The Prize (13 page)

At that moment, Booker and his security detail were speeding out of Newark toward the Four Seasons Hotel in midtown Manhattan, where he would deliver a lunchtime fundraising appeal for
HELP
USA
, a provider of housing and services for abused mothers in Newark and nationally. He often spoke to wealthy, well-connected audiences at luncheons and dinners, for fees of as much as $30,000 a talk. This day he spoke for free at the invitation of his friend and
HELP
USA
board chair Maria Cuomo Cole—sister of New York governor Andrew Cuomo, daughter of former governor Mario Cuomo, and wife of fashion designer Kenneth Cole.

A remarkable transformation occurred as Booker's driver pulled
the well-traveled Tahoe to a stop in New York City. The embattled mayor disappeared down a private passageway of the hotel, emerging into a packed ballroom as Cory Booker, Urban Superman. Heads turned as everyone recognized the strapping, six-foot-three-inch figure with shaved pate and dazzling smile. “I get to introduce one of my favorite men on the planet,” Cuomo Cole crooned from the podium. “Just over the river there's a remarkable, dynamic star on the horizon who is making revolutionary change in education.” People raised their smartphones and snapped pictures as applause rose and rose.

Booker delivered almost the same speech wherever he went, calling with heartfelt emotion on his audiences—“we who drink deeply from wells of freedom we did not dig, who eat lavishly from banquet tables prepared for us by our ancestors”—to work to perfect America. “From Newark to Oakland, the children are calling to our conscience every day with the same five words: liberty and justice for all. But we are failing in that,” he said often. No matter how many times he repeated those phrases, he sounded passionate and spontaneous, and invariably he received standing ovations. Never relying on notes, he seemed to erupt with eloquence and inspiration.

Booker's audiences were disproportionately white, but there was no suggestion of racial distance between him and them. A white Democratic operative who knew Booker growing up said the relationship was similar to those Booker had as a boy—“he was the black kid who made every white kid feel comfortable.” With his tan skin and suburban and Ivy League lineage, Booker did not evoke the blackness of riots or rage. Raised in almost all-white Harrington Park, New Jersey, he presented himself as postracial, fluent in lingos from business-speak to hip-hop, from English to Spanish and even a bit of Yiddish. He talked less about anger than love: “crazy love . . . unreasonable, irrational, impractical love that sustained African Americans through slavery, inequality, and the civil rights movement,” as he once put it.

During the monster blizzard of December 2010, widely dubbed the “snowpocalypse,” Booker set off a national media sensation by riding
snowplows, BlackBerry in hand, using his prolific Twitter feed to respond to constituents in distress. A man tweeted that his snowbound sister, a new mother, had run out of diapers. “I'm on it,” Booker tweeted back, and soon was at her door, diapers in hand. A picture of the diaper-bearing mayor soon appeared on his Twitter feed. A woman scheduled for a medical procedure couldn't get her car out of the ice. Booker posted her plea and his reply: “I just doug out ur car. All the best.” Network news teams were not far behind, filming and airing stories about the Twitter-savvy mayor in action. VanityFair.com posted “The 10 Most Valiant Snow-Rescue Tweets from Cory Booker, Twitter's mayor.” Time.com crowned him a “Blizzard Superhero.” ABC News correspondent Jake Tapper tweeted, “How do we draft you to be Mayor of DC.”

Meanwhile, back in Newark, large sections of the most populous wards—the South and West—remained snowbound. The
Star- Ledger
quoted residents complaining of the mayor's “snow job,” citing unplowed thoroughfares throughout the city that the out-of-town coverage missed. Reverend William Howard, a civic leader who headed Booker's transition team in 2006, asked in exasperation: “What is the mayor doing riding snowplows? He should be at his desk drinking hot chocolate and solving our frightening fiscal crisis.”

Booker was popular in the Twitterverse for posting inspirational quotes two to four times a day, each drawing thousands of “retweets.” A
Star-Ledger
video-reporter read one of them—a quote from Vincent van Gogh—to sanitation workers demonstrating in front of city hall against Booker's threat to outsource their jobs. “If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced,” the reporter read to one worker after another. They reacted as if hearing something from another planet. “I ain't got time for no Vincent van Gogh,” said one. “We trying to keep our jobs.”

It was hardly surprising that Booker had problems at home. What urban mayor didn't, with the flight of jobs and state aid forcing layoffs of cops, teachers, code enforcers, street sweepers? Economic distress
was on the rise in Newark, particularly for children, with 43.5 percent living below the poverty line in 2011, the highest proportion in almost a decade and twice the national average. For most of Booker's years as mayor, municipal budgets relied on multimillion-dollar state bailouts to close deficits. In 2010, as Christie cut municipal aid and the recession savaged the nation's poorest cities, Booker sold and leased back sixteen city-owned buildings, raised property taxes sixteen percent, and eliminated one out of four jobs on the payroll.

But in a communications age when even local news traveled across the globe in an instant, what happened in Newark stayed in Newark—unless Booker tweeted it. Flooding the media universe with his tales of heroism and hope—he posted them on Facebook and Twitter, recounted them on television talk shows, recycled them in speeches delivered around the country—he effectively washed away downbeat news. Outside Newark, no matter where people looked, they found only the narrative according to Booker.

Nothing captured the disconnect between the outside and inside more acutely than
Brick City
, in which Booker was portrayed as a ubiquitous presence on the streets and in neighborhoods—“an outspoken and charismatic mayor” fighting alongside residents “to raise the city out of a half century of violence, poverty and corruption,” according to the promotional materials. Civic leaders complained that the show, which along with Booker costarred a couple who belonged to warring gangs, depicted Newark—except for Booker—as a city whose people were “drugged out and thugged out,” in the words of Councilwoman Mildred Crump.
Brick City
's film crew showed up at a 2011 school board meeting where a mother of a Newark first grader was delivering an impassioned plea for parents to demand better schools. “In the inner city, we're of the mentality that the government should take care of us, and when they don't, we yell and get mad and go home and think we've done our job,” said Keyeatta Hendricks, a New York City public school teacher and single mother who recently had bought a home in Newark. “No! It's not like that now. We need to get together and do for ourselves. I heard Al Sharpton say, ‘The gov
ernment is done with us.' I believe that. We need to take care of ourselves.” It was a brave and stirring speech, one mother taking on the anger and rancor that passed for public discourse in Newark. But the only person to approach her afterward was a
Brick City
camera crew member, asking her to sign a release in case she appeared on the air. It felt as if public life in Newark had become a reality show, while outside of Newark, the reality show had become reality.

Touring hot Silicon Valley ventures like LinkedIn and Twitter in 2011, Booker was welcomed as the politician of the future at meetings with CEOs and tech workers that were streamed live over the Internet. In April of that year,
Time
named Booker one of the world's one hundred most influential people. A year later, he appeared on nine television programs in one day after having rescued a neighbor from her burning house and tweeting about it within seconds of emerging from the flames. He told the story in exactly 140 characters, the maximum Twitter could accommodate: “Thanks 2 all who are concerned. Just suffering smoke inhalation. We got the woman out of the house. We are both off to hospital. I will b ok . . .” Two weeks later he flew to Los Angeles to appear on
The Ellen DeGeneres Show
, where the talk-show host welcomed him this way: “Hello, your honor, your highness, your excellency. What do I call you?” She also presented him with a Superman costume. DeGeneres introduced Booker with a biographical video riddled with factual inaccuracies and exaggerations about his mayoralty amid photos of him rubbing shoulders with residents—sitting on their stoops, shooting hoops, shoveling their sidewalks. A narrator said Booker “lives in the housing projects Newark residents call home,” although he lived in a rented, market-rate, freestanding house; reduced crime rates “almost fifty percent,” although FBI data at the time showed that overall crime was down only eleven percent and violent crime had increased; and announced that “schools are being transformed,” although there was no data to support the claim.

In speeches and on national television, the mayor described a Newark of struggling, yet optimistic, men and women, fired up by his
leadership. But at school board meetings, activists routinely called him “Mayor Hollywood,” insisting he was more devoted to national celebrity than to his constituents. With his omnipresence on social media and his frequent absences from Newark, Amiri Baraka dubbed him “the Virtual One.”

Baraka the younger was at the same time emerging as the leader of the opposition to Booker—deriding not only his glamorous political style but specifically his education reform agenda. The Booker-Christie-Zuckerberg strategy was doomed, he said, because it included no systemic assault on poverty, the real enemy of achievement. In addition to raising legitimate questions—such as why reformers focused disproportionately on changing systems, barely addressing the daunting effects of poverty on schools and classrooms—Baraka masterfully stoked residents' fears of rich outsiders. He cast Booker, Christie, and Zuckerberg as part of a monied conspiracy to seize control of the district's $1 billion budget, its prize. “The wolf is at the door, and there's a couple of insiders about to make a deal with the wolf for your children,” he said of Booker and Christie. “If we don't have a strategy, they gonna take it all from us.” He likened school closings in poor neighborhoods to class warfare. “The banks fail and they give 'em eight hundred million dollars. You can't close the damn banks. They're too big to fail. Why aren't the Newark public schools too big to fail?” he demanded.

The reformers, on the other hand, cast Ras Baraka as the symbol of all that ailed urban schooling. In public, he blamed poor student performance on oppression and poverty, assigning no responsibility to teachers and principals. In a rich New Jersey tradition, he held two public jobs, paying him more than $200,000 a year—an arrangement he brashly defended. He also put his brother, Amiri Jr., on his city hall payroll. “They beat me up for having two jobs,” Baraka said at a rally. “They don't know I've got more than two jobs. Councilman, principal, other people's father, father of my own children, police officer, conflict resolutionist, social worker, basketball coach, cheerleader
at games. Yeah, I got a buncha jobs. Problem is I'm not getting paid for them.” His supporters cheered loudly.

But inside Central High School, Baraka was more pragmatic educator than strident politician. In his first two years as principal, Central had such abysmal scores on the state proficiency exam given annually to juniors that it was in danger of being closed under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Baraka mounted an aggressive turnaround strategy, using some of the instructional techniques pioneered by the reform movement. He said he was particularly influenced by a superintendent in a high-poverty district in Colorado who was trained by philanthropist Eli Broad's leadership academy—an arm of the “conspiracy” Baraka the politician inveighed against. “I stole ideas from everywhere,” he said. With a federal school-improvement grant, he extended the school day, introduced small learning academies, integrated art and drama into academic classes, greatly intensified test preparation, and hired consultants to coach teachers in literacy instruction.

In addition to English and math, the test-prep classes at Central High included a heavy dose of motivation. Teachers told students over and over: You
can
pass this test. You
must
pass it—for yourself, your school, your community. Baraka scheduled a school-wide pep rally on the day before testing at which teachers, administrators, clerks, and fellow students love-bombed the junior class. In past years, many students had slept during the state test. Asked why, one teacher who proctored the test many times—and who said she used to spend much of it pulling students up from a sleeping position—gave this explanation: “They were tired, they were bored, they figured they'd fail, everyone always told them they'd fail, all of the above.” But in 2011, for the first time, everyone worked until the final bell and no one slept, the English department chair announced triumphantly at a sparsely attended parents' meeting. When the scores came back in April, seventy-two students had passed both the math and the literacy tests, more than a fivefold increase from the year before. Baraka summoned everyone to the gym for an impromptu assembly and told his
students through tears what had just occurred. One by one, he called the passing students to center court, and each received a standing ovation worthy of a football team MVP. Later that week, Cerf made a special trip to Central to commend the students, and Baraka called another assembly for the occasion. The state Department of Education invited him to deliver the keynote speech at a workshop that summer on how to turn around failing schools.