Street Fighting Men

...he thundered...

...But this time Booker has a much broader support network, including many clergymen and City Hall workers, plus better name recognition...

...One African American who has no use for such race-baiting is Ron Rice Jr., son of the deputy mayor and a city council candidate in the West Ward...

...He rips Booker's pro-voucher stance and notes that his opponent has held fundraisers in leafy suburbs such as Montclair...

...You have to learn to be an African American," he lectured Booker at one point...

...Others might have thought Booker was crazy, eschewing a lucrative career at a blue-chip law firm to move into a city with a violent-crime rate then twice as high as New York or Philadelphia's...

...Renaissance" notwithstanding, Newark is still a city of abysmal public schools and nearly 11 percent unemployment, where a third of children live below the poverty line, and the rates of murder, infant mortality, and AIDS are frighteningly high...

...In 2000, the centrist Democratic Leadership Council named Booker one of its "100 To Watch...

...Will that same dynamic play out in the Rice-Booker contest...

...My dad does not poll well against Cory," he says...

...Booker at first took the racist jabs in stride, trying to run what Street Fight creator Marshall Curry dubs a "choir-boy" campaign...

...This spring, Booker, now 36, is once again running for mayor, in what looked like a bitter rematch...

...It shows we're growing up as a city," says Rice...

...But he angrily rebuked James during their one debate and also put out negative ads highlighting the mayor's personal wealth—including a yacht, a Rolls Royce, and two six-figure jobs (mayor and state senator) on the public payroll—while listing Newark's poverty, failing schools, and rampant crime...

...He is definitely a Trojan horse...

...This has got to be an issue-driven campaign, and a mission-driven campaign...

...When Booker criticized James, the mayor cast it as an attack on the city itself...

...Amazingly, Booker upset a 16-year incumbent...

...Newark is a majority-black city, but Booker assured his audience, "I'm going to be a great Newark leader"—not just a "great black leader...

...We think it's gonna be just as venal and vicious" as last time...

...He's a different generation," the younger Rice says of his father...

...And he relentlessly zinged Booker for being an Uncle Tom, a right-wing puppet, and a "faggot white boy...

...It was the Old Guard vs...

...Rice Jr...

...The elder Rice can boast "a record of service," having lived in Newark for some 51 years...

...Cory Booker is "part of the far-right, conservative, Christian wing of the Republican party," Ron Rice Sr...

...James also touted the "renaissance" he'd overseen in Newark, marked principally by a revived downtown...

...In August 1999, he pitched a tent outside the crime-ridden Garden Spires housing complex and went on a hunger strike until police (and the mayor) responded...

...BY DUNCAN CURRIE Newark THE BEST Oscar-nominated movie you didn't see last year was a documentary called Street Fight, which chronicles the nasty 2002 municipal election in Newark, New Jersey...

...Each faced such epithets as 'Uncle Tom,' 'tool of the Reagan Right' or 'sellout to the suburbs' from black opponents who had few or no other cards left...

...He later spent several months living in a mobile home, which he would park in neighborhoods plagued by crime and drugs— again, to encourage a beefed-up police presence on Newark's streets...

...told me...

...And he's won the endorsements of several prominent labor unions that had previously backed James...

...People see [Booker] as an outsider," says Rice...

...Our safety must come first...

...Booker carried this part of the city overwhelmingly in 2002, and he entered the packed room, a modest street-level office, to raucous applause...

...He lost the May 2002 ballot by a mere 3,500 votes (in a city of some 280,000 people...

...Booker was often a lonely voice on the nine-member city council, but it was on the streets that a series of headline-grabbing stunts boosted his exposure...

...In many ways, the 2002 James-Booker matchup was a microcosm of black urban politics across the country...

...He promptly moved into the drug-infested Brick Towers housing project, to fulfill a campaign promise that he would live in one of the worst parts of town...

...But Booker is convinced an "urban transformation" is possible...

...The Booker tack almost worked...

...But on March 27, Sharpe James, 70, withdrew from the race, only 11 days after he rode to City Hall on a bicycle and ostentatiously filed for reelection minutes prior to the deadline...

...thinks Booker symbolizes Newark's future, while his dad represents its past...

...Sure sounds like it...

...I'm a big believer in what works," he explains...

...That's their playbook," Booker told me a few days later...

...By the spring of 2002, Booker was the toast of such assorted luminaries as Jack Kemp, Bill Bradley, George Will, Spike Lee, Cornel West, and Bar-bra Streisand...

...Duncan Currie is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...That same year, he addressed the conservative Manhattan Institute, where he made an impassioned plea for school choice...

...He soon felt the pull of politics, and in 1998 ran for city council in Newark's depressed Central Ward, where the 1967 riots were concentrated...

...But Booker stresses the influence of his parents, battle-scarred warriors of the civil rights movement, who made him appreciate the differences between his own upbringing and the blighted realities of Newark...

...Says Ingrid Reed, director of the New Jersey Project at Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute of Politics, "Everything seems to be going in the Booker direction...

...Election Day is May 9. One Sunday afternoon in late March—the day before James bowed out—I sat in Booker's East Ward headquarters watching Street Fight with dozens of supporters and their children...

...As the New York Times reported, James fired off a string of piqued letters to the network, blasting Street Fight as "nothing more than free political advertising" for his 2002 opponent, a young reformer named Cory Booker...

...We were waiting for the candidate to arrive at a "coffee klatch," where residents of the mostly Portuguese and Hispanic neighborhood (known to locals as "the Ironbound") could enjoy buffet food and hear Booker's spiel...

...The younger Rice, 38, is a robust Booker supporter, as he was in 2002, even though his father is now Booker's opponent...

...Lest anyone consider Booker a closet Republican, it should be noted that he volunteered for Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign in 1988 and affirms his "great reverence" for Democratic senator Barack Obama...

...As the Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page has written: Booker epitomized a crop of "newwave centrist, racial-outreach black mayors, such as Detroit's Dennis Archer and Cleveland's Michael White (both now out of office), or the District of Columbia's current mayor, Anthony Williams...

...This after a campaign marred by physical intimidation, police coercion, and downright criminality—so much so, in fact, that the Justice Department sent election observers to monitor the Newark poll for fraud...

...The film indeed paints James as a thuggish machine pol waging a campaign of dirty tricks and racist slurs to derail Booker, whose gilded resume makes you expect one of Tom Wolfe's Masters of the Universe: Stanford, Rhodes Scholar, Yale Law School...

...Meanwhile, on the council, the wonkish Booker established his reputation as a pragmatic New Democrat: a qualified supporter of school vouchers and a fan of Rudy Giuliani's policing reforms in New York...

...But in the rugged, wildly corrupt arena of Newark politics, as Curry's documentary puts it, elections are won and lost in the streets...

...PBS first aired it last July, much to the chagrin of Newark's five-term mayor, Sharpe James...

...At that time, says Booker, one of his heroes was Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone, a community renewal initiative...

...But he has a long family history in Newark, and relocated to the city after graduating from Yale to set up a nonprofit group, Newark Now...

...the New Pragmatists...

...They've overstayed their welcome...

...All well and good, but will his critics again trot out the race card...

...But Ron Rice Jr...

...Booker grew up in suburban Harrington Park, New Jersey—hence his opponents' charge that he is a "carpet-bagger"—where he was an all-American high school football player...

...is bullish on Booker's chances, and believes the "racial authenticity" nonsense has lost its potency...

...His model reformers include both Republicans, such as former Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith, now at the Manhattan Institute, and Democrats, such as Baltimore mayor Martin O'Malley...

...Both James and Booker are African-American Democrats...

...This is my town, and I'm [Newark's] champion...

...So Booker is now arguably the favorite to be Newark's next mayor, his chief competition being Deputy Mayor Ron Rice, 60, who is also a state senator...

...And we don't have time to train you...

...If elected, Booker will face daunting challenges...

...But as Street Fight shows in gritty detail, James muddied the race with charges that the light-skinned Booker was not "really" black: that he was a pawn of "far-right" Republicans, Jewish groups, and the Ku Klux Klan...