Cory Booker - NY Times - Analysis: Be Careful What You Wish For

*
The New York Times, Sunday April 30, 2006
New Jersey

Be Careful What You Wish For

By JOSH BENSON

NEWARK

CALL Cory Booker idealistic, pragmatic or some combination of the two. Just don't call him naïve.

"I'll take that criticism," he said, his eyes boring in on his questioner. "I'm politically naïve, but I'm a guy who started in this process four or five years ago, who took on the biggest, toughest political machine, urban political machine in the state of New Jersey. And I'm sitting here right now, naïve as I am, 40 points ahead of my opponent — maybe 50 points, according to our internal polls — ready to become the mayor of the City of Newark."

Mr. Booker ended by asserting that he was, in fact, "naïve like a fox."

Four years after losing his first race for mayor, Mr. Booker, 37, is on the verge of succeeding his political nemesis, Sharpe James, as elected leader of this embattled city of 280,000. In the likely event that Mr. Booker completes his political evolution by winning the coming election on May 9, his skills as a candidate will never again be in doubt.

But then what?

Mr. Booker, a former Rhodes scholar with ambitious plans for overhauling Newark's government, will be walking into a toxic environment if he wins: fiscal booby traps, institutional hostility, strangulation of outside aid and, to top it off, high public expectations about his ability to deal with it all.

"He can't come in as the knight on the white horse," said Walter Fields, a former political director of the N.A.A.C.P. "In the beginning, everyone hails the knight, and six months later they're ready to tar and feather him. That's the real danger for him."

Voters have little choice but to harbor high hopes that a new mayor will improve matters. Newark is currently the second-poorest city of its size in the country, according to a recent study by the United States Census Bureau that compared median incomes in places with more than 250,000 residents. Nearly half of Newark's working-age population lacks steady employment. Gang activity and murders are on the rise. And the school system has one of the lowest graduation rates in the state.

Mr. Booker's rivals — even those resigned to the idea of his winning — aren't waiting until Election Day to predict that in the face of such dire circumstances, he will fail miserably. "I think being mayor of the largest city in New Jersey is a complex task and it takes experience, as opposed to merely vision," said John James, the son of the departing mayor and a candidate for city council who has endorsed Mr. Booker's opponent, Ronald L. Rice.

Referring to Mr. Booker's four-year stint as a freshman councilman in Newark's Central Ward, Mr. James added, "The fact that his vision did not materialize in the Central Ward leads me to predict that it won't materialize for him in the entire city."

Mr. Booker shows no sign of being daunted, and sounded a defiant tone about his ability to confront whatever — and whoever — stands in the way of his painstakingly laid political plans.

"We're not going there to get comfortable and be a part of the status quo," Mr. Booker said in an interview in his Central Ward campaign headquarters "We're actually going there to make dramatic changes in the City of Newark. And that's going to entail making a lot of people very unhappy who are very comfortable and who have benefited from the process."

Still, for all his enthusiasm as he prepares to take over a city with a budget of more than $600 million, Mr. Booker is a lawyer and community activist who has never managed anything close to the scale of the city government he is now seeking to control. "It's going to be a challenge," he conceded.

Mr. Booker hopes to offset how large the task is, in part, by patterning himself after New York's mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, who has built a reputation for delegating unusual amounts of authority to his subordinates. "What's distinguishing Bloomberg, if you talk to people who really know cities, is not his leadership," Mr. Booker said. "It's that he brought together one of the most exemplary teams in municipal government I think this nation has ever seen."

But unlike Mr. Bloomberg, who came to office from the private sector promising little but sound management and a vague promise of continuity from his predecessor, Mr. Booker wants to bring about a radical rethinking of Newark's policies by implementing his own ideas on how to attack the city's worst problems. On reducing crime, for example, which Mr. Booker has said would be his priority as mayor, he has promised to hire more police officers and enforce a zero-tolerance policy for quality-of-life violations.

On the subject of education, where Mr. Booker has courted controversy in the past by embracing taxpayer-financed private school vouchers, he said that he plans to broaden curriculums and after-school programs in public schools, expand existing charter schools and institute preapprentice programs to teach trades to students.

The problem is that all of Mr. Booker's attractive-sounding proposals involve spending money. And as Mr. Booker himself is aware, there may not be much of it to go around by the time the next mayor walks into City Hall on July 1.

The departing mayor has plugged holes in the city's budget with cash from a one-time $450 million settlement with the Port Authority for lease payments. Add to that the fact that federal, state and county aid that have essentially subsidized Newark's schools, job-training programs and government services in recent years will be shrinking over the next few years, and it's not even clear that the city will be able to meet its most basic obligations a year after the new mayor takes office.

"The question that's never been asked is what are we going to do in 2007, because 2007, actually, is a tough year for whoever might take over mayor," Mr. Booker said. "And Sharpe James is realizing he's not going to run again, it's not his problem."

Mr. Booker talks of generating new revenue by improving the efficiency of tax collection, and plans to put his prodigious fund-raising skills to work for the city by soliciting private aid for city programs. He also promises to leverage the influence of the Newark mayor's office around election time to wrest aid from aspiring office seekers.

At the same time, Mr. Booker stresses the idea of achieving greater efficiency, seeking cuts in the administrative budget of the city council, the city clerk's office and the city's Department of Parks and Recreation, and emphasizes the need for Newark to wean itself from nonrecurring sources of revenue like the Port Authority money, to which he says the city has become addicted.

Mr. Booker's criticism of how the city has been run recently has not done anything to endear him to the many members of Newark's political establishment who already view him with suspicion. That, in turn, could be a problem for Mr. Booker's ability to get anything done as mayor.

"Looking beyond his ability to articulate power and his skills as a fund-raiser, there is a lot of doubt about how much leadership he's going to be able to provide to people who have been around this area for a long time," said Rick Thigpen, a consultant and former executive director of the state's Democratic Party. "To the extent that he is going to expect to have people doing things his way, he's going to be in a lot of trouble."

Mr. Booker is aware of the dangers of gridlock. He promised to work "like the dickens" over the next two weeks to try to elect allies to the nine-member council, but said he was prepared to deal with a hostile council if necessary. In the last few weeks alone, Mr. Booker put out an ad accusing several incumbent council members of trying to pad their retirement accounts with the city's money, and the offended members duly replied with a lawsuit for defamation.

"I hope I don't have a council that fights me or tries to undermine me every step of the way," he said. "But if that's the case, I'm willing to roll up the sleeves and do what's necessary to push through a reform agenda and push through the changes I need. It'll be a test of my political acumen, and I'm ready for that test because nobody will stand in the way — no political person will pimp their position for personal gain under my watch."

But for all his talk of girding for battle as he prepares to take his place atop Newark's power structure, there are also signs that Mr. Booker increasingly sees the value of finding consensus. In response to a question about what he might have done differently since coming to Newark, Mr. Booker focused on a single episode from eight years ago, when he was a well-intentioned freshman councilman who, it turns out, had a lot to learn about wielding actual power.

"There's only one thing I might have changed a little bit, about how I went about my fights to get the right to speak back," he said. "They had stripped away the right of residents to speak in front of the city council on camera. And I did it in a way that didn't even try to build consensus with my colleagues, but more was just saying a 'shame on you' sort of thing. And that's no way to go about moving people to your position."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/30njBOOKER.html?pagewanted=print

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfield Today, Plainfield Stuff and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today, Plainfield Stuff or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
*