Word: bookers
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...passed up a job that would seem to be a step up, and now, in the age of Obama, how big can Booker actually get? Now that we actually have an African-American President, some say it's natural to start scouring the country for the next one. But in another sense, Obama's election has diluted the Booker brand. The challenge for African-American stars like Booker is to separate themselves from Obama's larger-than-life persona and not seem like Barack wannabes. So is Booker just Obama-lite, or can he really govern? And there...
...Crime-Dog Mayor The centerpiece of Booker's campaign was a promise to improve public safety in Newark. "You're a children's foundation, you're a health-care foundation - don't you know that if a kid gets shot, every one of the issues you care about gets undermined?" Booker says...
...Booker hired Garry McCarthy, a respected, no-nonsense New York City cop, to run his police department. McCarthy had helped New York City mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg cut Big Apple crime. Booker took a huge risk because in Newark, McCarthy had two strikes against him. First, he's white. In a majority-black city fraught with racial tension between residents and police officers, that was sure to anger some locals. Second, he's not from Newark, a provincial town accustomed to giving plum public-sector jobs to its own. So here comes this Ivy League mayor reared...
Despite the strong law-enforcement team the mayor put in place, Booker's staff begged him to quit harping on crime. After all, violence, especially in a city with Newark's harrowing history, is awfully hard to control. "It's very ballsy," Newark city councilman Oscar James II says of Booker's laser focus on reducing murders. "Some dude decides to go on some crime spree, starts taking people out, and then what? It happens." (See pictures of an ammunitions manufacturer...
...During Booker's first year, the strategy did indeed backfire. In August 2007, three local college students were murdered, execution-style, in a city schoolyard. The tragedy was a nightmare that traumatized Newark and its confident new mayor. "It broke me down," Booker says on a Friday evening in June while relaxing in the back of his SUV. "I was feeling a deep sense of frustration and pain. I was just taking all the violence at that point very, very personally...