New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker sparred with former Vice President Joe Biden in the second round of the second Democratic presidential debates in Detroit, accusing him of creating the problems he fought in Newark, New Jersey, when he served as mayor. But Booker’s life did not start there.
“Mr. Vice President, there’s a saying in my community: ‘You’re dipping into the Kool-Aid and you don’t even know the flavor,'” Booker fired back at Biden when he slammed Booker about his oversight of local law enforcement issues under his watch in Newark.
Booker continued, “You need to come to the city and see the reforms we put in place. The head of the ACLU said that I embraced reform not just in action but in deeds. You are trying to shift the view from what you created. There are people right now in prison for life, for drug offenses because you stood up and used that tough-on-crime phony rhetoric that got a lot of people elected but destroyed communities like mine. This isn’t about the past. This is about the present, right now.”
In fact, the ACLU did criticize the Booker administration in 2009 for not making progress on police internal affairs reform and received a C average from the organization.
“Booker came in saying he has high standards and told the public to hold him accountable, and his actions have not lived up to his words,” said Edward Barocas, legal director of the state ACLU.
Although Booker likes to speak of Newark, the city is still dealing with major areas of poverty, high crime, and high absentee rates in schools.
These issues preceded his time in office, but did not ease when he was there, either. Booker, however, will defend his tenure by saying major development projects were brought in during his term.
“When (Booker) was mayor, crime and schools were not good,” said Novi Carter-Branch, 75, whose grandson was shot and killed last Christmas Eve. “There’s not enough policemen,” Carter-Branch told NJ.com.
Booker himself grew up in the upper-class white New Jersey suburb of Harrington Park, an hour’s drive from Newark. His father was a professional at IBM and was happily married to Carolyn Booker for 49 years.
The younger Booker was a star football player and top student in high school. He went to Stanford and Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. Yale Law School accepted him thereafter, the Daily Beast noted.
By 1995, he moved into a Newark housing project claiming he wanted to contribute to the community.
