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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
In this, James and Hilliard have more in common than do their respective opponents.
James "ran a campaign trying to appeal to people's fears, to their lesser angels," Booker says in an interview with Salon. "He ran a campaign trying to divide and conquer."
Booker, raised in nearby Bergen County, educated at Stanford, Yale Law School and Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, wasn't authentically black, James would declare. "You have to learn to be an African-American, and we don't have time to train you," James shouted, as if at Booker, at one rally. His campaign slogan became "The Real Deal." The usual race-baiting hucksters, like Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton, came out to beat their usual drums. Jackson said Booker -- who worked on Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign -- has a "sheeplike appearance and wolflike characteristics."
What wolflike characteristics? Booker was, of course, a tool -- a way for whitey to get his meat hooks into Newark. James even accused Booker of taking campaign contributions from the Ku Klux Klan.
"This is about taking over Newark for power," James told a small crowd in early May, roughly two weeks before the election. "The people who left Newark could never believe we'd still be here. So they're sending someone in to take it over. They sent someone who acts like us, talks like us but is not us. They want Newark! They want our port! They want Newark Airport! They want our city! They want to cut down Sharpe!"
Booker tells Salon that James used "race-based appeals while we talked about real things." Like the low rate of minority-owned businesses in Newark, or the fact that nearly 90 percent of the city's municipal contracts go to firms outside the city. "He played to the fears; we talked about the real stuff, including issues that do have racial realities. Like the disparities in incarceration in New Jersey, which is worse than in Alabama, or Mississippi."
Like Hilliard, James had a less-than-stellar record that Booker could exploit, including a federal corruption investigation that ended with the conviction of James' chief of staff for embezzlement and his police director for bribery. And the fact that James, who drives a Rolls-Royce, has seen his salary go from $80,000 when he was first elected in 1986 to $248,000 today -- more than any governor, not to mention the mayors of New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago. More than one-quarter of the good citizens of Newark, not incidentally, live in poverty.
Booker was elected to city council in 1998 and almost immediately James started hearing his footsteps. The reaction was, sadly, typical for any entrenched hack, regardless of color. In the summer of 1999, for instance, Booker staged a 10-day fast and sit-in at the blighted Garden Spires housing complex in Newark to call attention to the community's problems. James had already been eyeing Booker warily, thinking him a media hog, and James' police chief announced that he wouldn't provide police protection for Booker and his supporters during their protest. (Eventually city officials were shamed into action and announced that they would provide the projects with a 24-hour police van and a security fence.)
In November 1999, Booker led a two-day march to draw attention to the kids of Newark and their high rates of teen pregnancy, dropoutism and infant mortality; City Hall officials initially denied Booker a permit for his march.
Then, during the May 14 mayoral primary election, city employees, including police officers, reportedly harassed Booker supporters at the polls. This after a campaign where a Booker campaign trailer was broken into and files were stolen, and one of James' closest aides was arrested for tearing down Booker's campaign signs.
During the campaign, it wasn't enough for James to slam Booker for his past support of school vouchers, for the support he had gleaned from suspect boosters (at least inside Newark) like George F. Will and Jack Kemp. While whisper campaigns slimed Booker for being gay, Jewish and white, James himself accused Booker of taking money from the Ku Klux Klan and Booker insists that James called him "the faggot white boy." (James has denied saying it.) Last August, a Booker supporter told the New Jersey Jewish News that he heard James accuse Booker of "collaborating" with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach -- a friend of Booker's from his Oxford days -- "and the Jews to take over Newark."
"I was not surprised by anything," Booker tells Salon. "I knew what I was going up against. I knew the exact attack."
Booker-James and Hilliard-Davis are but two races, and there are of course stark differences in addition to the similarities. Booker is more New Democrat than Davis, whose primary differences with Hilliard are over policy in the Middle East (Davis supports Israel while Hilliard is more supportive of the Arab world) and whether or not Hilliard is, well, a total disgrace. But the young guns also more likely represent races of Election Day future.
