Cory Booker in Ridgewood photo by Boyd Loving
Apparently, Booker’s Hollywood millions aren’t enough to overcome his failed record in Newark, Trenk DiPasquale payoffs, his support for Obamacare, and his proposed $1.4 trillion in new taxes. – Steve Lonegan
Anxious Allies Aiding Booker in Senate Bid
By MICHAEL BARBARO
Published: October 6, 2013 201 Comments
Cory A. Booker is an undisputed star of a new generation of African-American leaders, electrifying liberal audiences with his oratory and charming the social media set with his digital savvy.
But the Senate campaign Mr. Booker, a Democrat, is running in New Jersey — at times sputtering, unfocused and entangled in seemingly frivolous skirmishes over Twitter messages involving a stripper — has unnerved his supporters, who thought that a robust and unblemished victory over his Republican opponent, Steve Lonegan, would catapult him onto the national stage.
As his allies move to shore up what was supposed to be a painless path to Congress, the biggest and wealthiest of them, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, will start spending more than $1 million on Monday to broadcast television commercials on Mr. Booker’s behalf, a vast sum to pour into a single candidacy.
With the special Senate election next week, the late campaign push is trying to exploit unhappiness over the government shutdown to promote Mr. Booker, Newark’s mayor, as a problem solver who eschews the kind of hard-line partisanship crippling the Capitol. “He is a solutions guy rather than an ideologue,” Mr. Bloomberg said in an interview.
