DAVIS: Newark Mayor Cory Booker's purple leadership

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By Lanny Davis

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

When he first ran for office, some of the black political establishment accused him of not being "black enough." When he graduated from a prestigious law school, he chose to do community organizing in an inner-city neighborhood where too many black men were either incarcerated or unemployed.

When he ran and won election to his first local office, he rejected the "left" vs. "right" paradigm. He worked with Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, and focused on solutions to problems - not ideological labels. Defying the purist-left ideologues of his Democratic Party, he campaigned for Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut in the 2006 Democratic primary.

Of course, I could be talking about Barack Obama, but I am talking about Cory Booker, Mr. Obama's friend and ally, who is in his third year of his four-year term as mayor of Newark, N.J.

Mr. Booker's political life story is the stuff of movies. Indeed, his first campaign for mayor, in 2002, was the basis of a 2005 Academy Award-nominated documentary called "Street Fight." (He narrowly lost, 53 percent to 47 percent, against longtime Mayor Sharpe James.)

While at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, he became close friends with a young orthodox rabbi from the Chabad Lubavitch Hasids in Brooklyn, Shmuley Boteach, and served as president of the "L'Chaim Society," a nonsectarian group founded by the young rabbi (later to become a famous author and media personality) to serve as a forum for important speakers and to bridge the gaps between people and religious groups from all perspectives.

After graduating Yale Law School, Mr. Booker moved to Newark, coordinated a community youth project, and lived for 10 years in a notorious Newark public housing project, Brick Towers, and then in a three-story rental unit on Hawthorne Avenue in Newark's south ward, described as a "drug- and gang-plagued neighborhood of boarded-up houses and empty lots."

In 1999, he scored an upset victory for a seat on the nine-member Newark City Council. Shortly thereafter, he began a 10-day hunger strike, living in a tent in front of one of Newark's worst housing projects (Garden Spires) to protest the city government's apparent indifference to open-air drug markets in that community.

On the night of his narrow 2002 defeat, he announced his intention to run for mayor again in 2006. He won that election with a landslide 72 percent vote over Ronald Rice, Mr. James' designated successor. But just as importantly, he also put together a complete slate of reform-minded council candidates and swept them in along with him.

Even before he was sworn in as mayor, Mr. Booker filed legal challenges to halt apparent "pay for play" sales of Newark real estate at bargain-basement prices to political insiders and developers. In June 2006, his suit was upheld by a local judge.