If you thought you knew Cory Booker, you might want to think again.
Ever since he challenged Newark boss Sharpe James for the mayorship, Booker’s been a media darling. But now that he’s a candidate for the US Senate, serious questions have emerged: about his taxes, about his mayorship and whether the stories he likes to tell have any grounding in truth.
This helps explain why a Senate race that was supposed to be a cakewalk has become a contest. Where Booker once was up 25 points over the GOP’s Steve Lonegan, a new Quinnipiac poll shows the lead has been cut in half.
What’s changed? Start with Booker’s “urban legends.”
One story involves a local drug dealer called T-Bone who turns out not to exist. Another fiction seems to be his account of a kid who died in his arms.
Then there’s the Booker story about how he delivered Pampers to a snowbound Newark resident. This one’s true, but as the woman told The Post, she needed help only because her street was unplowed after three days: “If he’d done his job,” she says, “I would have been able to do for myself.”
Even more substantive are questions about Booker’s tax returns. Thus far he’s gone the Eliot Spitzer route, showing them to a limited group of journalists who were not allowed to make copies. Even so there are questions about the $700,000 he got from his old law firm while it was doing business with two Newark city agencies.
Was Booker directly involved in the law firm’s operations? His partners say no, but Booker’s own tax returns say yes, which suggests a pretty strong conflict of interest.
These are serious issues, and voters need the truth before the election, not after.