Word: newarker
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...Florio's backyard. He now faces Republican Bob Franks from Hackensack, a generic four-term House member. And while Franks voted for Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, he's considered a moderate who sticks mostly to homegrown issues, like pipeline safety, waste disposal and noise reduction at Newark Airport...
Last summer Booker erected a tent outside one of the most violent housing projects in Newark and fasted for 10 days to get more police protection for the place. It worked; Mayor Sharpe James and the police brass were shamed into paying attention. Conrad Lindsey, 25, still lives at the complex and says Booker "changed a lot of moods in this community...
Booker's first stop this summer is a battered street corner near Newark's Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart. Last Thursday the councilman went door to door, listening to people's concerns: one woman shows him her broken, housing-authority refrigerator; another takes him to a stripped-bare playground where the dirt reeks of urine...
...Booker got elected, Mayor James told the local paper he worried about people "who try to create an empire and run for higher office." The day Booker moved into the motor home, a four-page anonymous screed was sent to hundreds of city leaders, stating that "Booker himself hates Newark...He is a mere publicity-stunt hound dog who is against everything and for nothing." Over the past three years, Booker's opponents have anonymously accused him of being white, gay, a tool of the Ku Klux Klan and a lover of Jews who lives in a mansion...
Here's the really annoying thing: Booker is thoroughly unaffected. In fact, he has a little-boy earnestness and optimism that are hard to resist. When he talks about cleaning up Newark, he can barely get the words out fast enough. At one point, when he realizes he's almost forgotten Mother's Day, he actually exclaims, "Jiminy Cricket!" The first night in the motor home, the generator and the engine die, leaving no water, no air conditioning and no way to drive out should there be any trouble. Booker collapses into bed--and gets...