Okay, so maybe Sharpe James was doomed.
Some of Mr. Booker's supporters had been backing him since he first moved to Newark in 1995 and ran successfully for a seat on the Municipal Council in 1998. He also drew an array of celebrities as supporters, including Oprah Winfrey and Spike Lee, and millions of dollars in campaign contributions from people living outside Newark.
Mr. Booker, a chatty former Rhodes scholar who developed his oratorical talents at Yale Law School, has been tagged by fellow Democrats as a rising star in the party, even as he struggled to win citywide approval.
Sometimes I am...what, naïve? uninformed?
Until Mr. James dropped out, it had appeared very likely that Newark would see a repeat of the campaign of 2002, when he and Mr. Booker fought a bitter and volatile campaign that was captured in the Academy Award-nominated documentary, "Street Fight."
To go from such bitterness to a landslide...I'm not sure which campaign was won by a skillful pushing of buttons. Maybe both were. Black folks do, in general, vote their interests, but how do you determine your interests? Do you look at it positionally like a checkmate-in-three problem, or strategically? Do you consider trajectory as well as position? I think you must, and I tend to assume thinking people do. But it's more than possible to consider positions and laws of motion at great depth without ever referring to the actual position of any particle at all.
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He was but not because Corey
He was but not because Corey Booker was running for mayor.
Booker was the point, that's
Booker was the point, that's all. That he could stay with it as long as he has means he had a machine behind him that would have picked some candidate that was logically equivalent to Booker.
 James' end, in my view,
 James' end, in my view, lay in his beginning. The machine style of politics that he was a product of and that he continued to promote was exhausted by the time that Gibson was in his second term. It has been running on empty since that time. Gibson's subsequent reelections and James' assumption of the mantle after Gibson's departure represents one of the few times that black voters did not correctly perceive where their real self-interests lay.Â
I have to give Booker the benefit of the doubt because he deserves and has at least earned that much, but the window of opportunity that he has been given will begin rapidly closing if he doesn't move quickly to dismantle the old regime and put a new one in place. Â