NEWARK — The mayoral candidate Ras Baraka, a burly man with a two-his opponent, Shavar Jeffries, two feet away.“I want to address some of the lies out there,” he said, before reciting calumnies that he said Mr. Jeffries had heaped upon his head.Thirty sday growth of gray-flecked beard, was asked during a television debate last week to introduce himself to viewers.Mr. Baraka, a city councilman here, rattled off a perfunctory sentence or two of autobiography before growing impatient and tossing a verbal haymaker at econds later, Mr. Jeffries, a former assistant attorney general and school board member whose professorial demeanor no longer disguises his ability to toss a right jab, replied in kind. He mentioned that Mr. Baraka held two public jobs at once (principal and councilman), and employed his brother.
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“It’s about hooking up your relatives with taxpayer resources,” he said. Later he said that Mr. Baraka’s district had become a gang killing field and added: “You don’t even deserve to be elected councilman.”
There is a brutal, Sluggo aspect to this mayoral race, which ends as voters go to the polls Tuesday: two intelligent, early-middle-age men exchanging windmill punches and uppercuts.Their style fits the stakes. Newark is a bruised and limping beauty of a city. It sits within sight of New York City’s spires but more closely resembles so many struggling American cities, leveled by racial flight and broken tax structures. The narrative once offered a media-certified fairy tale: Good Prince Cory Booker and his Newark Redemption Tale. He was smart and gave terrific speeches about the horrors he’d seen in his adopted city. He tweeted until his thumbs all but fell off.Homely reality, however, trailed him like empty cans tied to the bumper of a gleaming little Porsche. This year’s budget — Mr. Booker’s last as mayor — sprang a leak and left the city with a $30 million operating deficit. He created the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation and gave it a no-bid contract. His appointees pillaged the agency like Vikings come upon a defenseless hamlet.The state already has control of Newark’s schools, and Trenton may take over its finances. The homicide rate has spiked. Mr. Booker jumped free of this burning building last fall and took up residence in Washington as New Jersey’s junior United States senator. Neither candidate sought his endorsement.Newark under Gov. Chris Christie and Mayor Booker became a petri dish for the charter school movement, and that has triggered a golden landslide. The teachers’ union has poured in money to support Mr. Baraka.The hedge fund and pro-charter crowd has unleashed its own fleet of B-52s, dropping great bags of money on behalf of Mr. Jeffries. Oddly, both men insist they are not charter school ideologues.
Mr. Baraka insisted on Monday that he wanted to replicate what has worked in charter schools, while tempering their expansion. As for Mr. Jeffries, who has been pilloried as a front for Wall Street, he noted that he lived in this city with his wife and young children. “We have 9,000 children in charters and 10,000 on the waiting lists,” he said. “I love public schools and I’d love for teachers to keep their jobs, if they educate our children.”This city has many primal plagues. To walk the streets of the North Ward is to hear stories that cast back to a distant time for New York City, when control of public space was the domain of gangs.AdvertisementRobert Perez, 39, sat on his stoop with his father. I noted this was a pleasant block of rowhouses. He replied that a gang has a lock on the south end of the block. His next-door neighbor has put up a fenced-off basketball hoop in the skinny alley between their homes.
“He won’t let them out, but his kids are safe,” he said. “You ask me, a mayor must make us safe.”
There are vacant homes on every block here, gaptoothed and open to wind, rain and the addicted. Hector Yeye, a homeowner, described the squatters who steal his mail. He has caught them on his security cameras.
“I showed it to the police and they said, ‘Oh, that’s Bruce!’ ” Mr. Yeye said. “If you know it’s Bruce, how come you don’t arrest him?”This is where you grow a touch impatient with the two plainly intelligent candidates. Their passion for this place is palpable; their position papers offer more detail than those of the candidates in last year’s race in New York City. If they can stop tossing punches, one of them might prove up to the considerable task of ruling this city.
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