Corey Booker Gets the Michael Powell Treatment in the NYT. Ouch.

i.e. The careful, measured, unsentimental analysis for which Powell is justifiably known. The proverbial "cold, hard look."

Not exactly a surprise to me.... Booker always struck me a slick, media savvy, well financed, demagogue. Little or nothing going for him beyond that. He has to run for reelection in 2016, If I'm not mistaken. He won the last primary in a laugher but the GE was rather close.

Any chance we DEMs can do better? Here's Powell:


United States Senator Cory A. Booker talks of his adopted city of Newark as if it were his very own Wild West. As mayor, he ran toward gunshots “that sounded like cannon fire,” cradled a dying boy whose mouth “foamed red” with blood, and learned as much from a plain-spoken woman in the projects “as from any professor.”

This makes for excellent commencement speech fodder.

But a recent state audit underlines that the former mayor might have paid more attention to the prosaic business of running his city. Instead of shoveling driveways — he loved on snowy days to run about Newark with his shovel — he could have attended a meeting, just one, of his Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation.

It turns out this corporation, which the mayor championed and empowered, was pilfering from Newark.

The executive director, Linda Watkins-Brashear, who was a close ally of the mayor, acted like a bear come upon a honey pot. The state comptroller found her total compensation over seven years came to $1.98 million. Yet her salary during those years came to $1.16 million.

It seems she cut herself checks from the agency’s accounts. She also handed millions of dollars in no-bid contracts to friends and a former husband. She has denied wrongdoing.

Then there was the general counsel, Elnardo Webster, who is a close friend and former law partner of Mr. Booker. He made as much as $400,000 without a contract that anyone could find.
the rest:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/nyregion/leaders-words-dont-tell-the-real-story.html