The Road to Perdition is Paved With Feet of Clay (excuse the mixed metaphor): The Legend of Cory Booker

Washington D.C.

Newark, NJ

 Should Booker win the Senate Seat from New Jersey, which is no longer a foregone outcome partly because of Obama, he will find DC much like Newark. Except there will be enough long knives out to make Steve Lonegan (Republican Senate opponent) look like his protector. m/r

The American Spectator : The Legend of Cory Booker

By Daniel Foster from the October 2013 issue

Newark’s patron-saint mayor could do no wrong.  So why does everybody hate him now?

HISTORIANS OF THE YMCA’s “Youth in Government” legislative simulations will recall that in 2001, after two solid terms in the state senate, your correspondent was elected Youth Governor of New Jersey in a blue-state upset that saw a reform-minded conservative succeed on a platform of tax cuts, school choice, and marijuana decriminalization. 

Less often remembered is that the election banquet that year was keynoted by the honorable (more on this presently) Sharpe James, a grown-up Democratic state senator from the 29th District and, conjointly, 35th mayor of Newark. In my post-victory euphoria, I recall little of the substance of James’s address, save a well-worn line about how nobody thought he would win his first council race in 1970—“not my opponent, not my opponent’s wife, not my opponent’s girlfriend….”
In an amusing twist, it would be James’s own mistress, one Tamika Riley, who helped land him in a federal penitentiary in Petersburg, Virginia, after a court found him guilty of rigging the sale of city land to Riley so she could fence it at a handsome profit. 

Before that fall, of course, wenteth pride. In what would prove to be his last campaign, a hubristic James unleashed the full fearsome might of Newark’s machinery on a carpetbagger from the suburbs named Cory Booker, who had harassed James’s flanks for years from a perch on the city council, and who had the gall to try and unseat him in 2002.

Booker talked like Palo Alto and smelled like New Haven, but he had roused the rabble, convinced more than a handful of battered Newarkers that their once-proud city could be more than a punch line. It spooked James enough that he purged the municipal payrolls of suspected Booker sympathizers, had sanitation workers tear down Booker’s yard signs, and used city cops like mob enforcers to intimidate businesses that dared raise funds for him. Wily old Sharpe fended off Booker ’02—essentially painting Booker as a high-yellow, crypto-Republican homosexual in the process—but the writing was on the wall. James got out of Booker’s way in ’06, and the Rhodes scholar became mayor, taking more than 70 percent of the vote. James took a federal collar, one of many New Jersey Democrats to go down in a decade that was, even by the Garden State’s dubious standards, one of unusual infamy and intrigue. 

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