![]() To James, and to his disciples-of which there were many-Booker was not like them. And while attending the latter, in 1995, he moved into a housing project in Newark because, he said, he wanted to help the community. Sailed off to Stanford, then Oxford-as a Rhodes Scholar-then Yale Law. He was raised in the white, leafy upper-class New Jersey suburb of Harrington Park-about an hour’s drive from Newark. Having been born in the late ’60s, Booker was young-maybe too young. James defended his decades-long rule of Brick City by using Booker’s made-for-campaign-literature biography against him. It’s not about right or left, it really is about, ‘How can I pull people together to get things done?’”īooker began trying to answer that question in 2002, when he challenged the incumbent mayor of Newark: Sharpe James, a gap-toothed, gold-chain-wearing caricature of a corrupt, urban New Jersey politician. When you’re a mayor, the great thing about it is, you’re very, very pragmatic. ![]() There’s not that many folks with a perspective that you get from having to govern an urban area. “In Washington, it’s really exciting to be about the 21st-I think The Wall Street Journal said I was the 21st mayor in American history to go straight from being mayor to being a United States senator. I just want to run for a while and find some ice cream at the end to balance out the calorie intake and ex-take,” Booker jokes. “Steve is trying to make this into a political campaign speech about policy. He approaches the crowd which is-by virtue of his magnetic charm, or the light reflected off his toothy grin-already being pulled in his direction, where it forms a circle around him and Fulop. He wears a black Under Armour T-shirt, red basketball shorts, sneakers, and white socks hiked up to his calves. So even though it seems plausible that Bell is a Democratic plant sent to further weaken the Republican Party in New Jersey, Booker-celebrity, super hero, motivational tweeter-is barely polling above 50 percent.īooker finally materializes-the tall, shadowy figure that appears amid the red and blue lights of the police vehicles lining the perimeter of the parking lot. Murder, violent crime, unemployment, and taxes all rose dramatically under his stewardship. That would be the Brick City that Booker professed to love with the fire of a thousand suns, but did little to fundamentally change. And speaking of his former law career: Despite having resigned from his law firm once entering the mayor’s office, Booker received annual payments until 2011, during which time the firm was profiting handsomely off of Brick City. Months after he first entered the Senate, the New Jersey comptroller alleged that under Booker’s watch-or, more likely, because he was not watching-corruption ran rampant at a publicly funded water-treatment and reservoir-management agency, where Booker’s former law partner served as counsel. Attorney investigations into the Newark Watershed may have something to do with that. Yet Booker is actually having to put up a fight to be more than just a congressional seat-warmer. What’s more, Booker has once again found himself challenged by a Republican candidate who seems like he does not even want to win-a gold standard-obsessed former Reagan speechwriter named Jeff Bell, who has not lived in the Garden State for thirty years, is rumored to be running his campaign operation out of a hotel lobby, and whose idea of an attractive platform is to attack unmarried women for skewing left-wing because they are dependent on food stamps. For all anyone knows, Booker is out on the turnpike right now stopping two semi-trucks from colliding with each other through the sheer power of his charisma. And for the past year, Booker has been in Washington, posting selfies with his fellow federal lawmakers and vowing to reform the criminal-justice system. He shovels residents out of their driveways when it snows and tackles muggers with the graceful force of a former All-American tight end (which he is, of course). He saves the helpless from burning buildings and puppies from untimely deaths. Booker is friends with Oprah and Spike Lee.
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