Columnist
Cory Booker has all the makings of a folk hero – except for the folks. The documentary Street Fight bristles with chutzpah as the 32-year-old Newark councilman comes up short in his ’02 campaign to become mayor.
Back now and unbowed, the 36-year-old Yale-trained lawyer is campaigning again for mayor of that city, on legs far from the running trim of his Stanford football days, but quick enough for the street wards of Newark.
In the 83-minute film directed by his friend Marshall Curry, Booker walks the meanest streets and knocks on any door. He clearly loves the camera, though it doesn’t love him back. Balding and hard-eyed, the young Democratic councilman appears more the ambassador with portfolio than the politician feeling one’s pain. This may not matter to the black majority city of 273,546 souls largely neglected by the envoy as well as the cop on the corner.
In Street Fight, Booker drives home the need for better policing, upgraded schools, jobs, health care and all the improvements promised by every reform politician known to Newark, including his Democratic opponent, Mayor Sharpe James. The 2005 film depicts a running, nasty brawl where Booker charges his opponent with 16 years of neglect and James blasts the light-skinned, suburban-born, Ivy Leaguer as a hired carpetbagger of suspect economic motives.
In the showdown between the upstart and the 67-year-old geezer accused of fleecing the citizenry in broad daylight, the voters chose four-term Mayor James by a 3,500-vote margin.
Come this primary election day, May 9, Booker will be on his own – James has dropped out of the race. Mayor James, with all the black magic of incumbency, did himself in not for term limits but, some say, over the threat of a prison term.
Mayoral indictment is the gift Newark keeps on giving. Since Hugh Addonizio bowed out on a 67-count indictment (and extortion conviction) in 1970, each successor has fallen under the hammer of the prosecutor. After serving four terms, Kenneth Gibson was indicted on charges of conspiracy and misconduct before losing to James in 1986. Acquitted on the state charges, Gibson was indicted after leaving office and pleaded guilty to tax fraud and received three years probation.
A federal prosecutor reportedly said that city hall under James “is like a supermarket. You can buy anything.”
Beginning in 1995, the mayor’s administration was afloat with judicial cases, starting with the bribery convictions of Council President Gary Harris and Councilman Ralph Grant. The floodwaters crept closer to the mayor when his hand-picked police chief, William Celester, was convicted of diverting department funds for his girlfriend’s travel expenses. The tide got even closer when James’ chief of staff was caught hiding $156,000 under floorboards of his apartment and convicted of accepting kickbacks from contractors doing business with the city.
On the surface, Booker’s presumptive victory next week seems to signal the empowerment of a generation born after the 1967 Newark race riots that enabled Gibson to become the city’s first black mayor. Duly wary of strong white support for Booker, however, many blacks in Newark have raised flags. How can he serve the interests of those national backers who financed him when their issues, such as school vouchers, collide with the interests of Newark residents who need him to improve services?
Newark deserves a mayor for itself, not an ambassador from elsewhere.