In 2002, a now defunct magazine called Shout NY put a minor New Jersey politician on its cover, under the headline: "Will Cory Booker Be the First Black President of the United States?"
Even back then, the man was in a hurry to make it to the top. But with the death last week of Senator Frank Lautenberg, and the (very expensive) shotgun October special election called by Governor Chris Christie, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey may find himself in Washington, DC a full year earlier than he'd expected.
Cory Booker, the hedge fund guys' favorite politician and the most self-regarding official in America, is more likely than not headed to the US Senate – and I can't imagine he's dismayed at the accelerated schedule. He may be esteemed by Wall Street tycoons and Hollywood titans, and worshipped by an unserious internet brigade that prefers its politics in GIF form, but Booker has not had a good run of it lately in New Jersey's benighted largest city. Carjackings – the signature Newark crime; they used to call it "the carjack capital" – have gone up for four years in a row. Violent crime, which had been declining in Booker's first years, has spiked again; in summer, things will get worse. Police have been laid off, firefighters too, as Booker has slashed city budgets. And when the mayor recently tried to get an ally of his on the city council, the meeting devolved into a ruckus, with police officers resorting to pepper spray.
Except for a stinging New York Times report last year, one doesn't hear much about the actual conditions of life in Newark – a city that, to what I suppose is Booker's credit, has made conditions friendlier for companies such as Panasonic (enticed with a $100m tax break) and the Manischewitz kosher wine firm. But oh, one hears an awful lot about Booker. All politicians are to some degree wannabe celebrities, but it has been a while since we have met a showman as narcissistic as him: a man who makes Chuck Schumer look camera-shy, who makes Michele Bachmann seem like a subtle media operator.
He sleeps in tents. He shovels snow. He brings diapers to stranded mothers. He runs into a burning building, then holds a press conference to celebrate his own heroism. He tried to live on food stamps for a week, which I almost admired – but then he told his story to Face the Nation, and then the Today show, and then the Daily Show, and then Piers Morgan on CNN.
No one other than Vladimir Putin could pull off these bathetic, 360-degree political theatrics – though even Putin would have blanched at Booker's made-for-TV rescue one cold Newark night of a freezing mutt named Cha Cha, bearing the dog in his arms like the Lamb of God. "This dog is shaking really bad," he told an airhead local news reporter – who had earlier arranged the entire pseudo-rescue with him via Twitter. Had she really been concerned, she could have just called the cops or, you know, rescued the dog herself. Instead, she told Booker to meet her at the scene with her camera crew and, when it was all over, even got her picture taken with the man of the hour.
It'd be one thing if the Soviet-style personality cult and let's-come-together Twitter banalities – recent days have seen him post self-help quotations from Bruce Springsteen and the Dalai Lama – were just marketing for a progressive political program. But Booker is a far more conservative figure than the Cult of Cory, which is too busy making Superman or Chuck Norris jokes, may actually realize. He is a long-time advocate of charter schools and, more quietly, of voucher programs: a favorite hobbyhorse of the men of high finance. George Will, the paleoconservative columnist of the Washington Post, is a big fan. Michelle Rhee, the fallen DC schools chancellor whose union-busting, corporatist education reforms resulted in a citywide cheating scandal, is someone Booker calls "a friend of mine" – and we should add that Newark's charter schools were embroiled in a cheating scandal of their own last year.
And of course, Booker has the unwavering support of the big bad industry just across the river from Newark. Since his days as a city councilor, he has hoovered up cash from the financial services sector – but unlike many other tri-state Democrats who seduce the Street in a marriage of a convenience, Booker legitimately thinks that big money knows best and the public sector should do its bidding. When, in May 2012, Booker confessed that he found it "nauseating" for the Obama campaign to impugn Mitt Romney's career in private equity, Democrats were shocked. They shouldn't have been.
Booker's whole career has been a testament to a poisonous financial-corporatist consensus, which dresses up the interests of big money in post-ideological garb. (That helped him win the support this weekend of the most powerful man in New Jersey: George Norcross III, the feared political boss and owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who said he liked Booker because he was "a Democrat that's fiscally conservative yet socially progressive.")
Remember that $100m donation to the Newark schools from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, promoted with its very own Oprah episode? The cash didn't go into the Newark school system; it's controlled by a non-governmental fund, with Booker on the board, and has been so unaccountable that the ACLU had to sue the city to learn what was going on. (Booker's office first denied that the emails the ACLU sought existed; when a judge ordered the emails to be made public, the Booker team released them on Christmas Eve.)
Add to this Booker's privatization of the Newark sanitation department, and his repeated attempts to do the same to the water supply, and the picture becomes clearer. In the world Booker and his cohort inhabit, there are no systemic problems and no class interests. There are only pesky inefficiencies, to be fixed with better data and more money from smart, happy, rich people who can spend their cash far more sensibly than the public sector.
Poor Frank Lautenberg. The so-called "swamp dog" was one of the great remaining liberals in the Senate, a quiet but committed defender of unions and the working class, and a constant advocate for progressive taxation. And New Jerseyans have a chance to vote for a successor in his mold. Two quite progressive House members, the long-serving Frank Pallone and the physicist-turned-politician Rush Holt, have both declared their candidacies.
But it seems far more likely that the next senator from New Jersey will be the anti-Lautenberg: a neoliberal egomaniac who sees government as nothing more than a charity for billionaires and corporations to support as they please. There may be no stopping the rise and rise of Cory Booker. But let's at least recognize his impending triumph for what it is: another victory for the men in the glass towers, enabled by a nonstop publicity campaign waged 140 characters at a time.