EDITOR: This is an unfair heading to an otherwise interesting and informative article on a potential 2020 or 2024 presidential candidate. A relatively minor scandal in a Newark department which did not involve the mayor is blown up to be an indictment of an entire career.
DAILY BEAST COLUMN: … Having been born in the late ’60s, Booker was young—maybe too young. He was raised in the white, leafy upper-class New Jersey suburb of Harrington Park—about an hour’s drive from Newark. Star football player, star student. Sailed off to Stanford, then Oxford—as a Rhodes Scholar—then Yale Law. And while attending the latter, in 1995, he moved into a housing project in Newark because, he said, he wanted to help the community. To James, and to his disciples—of which there were many—Booker was not like them. He was an outsider. A phony. James went as far as to call him an insufficiently black (his grandmother was white) Jewish (Baptist, actually, but served as copresident of a Jewish students group at Oxford) “Republican who took money from the KKK” (source unknown).
Booker lost, but in doing so, won: He starred in Street Fight, a documentary about the campaign, which received high praise from critics and an Oscar nomination. When he returned to challenge James in 2006, he was a celebrity with a chip on his shoulder. James dropped out of the race, and Booker strutted into office at 920 Broad Street with 72 percent of the vote. James would go onto be indicted on 33 counts of fraud—including charging the city credit cards with $58,000 in personal expenses—just like every other Newark mayor had been in the previous 45 years. Booker—who got elected by promising to improve safety through investing in the police department and bring accountability back to the city which for so long was plagued by mismanagement—would be different. Booker would nurse Newark’s wheezing, decaying body back to health. On Election Night, he beamed: “This is the beginning of a new chapter in the life of our city.”
Booker was no stranger to heroics. At Stanford, so the story goes, he talked a suicidal student down from a roof. While on the Newark City Council, beginning in 1998, he started engaging in the sort of stunts that would ultimately lead to his self-mythologization: living in a motorhome on a drug-ravaged street corner, and embarking on a 10-day hunger strike to bring attention to the projects… (more)
