Do you know of Cory Booker?
Well, you need to. You should be watching Brick City this week on the Sundance Channel.
I first became aware of Mayor Booker when I saw the documentary Street Fight, about his mayoral campaign against incumbent Sharpe James. James throws every terrible insult out at him. He calls Booker a white republican (which in Newark is like being called a Klan member) and basically tries to say that Cory, raised by civil rights activists, and a Rhodes scholar, isn’t black enough and is an intruder in Newark.
Booker loses to James in 2002, but becomes mayor in 2006 after Sharpe James decides not to run. Throughout the doc there are mentions of suspicions that James takes brides for contracts in Newark. I saw the doc two years ago. Last year on the news I saw that James was indicted and convicted of fraud and conspiracy.
Booker is interesting and inspiring, not only because of the obvious comparisons one could make to Obama, or because of his close friendship with Rachel Maddow (they were Rhodes scholars at Oxford together!) but because he is trying to take one of the worst examples of a run down and dangerous inner city and fix it without totally gentrifying and corporatizing it. He is making big changes and bringing money in without forcing everyone out. He goes out of his way to live amongst the people of Newark in an effort to understand and expose the danger. And his discipline is absurd. Should you ever get the chance to see Street Fight, you’ll surely be impressed by what he gets done in a day, and the calm, cool, and committed way he gets it done.
He’ll have my support should he ever make it to national stage. But I’ll be following what happens in Newark either way.
