Now that’s how you file for an election. The 2006 rematch for Newark mayor — between 70-year-old incumbent and vaguely corrupt Sharpe James and young Cory Booker, who was my T.A. for a polisci class in college. (They ran against each other in 2002, a race that was the subject of the documentary Street Fight.)

The election — filled with all sorts of racial invective last time, despite both candidates being black — will no doubt be entertaining to watch again. James’ petition filing — for which he stripped down to a tanktop and shades and looked like he’d be spending the afternoon sunning on a stoop — is part of the class code he used in ‘02, in which his side accused Booker of not being “black enough” because he was an Ivy grad and Rhodes Scholar. (That was when James’ people weren’t accusing Booker of being controlled by “the Jews.”)

The NYT is even hosting a blog on the campaign — treatment I doubt the Times would give, say, mayoral elections in Passaic or Paterson. They link to video of the filing.

17 March 2006

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