Was reading some of my favorite blogs, including We Like It Raw, and noticed an article about the new Mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Cory Booker. This guy looks like the real deal. A couple of excerpts really got me:
It’s August of 1999. Booker is a fed-up, 30-year-old City Council member, thwarted at every attempt at reform by four-term mayor Sharpe James. Newark’s decay and despair, and the inability to do anything about it, stress out Booker so badly that he’s getting migraines and back spasms. After a particularly violent crime at a particularly drug-ravaged high-rise apartment complex, Booker decides it is time for drastic measures.
He buys a tent, pitches it next to the complex and goes on a hunger strike. For 10 days, he fasts and sleeps outdoors in one of the grimmest neighborhoods in one of the country’s grimmest cities. “It transformed my life,” Booker says, sitting in his office last week, where he was preparing his inauguration address.
Wow. If you thought that was some sort of fleeting charade, check out this description of his current standard of living. He lives amidst the poverty-stricken in a not-so-nice high rise buildng in a not-so-nice part of town. And he is the Mayor!
“I pay $600 a month, which seems like highway robbery at the moment,” says Booker, “because I haven’t had heat or hot water since November.”
Wait. The new mayor of Newark hasn’t had a hot shower since November?
“I boil water. First I used pots, but then a friend of mine came over one day and she said, ‘Have you ever heard of a camp shower?’ And now there’s this sack that hangs in my apartment” that provides hot water.
This guy clearly has a stellar emotional IQ, and it is also clear that he has the intellect and work ethic to back it up. Standford Undergrad, Yale Law, Rhodes Scholar. Class President…TWICE! This guy must be an robot!
“He was the kind of guy who slowed you down when you hung around him because he’d say ‘hi’ to everyone,” says Chris Magarro, his best friend, whom he met in fourth grade. “The kids, the teachers, the janitors. Everyone.”
He played football at Stanford, too, and heavily into his overachiever phase, he also worked at a suicide prevention hotline, won the student body president job and earned stellar grades. He recalls that the toughest question during his Rhodes scholarship interview was something along the lines of “Are you real?”
After Yale, he moved to Newark in the hopes, he says, of becoming a community activist in the tradition of Marian Wright Edelman. He claims that becoming a politician wasn’t on his agenda.
And after all this he ends up chasing and achieving a high level in a political career that “wasn’t on his agenda.” Wow, looks like I need to raise my own standards just a little bit :).
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