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Jewish World Review May 9, 2002 / 27 Iyar, 5762
John H. Fund
But the machine is striking back. The city's police union, flush with a generous new contract, has endorsed Mayor James. Cops have plastered the cars of Booker supporters with tickets, while Mr. Booker has been denied access to public meeting places. Last month, a federal judge issued an injunction against the city for using "selective enforcement" to tear down Booker signs. Public-housing tenants have been told they could be evicted if they put Booker signs in their windows. For his part, the 66-year-old mayor is demonizing the mild-mannered Mr. Booker. It would be fair game to accuse the 32-year-old Mr. Booker, a Rhodes scholar with degrees from Stanford and Yale Law, of using Newark as a launching pad for higher office. But in March, Mr. James issued a wild claim that Mr. Booker was "a Republican who took money from the KKK," and the light-skinned Mr. Booker says the mayor has called him "a faggot white boy." The Newark Star-Ledger reports that Mr. James said of Mr. Booker: "You have to learn to be an African-American! And we don't have time to train you all night." Mr. James, for the record, denies making such statements. "It's outrageous there hasn't been more criticism of such ugly race-baiting by a black leader," says Omar Wasow, executive director of BlackPlanet.com. He and other Booker supporters find more amusing than ugly the attempt to link Mr. Booker to--as an article at the top of Mayor James's Web site puts it--an "American Hard Right" that is "salivating over the prospect of seizing control of City Hall in Newark." The article goes on to accuse Mr. Booker of being "comfortable in the company of people whose political ancestors hosed down and blew up black children in Birmingham." Mr. Booker calls such tactics "a smear campaign to make black people fear blacks who criticize the status quo." He notes he was a proud supporter of Al Gore and hailed as "a political rising star" by the Democratic Leadership Council. He has muted his support for school choice and says he would only push for charter schools as mayor. But efforts to link him to the "vast right-wing conspiracy" still dog him. A new WABC-TV poll shows Mr. Booker with a slim 46% to 44% lead, but also found that Mayor James is polarizing the race. Mr. Booker wins 57% support from Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites, but Mr. James has expanded his lead among blacks (half of all voters) to 11 points, up from five. Every prominent Democratic office-holder has sided with Mr. James despite a history of corruption that has sent his former chief of staff and former police director to jail. Mr. James delivered Newark for both Gov. Jim McGreevey and Sen. Jon Corzine in Democratic primaries. Jesse Jackson came to Newark to warn that Mr. Booker was "a wolf in sheep's clothing" even though Mr. Booker worked on Mr. Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign. In the 1960s the white Democratic machine here used thuggery and intimidation to keep blacks from taking power. Voter fraud and the use of off-duty policemen to challenge black voters kept blacks from city hall until 1970. Today, the machine is under new management by blacks, and voter intimidation is back. So too may be voter fraud. Last month, the Booker campaign found several hundred dead voters on city election rolls. One out of six voter records is incomplete. The Booker campaign will deploy 150 volunteer lawyers on Election Day, but that may not stop absentee ballot manipulation or voter intimidation. The U.S. attorney's office is monitoring the situation but says the Justice Department won't send election monitors because it lacks a court order alleging racial discrimination in a city that's 86% minority--talk about a Catch-22. Of course the real loser in all of this is the black community. The problems that plague inner cities such as Newark--crime, failing schools, high taxes and corruption--require the kind of innovative approaches that Democratic mayors from Milwaukee to Baltimore have tried. But the old guard demonizes anyone who breaks from a race-based model. "They will fight to the end to hold on to [power]," former congressman Floyd Flake has said. "Here is a generation of kids that are not locked up in the struggles of the civil-rights era. And the older generation is saying, 'They're not ready because they're not black enough'? It's a sad indictment on us as a race."
If fraud is rampant next Tuesday it will be due to the Justice Department's failure to send election monitors and because Democrats abandoned a racial conciliator like Cory Booker and forced him to fight a thuggish machine on his own.
05/02/02: Will Terror Leave Us No Choice? Teachers unions try to use Sept. 11 as an excuse for bad schools
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