Newark's mayor Booker among politicians boosted by Obama's rise
Associated Press New Jersey
March 16, 2008
This Ivy League-educated, African-American politician who talks a lot about hope and is seen as a rising Democratic Party star has spent time in the last few months on the campaign trail in places like South Carolina and Ohio.
Barack Obama?
No, Newark Mayor Cory Booker.
He's an occasional Obama campaign surrogate and a man at the center of an emerging generation of black leaders who political insiders expect to have clout for decades, whether Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, wins the White House or not.
"To me, it's just a natural evolution of the country," the 38-year-old Booker said in a telephone interview. "My father grew up in a very segregated world. I grew up in a very integrated world."
Largely because of the successes of the civil rights movement, Booker and the rest of the cohort of black politicians grew up in diverse communities and were able to attend elite private colleges and universities rather than the historically black colleges that produced previous generations of black political leaders.
Experts say many politicians in this group tend to do well among non-black voters in elections.
"They're idealistic enough not to be carrying the luggage of the older generation," said Rhine McLin, the 59-year-old mayor of Dayton, Ohio, who met Booker recently.
Others considered part of the group include Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, Washington D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, former U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee, and current U.S. Reps. Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois and Artur Davis of Alabama.
Carol Swain, a Vanderbilt University law professor, who has written extensively about race and politics, says the rise of Obama and the others on his heels isn't a surprise to her. She says they have figured out how to do what she suggested black politicians do more than a decade ago: frame issues in terms of economic class, rather than race. [..]
Booker's connections to Obama go beyond their skin color and hopeful, spirited campaign style.
They met in 2005, introduced by Oprah Winfrey and her friend Gayle King, the editor of Winfrey's "O" magazine.
At the time, Obama was a newly elected U.S. Senator from Illinois who had risen quickly to national prominence because of a forceful speech at the Democratic National Convention the year before.
Booker, a former tight end for Stanford's football team, Rhodes scholar and Yale Law School graduate, got widespread attention because when he moved into public housing in Newark to try to help the city's downtrodden.
He lost his 2002 campaign for mayor, but gained friends like Winfrey and a starring role in a documentary film about the election.
By the time Obama announced his candidacy for president early last year, Booker was in office as mayor and was spending his free time lecturing at colleges across the country, giving him the sort of attention that mayors of a city Newark's size - it's the nation's 64th largest - rarely get.
With the personal connection, Booker endorsed Obama almost immediately.
The mayor has hosted the candidate in Newark and stumped for him around the country. He even sent a busload of his supporters to go knock on doors on Obama's behalf in Cincinnati on the eve of last week's Ohio primary voting.
Among insiders in New Jersey, Booker is seen as a major force - the kind of politician who could be elected statewide before long.
"If he desires to dedicate his life to public service, I think he will be going places," said Bonnie Watson Coleman, a member of the state Assembly and the former chairwoman of the Democratic State Committee. [..]
McLin, the mayor of Dayton, said that Booker's work for Obama helps the younger politician in a few ways. For one, it raises his profiles among the Democratic party loyalists who go to the rallies where he speaks.
It also gives him an inside line to a powerful Washington insider in Obama _ whether he's president or remains in the Senate.
And if Booker does not become a player on a national stage, says G. Terry Madonna, a political scientist at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., other African Americans who have similar characteristics will follow Obama.
"It's about the onslaught of a new generation that can't be denied its place," Madonna said.
Booker thinks so, too.
"We are a far more diverse nation than many people realize," he said. "When you see Obama, there are hundreds of others forging a similar path."
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