Obama's Crime Czar?

John O'Boyle, The Star-Ledger / Corbis Newark Mayor Cory Booker is now advising the White House on law-and-order policy. The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove sits down with him to discuss his nonstop job, Al Sharpton, and his romantic life.

Long before he swept into office three years ago as the scourge of corruption and urban blight—and years before anyone outside of Illinois had even heard of Barack Obama—Newark Mayor Cory Booker was already a national figure. Young, black and superbly credentialed—Stanford, Yale Law, and a football star to boot—Booker has taken on one of America’s toughest cities and appears to be winning: Two weeks ago, The Daily Beast has learned, Special Adviser to the President Valerie Jarrett invited Booker to Washington so he could explain why Newark’s crime rate was falling while it was rising in other big cities.

“It was flattering that the president’s office was recognizing that something’s happening in Newark—not just by a little bit, not a one-year fluke, but now closing in on three years of continuous decline [in crime].”

His first (unsuccessful) campaign for mayor in 2002, against the ruthless political machine of longtime mayor Sharpe James, became the subject of a riveting documentary, Street Fight, which was produced by Rory Kennedy and nominated for an Academy Award. The film portrayed Booker as a courageous reformer in a city plagued by crime, both violent and political, and announced the arrival of a new star on the American scene. Among the celebs who have climbed aboard the Booker bandwagon and given money to his campaigns and philanthropic projects are Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand, Jon Bon Jovi, and Oprah Winfrey—who introduced the rising Jerseyite to Obama.

Today the 73-year-old Sharpe James is in jail, serving a 27-month sentence on a corruption conviction, and his successor, at age 40, is the prince of a still-troubled city—presiding over dropping crime rates but also economic hardship and budget shortfalls. On Tuesday, Booker talked to The Daily Beast about crime, race—and his love life.

Highlights include:

• On lowering crime: “The lowest murder rate in the city’s history was 1957. We’re on track right now to beat that all-time record.”

• On race: “The last thing I want is for America to transcend race. I think this culture is great because it has a rich black, Latino, Irish, Jewish culture, and so forth.”

• On stealing business from Bloomberg: “I’m trying to get businesses from anywhere—literally from China to other New Jersey cities.”

• On dating: “I need to find the woman that will be tolerant of me, and that’s a very tall order.”

• On Gayle King: “She’s a great friend. She jokes on her radio show all the time that she’s the unofficial first lady of the city of Newark, a title I’ll happily give her. But there’s nothing romantic.”

Q: You’re two years and 10 months into your first term. The next election will be May 9, 2010. What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned so far as mayor of Newark?

A: I have to be blunt. So many people were literally lining up to tell me what I couldn’t do as mayor and to control and lower my expectations that a lot of my optimism and idealism will be ground down by the job when I face the realities. I have to say, I’m more hopeful and optimistic about what is possible in this job, and in a larger sense in our country, than ever before. So many things people told me we couldn’t do for one reason or another, we’re actually doing. I think the biggest challenge to us as Americans is lack of moral imagination about what’s possible. We too often resign ourselves. I’m saying that not to overlook the fact that we’re in the midst of tremendous challenges. This economy is really hurting the city. We have an unemployment rate that has reached 13 percent. We have probably about 300,000 citizens in Newark. We have foreclosure challenges, the city budget’s in shambles. But what we’ve been able to do is, as they say, “find a way out of no way.”

Q: I want to talk to you about crime.

A: Crime was the big issue when I was elected. One of the best criminologists in the country told me, “If you lower the murder rate 5 to 7 percent that’s miraculous,” and sort of saying, anything beyond that is basically impossible. Here we are now, down about 40 percent on shootings and murders from the time I took office.

Q: You and your police chief were recently crowing about having only—only—14 murders in the first four months of 2009. That’s still a high murder rate.

A: Look, we’re right now on track to have the lowest number of recorded murders for any year in history in Newark. The lowest murder rate in the city’s history was 1957. We’re on track right now to beat that all-time record.