Sure, Chris Christie Is Unspeakably Corrupt, But That Doesn't Mean He's The Only Corrupt Politician In New Jersey-- Remember Cory Booker?

Blue America endorsed Rush Holt for the New Jersey Senate seat in last year's special election. But, as expected, Cory Booker won. Booker lead in every poll and he won big: 59.17% in a 4-way race. Holt came in third with 16.76%. In the general election Booker beat right-wing nut case Steve Lonegan 740,742 (54.92%) to 593,684 (44.02%). Booker, whose single biggest source of money was Wall Street banksters, spent $2,582,837 to Lonegan's $171,538.

A week from tomorrow, Booker is up against another fringe Republican, Jeff Bell, for the full term. As of the September 30 FEC reporting deadline, Booker had raised $17,653,871, spent $14,107,950 and was sitting on $3,495,321. Bell only raised $373,577 and lent himself another $35,000. He has $91,116 cash-on-hand.

Booker is going to win, but he's not running away with it. The brand new YouGov poll for CBS and the NY Times, released Sunday, hows him with 51% against Bell's 39%. Independents favor Bell 40 to 34%.

In theory, Booker should be doing a lot better, as Olivia Nuzzi explained at the Daily Beast last week. After all, Bell is less than nothing and certifiably insane and "Booker is friends with Oprah and Spike Lee. He saves the helpless from burning buildings and puppies from untimely deaths. He shovels residents out of their driveways when it snows and tackles muggers with the graceful force of a former All-American tight end (which he is, of course). And for the past year, Booker has been in Washington, posting selfies with his fellow federal lawmakers and vowing to reform the criminal-justice system. For all anyone knows, Booker is out on the turnpike right now stopping two semi-trucks from colliding with each other through the sheer power of his charisma."

Aside from being a Wall Street whore-- or part of being a Wall Street whore-- his corruption is starting to catch up with him. Yes, even in New Jersey, corruption sometimes matters (a little).

The alleged FBI and U.S. Attorney investigations into the Newark Watershed may have something to do with that. Months after he first entered the Senate, the New Jersey comptroller alleged that under Booker’s watch—or, more likely, because he was not watching-- corruption ran rampant at a publicly funded water-treatment and reservoir-management agency, where Booker’s former law partner served as counsel. And speaking of his former law career: Despite having resigned from his law firm once entering the mayor’s office, Booker received annual payments until 2011, during which time the firm was profiting handsomely off of Brick City. That would be the Brick City that Booker professed to love with the fire of a thousand suns, but did little to fundamentally change. Murder, violent crime, unemployment, and taxes all rose dramatically under his stewardship.

So even though it seems plausible that Bell is a Democratic plant sent to further weaken the Republican Party in New Jersey, Booker-- celebrity, super hero, motivational tweeter-- is barely polling above 50 percent.

...in 2002 [Booker] challenged the incumbent mayor of Newark: Sharpe James, a gap-toothed, gold-chain-wearing caricature of a corrupt, urban New Jersey politician. James defended his decades-long rule of Brick City by using Booker’s made-for-campaign-literature biography against him.

Having been born in the late ’60s, Booker was young-- maybe too young. He was raised in the white, leafy upper-class New Jersey suburb of Harrington Park-- about an hour’s drive from Newark. Star football player, star student. Sailed off to Stanford, then Oxford-- as a Rhodes Scholar-- then Yale Law. And while attending the latter, in 1995, he moved into a housing project in Newark because, he said, he wanted to help the community. To James, and to his disciples-- of which there were many-- Booker was not like them. He was an outsider. A phony. James went as far as to call him an insufficiently black (his grandmother was white) Jewish (Baptist, actually, but served as copresident of a Jewish students group at Oxford) “Republican who took money from the KKK” (source unknown).

Booker lost, but in doing so, won: He starred in Street Fight, a documentary about the campaign, which received high praise from critics and an Oscar nomination. When he returned to challenge James in 2006, he was a celebrity with a chip on his shoulder. James dropped out of the race, and Booker strutted into office at 920 Broad Street with 72 percent of the vote. James would go onto be indicted on 33 counts of fraud-- including charging the city credit cards with $58,000 in personal expenses-- just like every other Newark mayor had been in the previous 45 years. Booker-- who got elected by promising to improve safety through investing in the police department and bring accountability back to the city which for so long was plagued by mismanagement-- would be different. Booker would nurse Newark’s wheezing, decaying body back to health. On Election Night, he beamed: “This is the beginning of a new chapter in the life of our city.”

...Booker’s star was rising: Over a million Twitter followers, and half a million fans on Facebook. After saving his neighbor from a blaze (having shut down three of Newark’s fire companies, perhaps no one else was around to do it) Ellen Degeneres invited him on her show to gift him with a Superman costume. He frequently traveled outside of the state (in one year, he was gone about a quarter of the time) to give speeches-- nearly 100 in total, including 10 commencement speeches, at Stanford, Brandeis, Williams College, Bard College, Pitzer College, Columbia University’s Teachers College, Suffolk University Law School, New York Law School, Washington University, and Ramapo College. For his oratory work he was paid over $1.3 million (a significant amount of which he donated to charity).

All the while, from 2006 to 2011, Booker was still receiving annual payments, which totaled close to $700,000, from his former law firm-- Trenk, DiPasquale, Webster-- from which he had resigned once elected mayor to avoid “the appearance of impropriety.” Booker’s campaign spokeswoman, Silvia Alvarez, told me: “He was paid out by the firm as part of his separation agreement for work he performed before he became mayor.” OK, sure, but while Booker was profiting from the firm, they were profiting from Newark: over $2 million in work for Newark’s Housing Authority, the Watershed Conservation Development Corporation, and a wastewater agency. “That’s almost like Sharpe James-type shit,” one New Jersey Democratic operative offered.

But even if it were Sharpe James-type shit, it could never overshadow the Cory Booker-type shit that made him so beloved: his sincere delivery of corny tropes about Believing In Yourself and Finding The Good In Others, his knack for remembering names, and his Clintonian ability to connect with any and every individual who makes contact with his big, hazel eyes—be they a drug addict, a hedge-fund manager, or a small child staring up at his 6’3”  frame like he is some holy cross between LeBron James and Zeus. It was always assumed that Booker would be moving on to something bigger than Newark-- to the governor’s mansion, it seemed obvious, but then that didn’t look like such a great idea: The fall before Chris Christie’s reelection campaign brought Hurricane Sandy, and with it, approval ratings so high for him that Jesus Christ himself could have sailed down from the heavens and won the Democratic nomination, only to be stomped out by Christie come Election Day.

Booker was not going to be the Democrats’ sacrificial lamb-- but he could be their senator.

Having been there for five terms, the prickly Frank Lautenberg was not expected-- at 88 years old-- to run another campaign for the Senate. Out of decency, or the political need to at least appear decent, all would-be candidates waited until the ailing lawmaker announced he would not seek reelection to mount their own campaigns-- well, all but Booker, who allegedly refused to let Lautenberg fade nobly into the sunset and instead stared him down in his weakened state to let him know who the boss was.

...Since his election, Booker has been taking a page from the playbook of superstar senators before him, like Al Franken and Hillary Clinton, by keeping his head down. He has submitted to few interviews, but remains ever-visible on social media. His central senatorial “achievement,” if you want to call it that, is the introduction of the REDEEM Act-- an overhaul of the criminal-justice system that would encourage states to address the cycle of incarceration and recidivism by reforming how juveniles are dealt with, and to make it easier for people with criminal records to get jobs.

Booker introduced the bill, along with Republican Sen. Rand Paul, in July. But strangely, Booker didn’t seem to get behind his own legislation. When it came time to publicize the proposal, one senior Republican operative with knowledge of the situation told me, Booker wasn’t “overly comfortable jumping out and having the spotlight put on him.” Miscommunication between Booker and Paul’s camps led to the nixing of the original PR plan, which was to do a full-on media blitz to promote their ideas. Instead, Booker took softballs during a cocktail event, sponsored by Bank of America. “I don’t know why you’d give up a whole slew of interviews, including dominating the Sunday talk show circuit, in favor of doing a Mike Allen Politico briefing,” the operative said. “I don’t know why you’d do that unless you’re worried about the person asking you the questions.”

Meanwhile, it looked as though Booker’s record in Newark might be catching up with him. As mayor, he presided over and strengthened the Newark Watershed Conservation Development Corporation-- a publicly funded entity that managed the city’s reservoirs and treated water for its residents. Pretty boring stuff. But a state audit by the comptroller’s office found that the agency’s director, Linda Watkins-Brashear, was a donor and close ally of Booker’s, was using the Watershed like her own personal bank account-- paying herself $1.98 million over seven years, when her salary came to just $1.16 million. The also doled out millions in no-bid contracts to her friends and husband. Further, Booker’s former law partner, Elnardo Webster, had been acting as the Watershed’s counsel-- and his firm had profited $212,318. “He had nothing to do with the business the firm conducted with the Watershed,” Booker’s spokeswoman, Silvia Alvarez, told me.

Not quite Chinatown, but in a city where police were being fired by the dozens, millions of taxpayer dollars lost due to a lack of oversight is no small mistake. Which is not to say that blame for the corruption should be placed solely at Booker’s feet-- but the the comptroller’s office noted in their report that the mayor did not attend a single meeting regarding the agency. He instead sent a business administrator in his place, and then when the administrator resigned, in 2010, Booker never replaced them. He had no time to go to the meetings, he said. Never mind that a dearth of free time never seemed to get in the way of a commencement address, or a talk-show appearance, or a social-media stunt.

According to reports by The Star-Ledger and New York Post, the Watershed is being investigated by both the U.S. Attorney and the FBI. “The senator has not been contacted by the authorities,” Alvarez said, adding that he is only aware of the investigations “now, because it has been reported in the press.” In a recent interview with NJTV, Booker called the Watershed, “one of the big policy losses that I had in Newark.”