CARY BOOKER PLUS

The stage was packed with members of the City Council, family and assorted well-wishers, and the hall was filled with Booker's friends and most ardent fans. The event felt more like a church service and pep rally than a swearing-in. Second-Round Victory Booker's inauguration was held at a spiffy downtown arts center with a few thousand seats. If life is a high-school test writ large, this former Rhodes scholar with Clintonian charisma is single-handedly wrecking the curve. And that is a problem for the rest of us.

CARY BOOKER PLUS

Long before winning his current job, Booker was touted as an African American politician with limitless potential, the next Barack Obama, plus GQ looks. You see? Have you ever heard a more sickening story in your whole life? The commitment, the risk, the lesson about 'spiritual power' - it's all so unnervingly selfless and noble that it makes whatever you are doing seem halfhearted and inane. 'It's not about the office that you hold or the money in your bank account. 'It really changed my perceptions about power,' says Booker, who is wearing a blue oxford shirt and a yellow tie and speaking, as he always does, like a man in a rush. The media showed up, Mayor James relented - just a little - and Booker started eating.

By the end, there were enough people for us to form a circle around the two buildings. The first morning of the strike, we had a prayer circle of four people. 'Within 24 hours, people were saying, 'You're not sleeping out there alone,' and eventually there were dozens of people sleeping under this huge wedding tent. 'It transformed my life,' Booker says, sitting in his office last week, where he was preparing his inauguration address. For 10 days, he fasts and sleeps outdoors in one of the grimmest neighborhoods in one of the country's grimmest cities. He buys a tent, pitches it next to the complex and goes on a hunger strike. After a particularly violent crime at a particularly drug-ravaged high-rise apartment complex, Booker decides it is time for drastic measures. Newark's decay and despair, and the inability to do anything about it, stress out Booker so badly that he's getting migraines and back spasms. Booker is a fed-up, 30-year-old City Council member, thwarted at every attempt at reform by four-term mayor Sharpe James. Let's call it Briefly Sickening Cory Booker Story No. But only for a few minutes, because that's how selfish and cynical you are. Not nauseated sick, but something that is both deeper and more fleeting - the feeling that you are a cynical, selfish jerk and you ought to be ashamed, and you are ashamed. Cory Booker, who was inaugurated on Saturday as this city's new Democratic mayor, likes to tell stories, and nearly every one of them will make you sick.

Cary booker