The "Metrosexual" Streetfighter Subdued

Same old nothing from the Democrat machine. m/r

The Streetfighter Subdued by Steven Malanga - City Journal
Steven Malanga  22 October 2013

Where did the real Cory Booker go?

Cory Booker prevailed in last week’s special Senate election in New Jersey, but rarely has a triumph seemed more like a setback. Long considered a rising star in the national Democratic Party, Booker ran such a listless campaign—his lead over Republican Steven Lonegan shrank nearly 20 points over two months—that Garden State newspapers are already asking whether he can withstand a sustained challenge from a better-financed opponent. (Booker will serve out the final year of the late Senator Frank Lautenberg’s term and must run again next year for a full term.)

Much of the criticism of Booker’s performance has portrayed him as a celebrity-obsessed, Twitter-infatuated master of political style over substance who struggled to define himself early in the campaign as a progressive. This was not the same Cory Booker that New Jersey voters thought they knew. That Cory Booker was one of the earliest Democratic backers of school choice in New Jersey. He won his first city council seat not through social media but by knocking on thousands of doors in Newark’s poor Central Ward. That Booker overturned a corrupt political machine to gain the mayor’s office and brought Giuliani-style “broken windows” policing to New Jersey’s largest city. “Newark is increasingly driven by people guided to come here because of Cory Booker and because of the new Newark,” Rutgers political scientist Clement Price said when Booker ran for reelection as mayor in the spring of 2010. But what a difference the intervening three-and-a-half years seem to have made.

Booker, who grew up in a wealthy Jersey suburb, established a foothold in Newark when he did volunteer community work there as a Yale law student. Inspired by Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone, which seeks to break the cycle of generational poverty in the Manhattan neighborhoods where it operates, Booker stayed on in Newark after graduation to work with local youth. Frustrated by what he saw around him—including the city’s dysfunctional and sleazy political culture—Booker resolved to run for city council in 1998 as a reform candidate. He upset a 16-year incumbent with a door-to-door campaign in the city’s largely black Central Ward but quickly found himself frozen out by Newark’s Democratic political establishment. So Booker began his own grass-roots reform efforts. Appalled at how drug gangs operated openly in Newark, he parked an RV on a street corner that served as a drug mart and camped there to call the media’s attention to how ineffective the city’s police were at shutting down the trade. Then-mayor Sharpe James called these efforts “stunts,” but they won Booker a following in a city desperate for leadership.

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