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Nearly 275,000 souls live in Newark, New Jersey -- twelve miles from New York City -- served by a grand total of one movie theater, where Cory Booker, Newark's mayor, sits on a Sunday night, hand-holding with a leggy Jersey City beauty and surrounded by various City Hall colleagues watching Will Smith in I Am Legend trying to save Manhattan from zombie hordes by devising a cure for the plague that has zombified them and wiped out most of the human race. Goddamn zombies. Smith's hero is ideal for his task -- a medical doctor and a lieutenant colonel, a man of bold action and great learning, a brilliant scientist and a deadly shot, a warrior and a healer and a paragon of muscular virtue, virile, brave, selfless. Early in the movie, he's seen on a Time magazine cover headlined "Savior?" -- exactly what he becomes, naturally, though he's self-martyred at the end, via hand grenade, in his basement laboratory, mobbed by peevish, famished zombies. Goddamn zombies.

And Cory Booker, who's just a regular Joe -- well, apart from once being an All-American tight end, plus his degrees from Stanford, Yale Law, and Oxford, the last as a Rhodes Scholar, where he also was copresident of the L'Chaim Society, a Jewish student group, although he himself is an African-American and a devout Baptist -- hey, you know what? Cory Booker's no regular Joe -- not even close. He is Will fucking Smith, right down to the eight-year-old real-life issue of Time that, years before he became its mayor, asked, "The Savior of Newark?" and his starring role in Street Fight, an Oscar-nominated film documenting Newark's 2002 ugly mayoral beat-down, when Booker's idealistic young hide was scorched by an old-school ghetto despot named Sharpe James, who bled the city dry for thirty-odd years -- Sharpe drove a Rolls, sailed a yacht, and, in the hallowed tradition of New Jersey politics, will be sentenced in late July for fraudulent land deals involving one of his concubine harem -- and buried Booker by campaigning on a platform of calling him a white, gay, Jewish Republican funded by the KKK.

None of which Booker is, mind you, although he is guilty of wearing lousy suits, and he's prone to dropping names like Cincinnatus, Maimonides, and Gandhi as if everybody at the North Ward Three Kings festival or the winter-coat giveaway down at the Seth Boyden projects were gathered in the parlor at Queen's College for a pinkies-out bull session.

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ORIGINAL: Level

Hey Aileen  Do you think the guy has a shot at "fixing" the city?

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ORIGINAL: Level
Yeah, and no new car dealerships..... sounds like a combat zone.

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ORIGINAL: Lordandmaster
Laugh...of course not.  New Jersey politics is all about keeping two places as perpetual slums.  Those places are called Trenton and Newark.