Two Jersey politicians get downright nasty in doc.
By PETER KEOUGH | March 1, 2006
Although the outrages of the 2000 presidential election caught the world by surprise, dirty local politics is an American pastime. Even so, the crude tactics unleashed in the 2002 Newark mayoral campaign as captured by documentarian Marshall Curry still shock. Cory Booker, a Rhodes scholar, football star, and Yale Law School grad, took on 16-year veteran mayor Sharpe James. Both men are black and Democrats. By the end of the campaign, James had called Booker a Jew, a right-winger, a carpetbagger, a white man (Booker is light-skinned), a faggot, and, rather ironically coming from someone whose political style recalls Richard Nixon circa 1972, a Republican. Booker, for his part, tries to stick to the issues. Curry isn’t fair and balanced, but you can hardly blame him when James’s goons are ripping his camera out of his hands. Funny, infuriating, and suspenseful, Street Fight is both a critique of the process and a vindication.
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