Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
He was supposed to be the dreamboat savior of a troubled New Jersey city. Then he lost.
May 15, 2002 | The Brasilia restaurant in Newark's Ironbound district was packed tight, with hundreds of people all inching their way through a maze of long tables to get to an overflowing buffet of chicken, sausage and green beans. Waiters carried trays piled with Cokes and beer. The Brasilia had started to fill up just after 8 p.m., when the polls closed, and by 9 it was hard to move in or out.
That New Jersey's largest city holds its nonpartisan municipal elections in the middle of the spring is just one of the many ways Newark sets itself apart from the rest of the world. This is a city, after all, that's still trying to move past the gruesome legacy of the 1967 race riots that decimated the city's downtown. Cory Booker was supposed to be a big step in a new direction.
Booker, a made-for-TV dreamboat of a candidate, was challenging Sharpe James, the comically entrenched four-term incumbent, a man who saw no shame in tooling around town in a Rolls, a man who thinks nothing of tarring his opponent -- publicly -- by calling him "faggot white boy" or accusing Booker (who, like James, is an African-American and a Democrat) of being owned by the Jews and the Ku Klux Klan.
Let's back up. For those who have somehow missed the spate of news articles and network news profiles and "Today Show" interviews and NPR spotlights, here's a quick rundown: Cory Booker is 33 years old. He went to Stanford and Yale Law, and is a Rhodes scholar. After law school, Booker opted to move to Newark and become an activist. He ran for city council and, against the odds, won. Over the past four years, he's become a media cause cilhbre, staging stunts like pitching a tent and embarking on a hunger strike in a drug-infested housing project until the cops were shamed into cleaning up the area.
Sharpe James is 66. He's held elective office in Newark for as long as Booker's been alive. And while James' tenure has encompassed some impressive changes -- the city's Performing Arts Center is as beautiful a concert hall as you're likely to find in America -- outside of downtown, Newark is still mired in a poverty and despair that feels foreign to residents of American cities that participated in the boom of the 1990s, particularly those looking down, with upturned noses, from just across the river in New York.
But in the end, all of Booker's charm, and all the love bestowed upon him from luminaries on the left and the right -- the George Wills and Arianna Huffingtons and Barbara Streisands -- was not enough. Just after 9:30 p.m., one of the Brasilia's big-screen sets showed James leading by a couple of thousand votes, already a huge margin in a race where less than 55,000 people voted. The largely white crowd in this mainly minority city tried to stay hopeful, but there were enough realists here to know that it looked grim.
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