The overrated Cory Booker.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s star has been rising for what seems like an eternity. His fame rests largely upon a number of almost absurdly heroic acts, which have varied from harrowing to Hollywood-esque: saving a resident from a burning building, cradling a twelve-year-old dying from gunshot wounds, hunger-striking for better police protection in the projects, sleeping in a trailer for five months to halt open-air drug markets. Along with Booker’s media-friendly persona, these superhero moves have ensured a steady stream of adulation. His first spate of national press came in the spring of 2000—the same year that another attractive young political figure flew from Chicago to Los Angeles for the Democratic National Convention, had his credit card declined at the rental car station, and went home without even getting inside the arena. Yet this summer, Barack Obama will attend the second convention in his honor and compete for another term as arguably the most legislatively successful Democratic president in a half-century—while Booker is little further along than where he started.

In 2002, during Booker’s first run for mayor, the filmmaker Marshall Curry acquired Booker’s consent to participate in the documentary Street Fight by asking, “What would it have been like if someone had filmed Bill Clinton’s first campaign?” Booker lost that election to the slippery Sharpe James before winning in a landslide in 2006. The reality of his mayoralty, however, has dimmed his wattage in New Jersey, and the mess he made on last month’s “Meet the Press”—defending the record of Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital and equating Democrats’ “nauseating” negative ads with ones about the president’s firebrand former pastor—might have finally taken the disappointment national.

Booker and Obama made their names by rejecting the business-as-usual politics of Newark and Washington, respectively. But Booker is still defined more by his promise than by his accomplishments. Although the country’s picture of him has not changed much in twelve years, in New Jersey Booker’s “postpartisan” leadership has met with increasingly diminishing returns. Now, the mayor of a mid-sized city with a media profile that the average senator or governor would kill for may not have much of a political future. “Whom the Gods wish to destroy,” Cyril Connolly famously wrote, “they first call promising.”





FROM THE START, Booker’s career has been unconventional. Though much has been made about the money he raised from the financial services industry, Booker started out by passing up more lucrative professions to move into a housing project and take on slumlords. The conditions around him spurred a run for office, and he won a council seat in an upset. In 2002, Booker challenged James, the four-term incumbent, who eked out victory through a nasty campaign of smears and intimidation. Booker simply brushed himself off and began working toward 2006, when James stood down and he won in a landslide.

Once in the mayor’s office, Booker faced the scourges of crime, poverty, and failing schools. He made some progress with several major economic development schemes (some begun under his predecessor) and finished his first term with impressive drops in gun crime and homicides. Newark’s first murder-free calendar month in over 40 years occurred in 2010. The year ended with Booker getting buried in accolades for digging his neighbors out from a snowstorm. Although America may have wanted Booker to be its mayor, people in Newark were beginning to see things a bit differently. They had been there in the months between the narrow-lens media events.