New game in urban politics

Mayor Sharpe James raises both hands and looks up at a highway overpass. "Hope only rises," he says with evangelical fervor to a gaggle of teenagers in sweatshirts, baggy pants, and cornrowed hair. "You keep hope alive!"

Moments later, the teens unveil a huge sign welcoming people to the city: "Let's make music!"

It's this hopeful outlook for Newark – a still distressed industrial city – that is fueling a hotly contested mayoral race that has garnered national attention.

Mayor James – a stalwart of the civil rights movement and part of the first generation of black municipal leaders – is pitted against an equally fervent but young Ivy League-educated reformer from the elite suburbs.

But this is more than a battle between black generations. It is also emblematic of a major shift in urban politics, in which candidates are being forced to frame issues to appeal to a multitude of ethnic and racial groups.

Newark, like most US cities, is now multihued, with people from Sri Lanka to São Paulo filling its apartments, shops, and street corners. In this new melting pot, issues can no longer be framed simply in terms of blacks and whites. One historian calls this election a referendum on the "post-black-power" age.

"We now know the traditional construction of race in this country makes absolutely no sense, given the demographic changes in this society," says historian Clement Price of Rutgers University in Newark. "The question is: Will the traditional white-over-black calculus, which has traditionally shaped the way black Americans think about politics ... matter in a city that is settling so many people from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil?"

James's challenger, Cory Booker, clearly thinks not. Now a city councilman, he arrived in Newark just four years ago after graduating from Yale Law School. Before that, he had a stint at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and was an undergraduate football star at Stanford University. His parents, IBM executives, were the first blacks to buy in Harrington Park, the upscale white suburb where Mr. Booker was raised.

In many ways, he's been the beneficiary of the civil rights battles that both his parents – and people like Mayor James – fought throughout the 1950s and '60s. He's been described as a "vegetarian, postracial, postpartisan idealist."

While both men are Democrats, this is a nonpartisan race, and Booker is clearly trying to make it a colorblind one as well. He touts himself as the reformer who can do more for a changing and diverse Newark than James.

"We're falling behind the times, because we've stagnated, we've had the same leadership in City Hall for 32 years. That's why it's time for some innovation, it's time for some new blood, it's time for some change," he says.

Booker is quick to rattle off statistics to support his claim: a poverty rate that's gone from 26 percent to 32 percent, tax collections that are some of the lowest in the state, and spending for kids' recreation that's half that of nearby Jersey City and Elizabeth. He also talks of the need to increase efficiencies at City Hall with the rapid-fire cadence and confidence of a Wall Street management analyst.

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