American politicians are so used to going unchallenged — the turnover rate for incumbents is only a smidge higher than for popes — that when they actually face a rival for the office they believe is theirs, they go nuts.
Witness the campaign craziness going on in Newark, N.J., where the race for mayor has become a case study in the nationwide clash pitting reformers vs. the establishment, the afflicted vs. the comfortable, the politics of ideas vs. the politics of dirty tricks, and a new generation of leaders vs. the members of an elite old guard who have outstayed their welcome and refuse to either think anew or make room for those who do.
In elected office for 32 years, and feeling the heat of a surprisingly tight race, four-term mayor Sharpe James has leveled a variety of lunatic charges against his opponent, city councilman Cory Booker, accusing him of taking money from the KKK and the Taliban, collaborating with Jews to take over Newark, being a “faggot white boy” and (cover your ears, children) a Republican. What makes this mouth-foaming vitriol especially nutty is that Booker is an African-American, a Democrat and a Stanford and Yale Law School-educated Rhodes scholar, who, in case you’re wondering, is straight and hasn’t received a dime from David Duke or Mullah Omar.
Mayor James is acting as if he’s King James and Booker is a traitor to the throne, questioning his divine right to rule. But far from the self-serving apostate portrayed by James, Booker is, in fact, a true reformer of the kind sorely lacking in our national politics — driven by the needs of those left behind, struggling with failing schools, a chronic lack of health insurance and a dearth of affordable housing.
“The tragic thing about Newark,” says Booker, “is that while we sit in one of the richest states in the nation, we’re one of the 10 poorest cities.” This tale of two cities is being played out across America, as ossified politicians push their flash-over-substance agenda.
In Newark, the port city’s downtown area has seen an explosion of high-profile development, including a new performing arts center, a new minor league baseball stadium and the renovation of a number of area office buildings. But as Booker stresses on the campaign trail, most of the people in Newark have yet to benefit from the expansion. Eighty percent of Newark’s public school students qualify for free or reduced-cost lunch programs, and the city’s infant mortality rate is twice as high as in the rest of the state. Ready access to the performing arts and minor league baseball is all well and good, but people need their basic needs met before they can benefit from a night at the ballet.
“James,” says Booker, “has been in office as long as I’ve been alive. After 16 years, anything he could have done he should have done.”
Along with being able to communicate and inspire in a way that has drawn comparisons to Bobby Kennedy, Booker has demonstrated a rare ability to bring together the powerful and the powerless — so often the only coalition that can achieve timely social change.
Yet the very people who should be on his side or, at least, impartial are viciously attacking him. Jesse Jackson, who Booker campaigned for in 1988, called him “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” — a not so subtle echo of James’ claim that Booker isn’t black enough. “You have to learn to be an African-American,” King James said of his upstart rival. “And we don’t have time to train you.”
James, like so many desperate officeholders clinging to their station, is simply playing the “authenticity” card. It comes in many guises: In Newark it’s blackness, below the Mason-Dixon it’s good-old-boy bona fides, out West it’s rancher roots and in the suburbs it’s NIMBY street cred.
In another example of cronyism trumping principle, Sen. Jon Corzine, a proud champion of the little people, has endorsed James because he’s done “a good job as the mayor of Newark.” Tell that to the six out of 10 children who don’t graduate from high school, or the 31 percent of the population living below the poverty line. Would Corzine be proud to run on those numbers?
The truth is that James scratched Corzine’s back when the multimillionaire ran for the Senate in New Jersey, and now Corzine is returning the favor. It’s that simple and that crass. And the little people be damned.
It’s ironic that Booker is being attacked for what is most admirable about him: the fact that he’s consumed by his mission “to bring justice to the city.” Since being elected to the city council in 1998, Booker has again and again challenged the Newark political establishment to clean up crime- and drug-infested neighborhoods. He’s called attention to the cause by camping out in the middle of a notorious housing project, going on a hunger strike and spending six months sleeping in an old R.V., traveling from drug hot spot to drug hot spot.
And yet this lay-it-on-the-line commitment has been derided as “a media stunt” by the mayor, a man who owns a Rolls Royce, two boats and multiple homes. The whiff of desperation emanating from the James camp has turned into an outright stench. “He’s totally cynical, careerist and mercenary,” says James-loyalist Glen Ford about Booker — rather startling claims about a guy who turned down big bucks from Wall Street to live in a housing project and take on drug dealers. “I’m a connoisseur of inauthenticity,” says Booker’s Yale Law School dean, Anthony Kronman, “and I don’t see a drop of it in this young man’s soul. He’s totally genuine.”
In a refreshing contrast to his father’s antagonism, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. welcomes the challenge to the status quo that Booker embodies. “Cory,” he told me, “represents a new breed and a new brand of elected official who, if given the chance, can make a significant difference. Instead of discouraging these young leaders, we should do everything in our power to encourage them.”
But former Rep. Floyd Flake is not optimistic about his well-entrenched political peers’ willingness to cede power: “They will fight to the end to hold on to it.”
So what does the tawdry little drama in Newark mean to you in Chattanooga, Honolulu or Columbus, Ohio? Simply put, Sharpe James is a pathetically familiar type nationwide: the backslapping political hack with an unshakable addiction to the prerogatives of power. Cory Booker, the passionate reformer, is a rarer breed. But ask yourself, who’s in charge in your town? A Cory Booker? Or a Sharpe James?
Putting Booker in Newark’s City Hall is a small step toward winning the fight for reform, but it’s a move in the right direction. The next step is a lot harder, but even more vital: encouraging hundreds more like him to join the battle across the nation.
Arianna Huffington is a nationally syndicated columnist, the co-host of the National Public Radio program "Left, Right, and Center," and the author of 10 books. Her latest is "Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America."
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Mitt Romney put out an ad Monday using Newark Mayor Cory Booker, along with former Tennessee politician Harold Ford Jr. and former auto czar Steve Rattner, to attack the Obama campaign for its criticism of Romney’s work with Bain Capital. “Have you had enough of President Obama’s attacks on free enterprise?” the ad asks. “His own supporters have.”
Booker, of course, has become infamous for telling David Gregory on “Meet the Press” Sunday that Obama ads criticizing Romney’s Bain work are “nauseating” and “crap.” Then Harold Ford Jr., who laughably tried to become the senator from Wall Street in 2010 after failing to become the senator from Tennessee in 2006, couldn’t stand seeing Booker getting all the centrist Wall Street love, and jumped in behind him: ”I would not have backed off the comments, if I were Mayor Booker,” Ford told his friends on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Monday. “Private equity is not a bad thing. Private equity is a good thing in many instances.” For good measure the Romney ad also scooped up Rattner’s criticism – also on “Morning Joe” – from a few weeks ago: “I don’t think there’s anything Bain Capital did that they need to feel bad about,” Rattner told the crew.
Democrats are wringing their hands over the latest circular firing squad, but I think all the self-promotion and betrayal is a good thing. It should remind Democrats why many working- and middle-class people either sit out elections or don’t think there’s a big difference between the parties. For the last 20 years, folks like Rattner, Booker and Ford have tried to make sure their party courted Wall Street more slavishly than the GOP – and they often succeeded. We ought to remember that history before we get carried away with our populist high-fiving in the 2012 campaign, convinced that Obama deserves to win the fealty of the unemployed, underemployed and Occupy Wall Street, too.
I’ve always kind of liked Cory Booker, even while knowing he was a privileged Ivy Leaguer in love with his own capacity to reconcile conflict and also to convince rich people and Republicans that Democrats don’t hate them – kind of like Barack Obama, before he got sandbagged by the modern GOP. I still don’t think Booker has gotten nearly enough grief for his multilayered betrayal of Obama on “Meet the Press.” For one thing, he stepped on the president’s message, which is a terrible move for a trusted surrogate. He also played the despicable false-equivalence game – and he did it again in the video he made to try to walk back some of the damage he’d done. Booker keeps claiming what he really finds “nauseating” are the negative super PAC ads “from both sides” – but the Bain attack is coming directly from the Obama campaign (although the pro-Obama Priorities USA contributed one ad to the mix). Besides, it’s outrageous to equate the Bain attacks with the Fred Davis-Joe Ricketts plan to morph the president into Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I expect Republicans to try to make that lame argument, not Democrats.
Maybe most unfair, Booker and Ford endorsed the GOP lie that Obama has it in for private equity generally, not merely the excesses of firms like Bain. They’re only egging on the Wall Street wusses who act like the president has nationalized the banks just because he signed on to the flawed Dodd-Frank bill and once called a few of them “fat cats.” Booker and Ford are clearly only out for themselves, anxious to prove there are some Democrats who still love Wall Street. Of course, this shouldn’t surprise us: Booker has teamed up with hedge fund moguls and other super-rich private equity folks (as well as Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates) in the course of reforming Newark’s schools as well as generally advancing his career. (He’s also ignored public records laws to keep those big donors from scrutiny.)
I wrote about Rattner’s comments earlier. By all accounts he did a decent job as auto czar, helping the president restructure the big three automakers and save the industry. But the big Democratic Party donor is clearly trying to pull the party back from those who are coming to understand that its fealty to Wall Street has hurt it with working- and middle-class voters – and much more important, has hurt the country. It’s Democrats who have for years protected the carried interest rule, keeping tax rates low for investors and private equity principals like Mitt Romney. Booker, Ford and Rattner are firing a warning shot at Democrats who are wandering away from their Wall Street. To its credit, the Obama team is doubling down on its Bain campaign, and let’s hope that continues.
If you missed Piers Morgan’s show last night about Twitter, don’t worry, so did I. And I happened to be sitting in the audience. You see, before the show we were told that, in addition to such guests as Martha Stewart, Alyssa Milano, Twitter founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and Twitter entrepreneur and wine enthusiast Gary Vaynerchuk, we the audience would also be encouraged to tweet during the show.
Which meant, naturally, that I only caught about five minutes of looking at the actual stage, and spent the rest of the time tweeting about how ridiculous this entire concept was. Apparently I didn’t miss much, either: Piers Morgan, in his typical celebrity ass-kissing way, spent the entire hour talking about how he was the inspiration for Charlie Sheen getting on Twitter (as if that’s a positive thing?); for getting Martha Stewart to have her fans tweet her something about pierogis live on the air (technology!) while she spoke about the proper etiquette for shouting out into the Twittersphere (Martha uses Twitter the way a lot of celebrities do: not to interact with her fans but as a sort of message board for her thoughts of the day); and for talking to Alyssa Milano in a fascinating story about why she decided to tell everyone the sex of her baby on Twitter.
About five minutes of the show was dedicated to discussing what the application was doing internationally, and zero minutes were spent asking Biz or Jack anything of interest, like why their co-founder Evan Williams wasn’t even mentioned during the entire hour. (My theory is that Ev is poised to become the next Eduardo Saverin of the tech world.)
At one point, Piers declared proudly to Alyssa, “We’re all Twits!” and continually referenced how Biz and Jack’s original idea was to have Twitter used for bursts of short, inconsequential ideas. Only two people managed to dispute that claim: Cory Booker (who used Twitter to help his city during the snowstorms this winter, and who joked off-camera that he was planning a flash-mob over to Mayor Bloomberg’s place after the show), and Gary Vaynerchuk, who frankly called Martha out on her b.s.
“Twitter is about listening,” not talking, said Gary, who used Twitter to help launch both his wine business on a grand scale, as well as his own Web show, “Wine Library TV.” Piers, who wasn’t really listening (you ever notice how the man never asks any follow-up questions?), turned to Biz and Jack and asked if they were worried that celebrities revealed too much about themselves on Twitter. If Biz and Jack had any concerns that night, creating the application that let us know Alyssa Milano will be having a baby boy was not one of them.
Piers spent most of the commercial breaks tweeting on his phone, not looking up when guests sat down at the table. I couldn’t really blame him: I was doing the same thing.
Jayda and Creep from The Sundance Channel's Brick City
Cynicism is a luxury item. You might be able to afford it, but not everyone can. If you’re young, you can roll your eyes at the world without paying much of a price. If you’re rich, you can shake your head and sigh from the comfort of your climate-controlled, pest-free, meticulously clean square footage.
But if you’re poor or black or overweight or old or handicapped or depressed, if the world isn’t coming up roses for you unless you fight hard, every day, to make it work, cynicism can mean a slow downward spiral to death. Once you’ve suffered loss or stumbled and fallen hard, cynicism looks less like harmless fun and more like quicksand.
Of course we all like to pretend that our nice things and our education and our highly professional, dry-cleaned existence means that we’re above hope, that we don’t have to believe in something like the little guy does, that we don’t have to help out or worry or lend our voices to the voiceless. But that’s all an elaborate game of make-believe.
You may be able to afford the luxury of cynicism now. But when cynicism becomes a way of life, eventually, you pay the tax with your soul.
Another brick in the wall
Sure, it’s tough to fight your own skepticism when you witness how ugly the world can be, day after day. Now imagine growing up in a place that most people see as ugly: Newark, N.J. Its inhabitants are mostly poor and have been plagued by terrible crime rates for decades. But when you watch Sundance’s “Brick City,” a five-part miniseries that airs every night this week (10 p.m. Monday, Sept. 21, through Friday, Sept. 25) (and you’d better watch it), you get a different view. Once you get past the fact that you’re hearing the same old glowing promises out of Mayor Cory Booker that you’ve heard from every politician under the sun, once you get past the inherent hopelessness of a former Bloods gang member named Jayda trying to kick the gang life, once you look beyond the same old shots of beleaguered cops and overwhelmed high school teachers and tearful community activists, mourning innocent kids gunned down in the streets, there’s something beautiful at the core of this series.
It takes a while to let your cynicism slough off, partially because watching a real-life version of HBO’s “The Wire” is a little too brutal to take to heart at first, because you’ve been trained, by that show and by the local news, to avert your eyes from such a gut-wrenchingly dim scenario. Booker, who comes across as charming and slightly nerdy, is still determined to reduce crime in the city of Newark drastically. He wants to make the streets safe for the children of Newark, and keep more of them in school for longer. Can you feel the deep sighs coming already?
While the access that filmmakers Marc Levin and Mark Benjamin, along with producer Forest Whitaker, managed to get to intimate conversations and backroom meetings is truly impressive, it’s not always easy to craft a narrative around an endless flow of dismal planning sessions, homicides, press conferences and the latest fight between Jayda and her boyfriend (a member of the Crips). During the first hour or so, it’s tough to see how this story will ever take shape.
And that’s not to mention the desperation of this picture: Of course the city is broke. Of course Police Director Garry McCarthy is faced with trying to do more with less, but still has to alternately rally and bully his troops in scenes that could’ve come straight from David Simon’s keyboard. Of course Booker is running on fumes and idealism, repeating his own mantras over and over, trying to get all of the beleaguered city officials and community organizers and cops to catch the spirit. Even when the mayor is full of inspiration and a burning desire to fix his city, most of his city officials look like they could use a stiff drink.
But by the third episode — and I would beg you to stick with this series until then — something beautiful starts to reveal itself. Suddenly, we stop seeing Jayda as just another former gang member, or Booker as just another politician, or Ras Baraka, the principal of Central High School in Newark, as just another disappointed school administrator. Suddenly we can see straight through to the hearts and souls of these people. Maybe it just takes two and a half hours of this very patient, day-in-the-life documentary to recognize how special the people on-screen are, or maybe it takes that long for its subjects to forget that the cameras are on, or maybe it just takes a while to appreciate how good filmmakers Levin and Benjamin are at ferreting out salient moments so that we really get to know these subjects.
After some dark moments in the first few hours, Jayda starts to really come alive for the camera. She’s obviously smart and dynamic from the beginning, but her ability to connect with younger women only becomes clear when she starts a mentoring group for at-risk high-school-age girls called Nine Strong Women. During a sleepover for the girls at her apartment, Jayda warns them against falling in with the wrong crowd, telling them, “Be careful about who you call a friend.” One of the girls is annoyed that Jayda is looking straight at her when she says that.
“You want to know why I look at you? Because you have a beautiful heart and you are gullible as hell. You will believe anything. And that is the worst type of person to be in 2008 living in Newark, New Jersey.”
Meanwhile, Jayda’s boyfriend Creep, who still hangs out with his fellow Cripps gang members, says he doesn’t want to be living in Newark at all. When the two of them go looking for a new apartment to share with their baby, plus Creep’s daughter and Jayda’s young son, Creep spells it out for Jayda.
Creep: I wanna live …
Jayda: In a neutral zone.
Creep: … in the business hood, where I go outside and it’s like “How you doing this morning, sir? How you doing?” Fucking suits. That’s where I wanna live at.
Jayda: Where in Newark could we find that?
Creep: I ain’t say nothin’ about Newark.
So why not just move to a prettier place? Sure, some can’t afford it. But crucially, a lot of the people we see on-screen aren’t merely interested in making their own lives prettier (like so many of us). They’re interested in somehow, some way, pulling their community out of a deep, dark pit of despair.
“When you say a kid doesn’t want to learn, that’s like saying a moth doesn’t want to be a butterfly,” says Principal Baraka of the challenges of teaching kids with so much turmoil in their lives. “Kids learn every single day. We learn every single day. The question is, what do we learn?”
Baraka and Vice Principal Todd Warren aim to teach their kids lessons that many of them aren’t learning at home. In one heartbreaking scene, Warren addresses a group of freshman boys taking part in the Freshman Boys Overnight, a program at Central High that seems to encourage the boys to make the school a sort of second home.
“You’re playing around in the classroom, but those kids in [predominantly white] Millburn have their faces in a book,” Warren says, but no one looks all that convinced. “But you’re too foolish to see that! We’re telling you this stuff because we love you, man.”
Warren looks around the room and his voice softens. “Some of you don’t know anything about real love, though. You’ve never had any type of interaction with a real man before. Who here is being raised by a woman?” Almost every single kid in the classroom raises his hand.
“Those of you who don’t have men in your lives, your fathers, strong male figures, listen. Mr. Baraka and Mr. Warren love you. Mr. Baraka and Mr. Warren are here for you.” Even the toughest kids in the room look like they’re about to cry when Warren says this.
Boys may always grow up without fathers and Newark may always be a tough place, but this city’s heroes give us all something to aspire to. As most of us struggle mightily to improve our own lives, these people fight every day to make the world a safer and better place for their neighbors. In revealing their trials and toils, Sundance’s “Brick City” makes our luxuries, from our comforting things to the comfort of our cynicism, look downright foolish by comparison. By resisting the urge to avert our eyes, we can glimpse the blinding beauty that lies in the humblest acts of optimism, generosity and hope.
Anger gets a bad rap. It’s the universal disguised denunciation (“Why are feminists so angry?”), the wink-and-nudge code word to signal contempt while fronting as pity for the deranged. That label gives those at whom the anger is directed a get-out-of-jail-free card to abandon the debate since anger is, in one fell swoop, deemed irrational. Neat trick that, changing the subject from the offense that provoked the response to a feigned disgust over the angry person’s “unseemly” behavior.
Here’s hoping that Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker holds onto his newfound rage over his city’s crime rates. A recent column in the Newark Star-Ledger lays out the stark reality that has turned this Zen-y, post-race, teetotaling philosopher, Rhodes scholar, Stanford football star and Yale Law grad into Martin Luther King Jr. If he doesn’t see progress soon, we may be heading for Malcom X territory. A year into his mayoralty, Booker’s million and one grad school-infused plans to save Newark have come to naught and will continue to do so as long as the war on drugs remains a war on the urban poor.
Booker staked his campaign on making Newark safe, yet the city’s as dangerous as it ever was. Its tally of 105 murders last year is the highest in 10 years. But that die was cast long before he nailed his shiny diplomas to his office wall, because New Jersey‘s urban and crime policies are designed to keep Newark an enclave of despair, violence and race-based underachievement. Drugs remain about the only game in town for an urban poor denied entree to the legit life. And, once in the drug life, talk about cutthroat competition; dealers are ruthlessly assassinating each other, up close and personal. The only good news is the decrease in random killings. The number of people hit by gunfire is down 31 percent — people who aren’t drug dealers, that is.
What do we expect as a society, when we fail to educate and embrace “the usual suspects” and send them out into this brutal economy with no way to make an honest living? What’s more, once they’ve fallen into that trap, we do everything possible to ensure they’ll have to repeat the pattern. Cherry on top? The millions that the Halliburtons of America make off the prison-industrial complex. I’m not one given to easy racial tropes, but prisons are indeed the new plantations. New Jersey spends a billion dollars a year on prisons, one-third of which are filled with nonviolent offenders, our nation’s highest rate.
Not surprising, considering that the entire city (save the airport) is within a school drug zone, which means that illegal drug activity in the area carries a mandatory minimum of three years’ incarceration. According to Star-Ledger columnist Tom Moran, 96 percent of those so sentenced are black or Hispanic, though virtually none of the drugs in question were sold to children. Even so, the state Legislature voted down a proposal to shrink the school zones from 1,000 feet to 200 feet, offering instead proposals to make the mandatory penalties, already among the nation’s toughest, tougher still. It also refuses to fund more than token levels of drug treatment or sentencing alternatives for the nonviolent, with predictable results.
A staggering 1,500 state cons are released back to Newark each year. One thousand of them will end up back on lockdown, probably on drug charges, within three years. In between prison stays, the state’s post-release restrictions on employment (or basic adult necessities like, say, getting a driver’s license) are among the nation’s most draconian. Given the underperforming schools most in this group attended, it’s a wonder we don’t just round them up, à la the hapless Baghdad-cabby-and-tea-shop guys of our war on terror raids, and lock them all in conveniently located Gitmos.
In tracing the arc of Booker’s road to rage, columnist Moran noted, “At a time when even states like Texas are changing course, we are sticking with our failed strategy.” Booker told Moran that he was willing to go to jail himself to change things. “I’m going to battle on this,” the mayor said. “We’re going to start doing it the gentlemanly way. And then we’re going to do the civil disobedience way. Because this is absurd … I’m talking about marches. I’m talking about sit-ins at the state capital. I’m talking about whatever it takes.”
Booker’s right. It’s time to let America know that we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore. Urban policy, in most of America and especially in Newark, is what we GIs called a self-licking ice cream cone: It exists only for its own satisfaction and benefits no one but itself. This is a reality that dreamy-eyed young leaders like Cory Booker are learning the hard way. Let no one say that he didn’t try to work within the system. Now, the same energy he put into genteelly lobbying Trenton politicians with pie charts and spreadsheets must now take to the streets. No justice, no peace.
Twit. 
Jayda and Creep from The Sundance Channel's Brick City 
