Savoymag.com

Cory Booker is being swarmed by women. He dutifully bends to hug and kiss each one and there is a gentle jostling as the fans - all residents of a Newark, NJ senior citizens’ home - press forward to take their turn. Seventy two-year-old Doris Worsley, decked in a black head wrap and dark glasses, smiles as Booker embraces her. The woman beside her screws up her face in mock disgust. “You cheatin’ on me?” she asks Booker. He throws his head back and laughs.

Meet Newark’s Golden Boy. The city’s May 14th mayoral election might have gone unnoticed were it not for Booker, 32, an Ivy League grad and Rhodes scholar who is attempting to oust 16-year incumbent Sharpe James. It is a race fraught with foul accusations and racial slurs, though it is one between two African American men. Both Booker and James’ offices have been broken into; supporters have been hassled; campaign signs have been torn down. In the past, Booker has had his car ticketed, his license suspended, his car windows smashed. And James has called him a “republican who took money from the KKK” and even gone as far as to brand him “the faggot white boy.”

This race is also a study of opposites. While both men are democrats, Booker was raised in affluent Harrington Park, NJ, was student body president at Stanford and went on to Yale Law School. James, 66, was raised by a single mother in Newark’s impoverished Central Ward. The mayor is at times gruff, and his unprincipled tactics are those of an old-school politician molded by the rigors of the civil rights era. Booker, polished and a natural showman, is a man who has reaped that era’s rewards.

Booker is six foot three, clean-cut and handsome and his pedigree naturally begs the question, why Newark, a blighted city long one of the most depressed in the nation? He explains that his family has a 50-year history with the city, and remembers going to church there as a child. “As a young African American man, I’ve inherited a great legacy of struggle and benefited from others’ sacrifices,” he says. “I have an obligation to be loyal to that and the way you stay loyal is to continue the fight.”

Booker’s fight began in 1998, when he ran against and beat another four-term incumbent to become councilman of Newark’s Central Ward. He had come to Newark the year before, fresh out of law school, to work as a tenants’ lawyer. His “subtle dislike” of politicians steered him more towards community service than government. “My heroes are people like Mandela and Gandhi,” he says, “people who were trained as lawyers but were also social activists.”

But Booker found it hard to change housing conditions as city officials turned a blind eye to slum lords, many of whom Booker says were huge campaign contributors. “City Hall was at best apathetic about the struggles that people were living with, and at worst complicit,” he says. He realized that the only way to affect change was to run for councilman, and he won by registering more new voters than had even participated in the previous election.

That victory made Booker a media darling. He made headlines by moving into Brick Towers, a housing project where he still resides, and camping out in some of the city’s most drug-infested neighborhoods to shame the mayor into action. He also arranged job fairs and set up a Wall Street adopt-a-school program.

Booker’s goal as mayor is to revive the rest of the city as he has the Central Ward. He intends to enforce quality of life laws, provide better schooling, and use alternative detention programs to help reform young black men as opposed to simply throwing them in jail. He wants a less corrupt government - “It’s repugnant that the richest people in Newark are not your business class, not your professional class but your political class,” he says, and intends to cut his salary and use the surplus for community development. But while Booker criticizes James and points to problems such as Newark’s high crime and unemployment rates, he says, “People like Sharpe James broke down doors for me. We do not disrespect him for his service, we say it’s time for a change.”

While Booker has captured the hearts of the media, his fate ultimately lies in the hands of the citizens of Newark, many of whom believe that he might be too young and inexperienced to tackle the problems that the city faces. Jay DeVore, 56, thinks that James has done a good job of revitalizing the city, and that he has the experience to keep the momentum going. “[Booker] seems to be a sincere person. I like some of the things he’s saying, but he’s more or less new to this.”

Even Doris Worsley says: “I think Cory’s ready and it’s time for a change, but he should have waited another four years.”

Newark has definitely improved under James’ reign, and he lists the swanky New Jersey Performing Arts Center and new baseball stadium as just two of his many accomplishments. For many, James’ “renaissance” is a reality, but Booker says it has left Newark’s most needy residents behind: “If your city is ranked the worst to raise a child and is one of the most violent in the country, that is not a renaissance.”

Booker is messianic in his manner, and his dreams have more than once been described as a little naive. But he says there are a lot of “low hanging fruit,” changes, such as better budget allocation and improved police presence, that could make an instant change. “If you look at black history over the past 200 years, you see that it is the history of making the impossible possible,” he says. “The challenges that we have in Newark are staggering, but no problem is beyond our control.”

Of the challenges he has faced in the past couple months, he says: “It’s unfortunate that the mayor’s doing a lot of things that I think are anti-democratic. We’re trying to change a longstanding political order, or disorder, and that’s a struggle, but I will not be deterred.”
Whether he wins or not, there is already talk that Booker is headed for the White House. Daryn Martin, 36, believes that Booker’s scruples alone set him apart from other politicians: “I like his energy and honesty. He followed through on his promises when he was elected councilman and I think he’ll continue the fight for others,” he says.

For now, Booker prefers to focus on the task at hand. As he powers through a list of pledges and aspirations at his address at the senior citizens’ home, he finishes with one simple request: “Give me the chance, and I will make you proud.”