NEWARK, Oct. 18 — Lesson No. 1: Skin color does matter.
It was Mayor Cory A. Booker’s third month at City Hall and his choice for police director — a high-ranking crime tactician from New York City — was running into resistance. For Mr. Booker, who often says his administration will “live or die on public safety,” this most important appointment threatened to spiral into embarrassing defeat.
Publicly, critics said they were troubled by the nominee’s scuffle with a pair of highway patrolmen who had ticketed his daughter, a year-old incident that Mr. Booker had initially shrugged off. But in a city that is 54 percent black and 33 percent Latino, with a new mayor whose own identity has been challenged as “not black enough” because of his suburban upbringing, the fact that the nominee, Garry F. McCarthy, was white was the ever-present if unspoken complaint.
Weeks earlier, aides had cautioned Mr. Booker that it was dangerously naïve to ignore Mr. McCarthy’s race. “This is Newark — it matters,” warned his politically minded chief of staff, Pablo Fonseca. Now several minority members of the Municipal Council slate that swept into office on Mr. Booker’s coattails seemed ready for open revolt.
So the mayor who had vowed to change City Hall was reduced to the horse-trading and arm-twisting that defined his predecessor’s reign. He promised to pave the main thoroughfare in one councilman’s ward and left open-ended i.o.u.’s with other waverers. Mr. Booker eventually won the day, on a 6-to-3 vote, but he lost some of his luster along the way.
“I think Newark deserves better,” said Luis Quintana, a councilman backed by Mr. Booker in the election who voted against Mr. McCarthy’s appointment.
After a campaign in which Mr. Booker sailed into City Hall with a landslide 72 percent of the vote to replace Sharpe James, the 20-year incumbent mired in accusations of malfeasance, he has found running New Jersey’s largest city more challenging than he ever expected. To watch his new team up close is to witness the clash between political promises and the nitty gritty of governing, to see goals and plans sidelined by the realpolitik of race and budget gaps, and to experience the frustratingly sluggish pace of change.
Turning Newark into the paragon of American cities sounded nice in campaign speeches, but 100 days in, the ambitious 37-year-old mayor is starting to settle for a city that is a little less bruised. Campaigns are run on emotion and white-knuckle grit, he has discovered, while governing demands ruthless dispassion to tolerate reordered priorities and a disappointed public.
Some Early Difficulties
In these early days of his administration, Mr. Booker has infuriated homeowners by pushing through an 8.4 percent property tax increase to fill a deficit he did not anticipate. His openness with the press has sometimes backfired, such as when an offhand comment about needing to shrink the municipal workforce of 4,000 by as much as 20 percent angered the City Hall rank and file. Firefighters’ union officials were irked by a reorganization of the department that led to the closing of three firehouses.
And stepping up arrests, he has learned, does not necessarily reduce violence; shootings and homicides rose compared with the previous summer, along with burnout on the 1,300-officer force and overtime costs mounting to $20 million.
“Things come at you 1,000 miles an hour, and much of the time you’re dealing with chaos,” an exhausted Mr. Booker said one recent evening as he rode to Manhattan for a private dinner with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York. “You can easily get distracted by issues that are not central.”
To keep focused, Mr. Booker often pulls a crumpled square of paper from his pocket.
“To be America’s leading urban city in safety, prosperity and nurturing of family life,” reads the note he typed to himself shortly after his election in May. “Newark will set a national standard for urban transformation by marshaling its resources to achieve security, economic abundance and an environment that is nurturing and empowering for families.”
It is Mr. Booker’s mission statement, invoked often in public speeches as well as impromptu pep talks to his staff.
A bold statement, considering that Newark, population 275,000 and one of the nation’s poorest cities, remains a stubborn synonym for urban dysfunction. One third of its children live in poverty. Fewer than 9 percent of its adults have a college education. Every year, 1 out of every 800 residents is hit by gunfire.
His BlackBerry buzzes with the news of each shooting. One afternoon, Mr. Booker bolted from a staff meeting and sped to the scene when a 14-year-old girl was hit in the knee as she walked home from school, then to the hospital to console her family.
“Listen, Mr. Mayor,” said Daisy Hargraves, the girl’s grandmother, as she lectured him in the emergency room. “I don’t want to hear any blame about the past administration. I just want you to stop the violence. It’s not enough to just lock people up.”
As he passed the 100-day mark in office last week, Mr. Booker had compiled some things to crow about (though he postponed a celebratory news conference until Wednesday because the glossy handouts were not ready). Despite a rise in homicides, shootings were down 20 percent in September. Dozens of no-show employees have been purged from the municipal payroll. In the coming months, 50 police surveillance cameras will be installed across the city — the first ever.
“The air is filled with the electricity of hope,” said Lawrence P. Goldman, president of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, echoing business and civic leaders who describe a spirit of revival sweeping the city.
But some say Mr. Booker has unrealistically lofty expectations for his tenure. He is grappling both with the impatience of those who expected a revolution, and the sniping of others who feel slighted or left out by the new regime. After a generation of machine-style rule by Mr. James, Mr. Booker’s shakeup has inevitably led to a scorecard of winners and losers.
Some critics have never gotten over the fact that the Ivy League-schooled, Buddhist-inspired, vegetarian mayor was raised in an affluent Bergen County suburb, Harrington Park. Others are unhappy that much of his inner circle is made up of recruits from New York, and that many are white.
“After mobilizing voters, you’re elected and then you have to say, ‘Please wait your turn,’ ” said David P. Rebovich, a political scientist at Rider University. “He’s made the people in Newark especially optimistic, and lo and behold, reality can be a bitter pill.”
Frank Hurtz, a frequent civic critic, especially during the previous administration, lambasted the six-figure salaries Mr. Booker has given to his top aides and said he should have tried harder to hire Newarkers. “What I see is a level of arrogance and a lot of public relations,” he said during a recent hearing in which the Municipal Council approved the mayor’s tax increase. “To me, its just politics as usual.”
It is too early to grade his administration, but Mr. Booker’s first three months in City Hall offer hints of his governing style and highlight some of the issues and priorities that will shape his tenure — and his future as one of the most prominent African-American politicians in the country.
He is a workaholic. He is obsessed with reducing crime. He is intent on increasing the role of charter schools in a city whose public education system, under state control for more than a decade, is in a shambles. And he knows how to use the news media to promote his agenda.
Last month, Esquire magazine included him in its “Esquire 100” and gave him three pages to expound on his plans; in the coming weeks Oprah Winfrey will feature him and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois on her show in a segment titled “Audacious People.” New York City news channels that in the past dispatched reporters here only for stories involving mayhem now cover relatively minor mayoral news conferences.
And he has agreed to let a New York Times reporter sit in on scores of normally private meetings for a series chronicling his first year.
Most of Mr. Booker’s days begin with meditation and a predawn run from his apartment in a nearly abandoned housing project through some of the city’s most ragged neighborhoods. On weekends, he treks door to door, seemingly stuck in candidate mode. Twice a month, he sets aside a day to see anyone seeking jobs, housing, or even justice for a murdered relative.
An Encounter With Teenagers
One recent day, Mr. Booker sang with 8-year-olds at a charter school, doled out hugs to teenagers at a homeless shelter and delivered a celebratory speech, flecked with Talmudic aphorisms, for the inauguration of a robotic surgery training center at Beth Israel Medical Center. Then he headed to the offices of the Essex County prosecutor for a meeting with two 16-year-olds who were caught spray painting “Death to Cory Booker” in a high school hallway.
Sitting in a conference room with the boys and their parents, Mr. Booker asked the teenagers, Duwon Diggs and Sean Bennett Leboo, about their dreams, peppered them with quotations from Frederick Douglass and Nelson Mandela, and scolded them for their muddled diction and messy hair. He has since taken the boys on as a sort of project, escorting them over the past few weeks to suburban bookstores and first-run movies like “Fearless” and “Gridiron Gang,” treating them to paella in the city’s Portuguese Ironbound section and arranging for tutors from Rutgers University.
The mayor has set ground rules for their relationship: the boys must read books and, when in his company, wear collared shirts and speak thoughtfully constructed English. “People will judge you by the way you look and talk,” he told them. “You’re only 16 and it’s not fair, but that’s how life is.”
Good Days, Bad Days
Most days are a mix of victories and vexations in the mayor’s oak-paneled office, which often takes on the boisterous air of a student dorm lounge. When the tidings are unpleasant, Mr. Booker grabs a Diet Pepsi from the mini-fridge beside his desk, or fiddles with his string of African prayer beads. When he’s relaxed, the shoes come off and Mr. Booker rests his feet on a chair.
One afternoon in early September, after three nights without a shooting, Mr. Booker’s smile broadened when he learned that the state had agreed to pay for the city’s surveillance camera program. Then Mr. Fonseca, the chief of staff, brought word that an ally on the Municipal Council was criticizing him in the press for introducing contracts for a vote at the last minute.
“We should bang him and bang him hard,” said Mr. Fonseca, a veteran of the previous administration who has been a Booker devotee since he was fired by Mr. James in 1999 for his perceived disloyalty. Mr. Booker winced and handed Mr. Fonseca a self-help best-seller, “Way of the Peaceful Warrior.” Mr. Fonseca smiled and passed it back, saying, “That’s definitely not me.”
That same day, Anthony Campos, the acting police chief, announced that he had yet to find a pilot for the city’s only police helicopter, which had been grounded for more than a year. It also lacked a functioning communication system and a municipal heliport at which to land.
In the ensuing weeks, Mr. Booker repeatedly pledged to have the helicopter airborne before his 100-day mark, promising that it would become an eye over the city to track joy-riding car thieves, its blinding spotlight shooing away troublemakers from cemeteries and parks.
“I may need that thing to airlift me off the roof of Brick Towers,” he said jokingly, a reference to the dilapidated building where he moved eight years ago as a gesture of solidarity with residents of city projects. “If I have to fly it myself, we’re going to get that thing in the air.”
Two weeks ago, the helicopter touched down in a parking lot across from City Hall, a triumphal moment after several frustrating weeks of mixed crime figures.
“Everything is a wrestling match and so many things are taking longer than I want,” he said afterward, joy spread across his face. “The helicopter is a great symbol showing that we will get things off the ground.”
Now all he needs is a heliport to land it.