 city employees included in the poll, only 65 said they would vote for James and 59 for Booker, with 60 still undecided. James clearly needs a majority of city workers and their families if he is to win reelection.

While most of the attention focuses on campaign spending and TV and radio ads, there is another parallel campaign being waged in the streets. Newark politics has a rough-and-tumble history. Both campaigns have reported an office break-in and both have charged that the other side has torn down its signs. Booker says he is recruiting 300 lawyers to watch for potential vote fraud on Election Day, and both Booker and James decry the whispering campaign and malicious unsigned campaign literature making its way through the streets.

In the end, the impact of the Newark mayoral campaign goes beyond whether James gets another four years and Booker has to wait until 2006 for what political experts see as his inevitable coronation.

The mayoral election is a referendum on whether Newark residents believe they are indeed enjoying a "Renaissance" or remain mired in poverty.

It is a referendum on the political influence of outsiders -- from corporate leaders to Governor McGreevey to the white suburban money from around the country that has bankrolled Booker's campaign.

It is a referendum on whether it is time for the civil rights generation to step aside and for the next generation to take power.

And it is a referendum on how the authenticity of African-American political leaders will be judged in the decades ahead -- and whether a downtrodden childhood continues to be a prerequisite for urban electoral success.

Lauren Otis, New Jersey Reporter's editor, contributed to this report.