Cory Anthony Booker:
On a Path
That Could Have No
Limits
By DAMIEN CAVE, from
the NYTimes on the Web, May 10, 2006
 |
|
|
Marko Georgiev for The New York Times
Cory
Booker signed autographs for children at a polling place at Ann
Street School in Newark. |
|
Newark, NJ -- Democrats
compare him to Barack Obama, the charismatic United States senator from
Illinois, or Harold Ford Jr., the Tennessee congressman.
Young, black, Ivy League-educated and pragmatic, Cory Anthony Booker is part of
an emerging generation of politicians who came up after the major battles of the
civil rights movement and say they have outgrown its approach.
But while Mr. Booker, 37, clearly sees himself as a next-generation leader who
will fight for ideas and people, not ideology or party, he has chosen a position
that has long been the first stop of his elders: big-city mayor.
Unlike Mr. Ford, who was sworn into Congress at the age of 26, Mr. Booker will
become a manager — "chief executive of a major city," said Ellis Cose, an author
and columnist who often writes about race.
That decision could make or break a career that his friends and supporters said
could have no limits.
"These other guys, at the end of the day, don't really have to run anything,"
Mr. Cose said. "He's going to have to run something, and he's never really
run anything of any substance or size before. He can fail."
Mr. Booker, whose major management experience is with his own campaign, has
acknowledged the challenge before him. But he said there is a logic and
inevitability to his decision to take on the entrenched political establishment
to run a struggling, poor, largely black city.
In a recent interview, Mr. Booker said he moved into Newark in 1995 — the summer
before his second year at Yale Law School — because he saw it as a place where
he could make a difference. He has spoken often, and passionately, about
cities, saying they are "the last frontier to make real the promise of America."
He insists that he will make Newark a national model of urban governing by
employing a mix of discipline and openness to new ideas.
"I'm a big believer that we need to raise people's expectations in this city,"
he said in one recent interview.
His urban zeal was developed in adulthood. He grew up in Harrington Park,
N.J., a wealthy, mostly white suburb 20 miles north of Newark. Mr. Booker, the
youngest of two sons born to parents who were among the first African-American
executives at I.B.M., was known in high school for getting good grades and
starring on the football team, and for his love of science fiction, including
"Star Trek."
Chris Magarro, a childhood friend who is now a major campaign contributor,
described Mr. Booker as a habitually social overachiever who sometimes put
people off with his eagerness to please.
"He's not like anybody you'll meet," Mr. Magarro said. "It would be very
hard to figure that he's that genuine." But, he added, "he really is just
that nice."
His earnestness can at times be confounding. Upbeat, chatty and
competitive, he drops quotations into conversations like a professor seeking
tenure. Even when campaigning, he occasionally corrects people over minor
mistakes.
In 2002, his sunny optimism, out-of-town roots and multiple degrees — from
Stanford, Oxford and Yale Law — were turned against him when he tried to make
the leap from Newark's Municipal Council to mayor.
His decision to take on Sharpe James, a canny, up-from-the-streets political
brawler who had never lost an election, could have ended his political career.
It was an ugly campaign. The mayor, seeing an opening in Mr. Booker's
out-of-town support and his willingness to embrace such nontraditional urban
ideas as school vouchers, falsely said that Mr. Booker was white, Jewish, gay
and a Republican.
In the end, the voters decided to go with what they knew. Mr. Booker lost
by six percentage points.
Over the next four years, he split time between a nonprofit he founded, Newark
Now; a downtown law firm where he was a partner; and efforts to quietly win over
the city's skeptics, one by one, with an eye toward a second campaign for mayor.
"In many ways, he went underground, below the radar," said Carl Sharif, his
campaign manager. "He was talking to a lot of people, just not in public."
His effort was helped by Mr. James's decision not to seek a sixth term and by
the belated, underfunded campaign of his leading opponent, State Senator Ronald
L. Rice.
Now, having won over many of the skeptics, Mr. Booker is poised to take over the
poor struggling city of 280,000, with its failing schools, rising gun violence,
annual budget of more than $600 million and ossified bureaucracy loyal to Mayor
James.
David Paterson, the New York state senator who is running for lieutenant
governor and who recently became friendly with Mr. Booker, said he believed that
Mr. Booker was capable and authentic.
"He's what the people who were running things really wanted to produce," Mr.
Paterson said. "Young black scholars who had great opportunity, had great
cachet, had relationships outside the community and cared enough to come back to
the community."
And yet, as a manager he is still an unknown.
"After all that's been written and said about him, there's still the unanswered
question: What is his leadership ability?" said the Rev. Reginald T.
Jackson, executive director of the Black Ministers' Council of New Jersey.
"We're about to find out. And in fact, he's about to find out, too."
Josh Benson contributed reporting for this article.
|
