Salon.com > Cory Booker

Three Wall Street stooges

Mon, 21 May 2012 20:33:00 +0000

It was inevitable.

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.

Live from Piers Morgan’s disastrous Twitter show

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 14:01:00 +0000

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.

“Brick City”: Like “The Wire,” but true

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 13:19:00 +0000

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

Why Cory Booker is mad as hell

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 11:26:00 +0000

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.

Keeping the new black candidates down

Tue, 18 Jun 2002 17:23:00 +0000

Newark (N.J.) City Councilman Cory Booker got the message pretty quickly. Mayor Sharpe James wasn't pleased that the young go-getter was going to challenge him, and told him privately that he would beat him with one simple strategy.

"I'm going to out-nigger you in the community," James told Booker, according to a source close to Booker.

Booker wouldn't comment about that story, and James could not be reached for his version of events. But that tactic does appear to be a key way James secured his victory, and won his fifth term as mayor last month, by a 53 to 46 percent margin.

With apparent sincerity, Booker still forces himself to remain respectful of his opponent. "I'm the beneficiary of a legacy of struggle," says Booker, "of the people who bled the beaches of Normandy red for me, of the people who bled the Southern soil. Martin Luther King and that generation --- including Sharpe James, that generation -- I am the product of that generation."

The madness of Newark’s King James

Tue, 30 Apr 2002 22:13:00 +0000

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.