Health & Fitness
Lonegan or Booker? Research Answers the Question
Who is more qualified for New Jersey’s vacant senate seat? I set about answering that question and came up with a few surprises.
The election, to be held on Wednesday, October 16, appears to be a much closer race than was predicted and will be decided on the believability of the candidates and their political leanings. Part 1 is a summary and conclusion and Part 2 presents the supporting links.
After completing my due diligence, it’s become clear to me that Steve Lonegan is the right choice for New Jersey senator.
Find out what's happening in Parsippanywith free, real-time updates from Patch.
PART 1 – SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Find out what's happening in Parsippanywith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Summary
Steve Lonegan is a proven tax-cutter, and has campaigned on a platform of limited government. He clearly demonstrated his strong leadership abilities and competencies as mayor of Bogota, NJ. He is a moderate conservative and is in no way extremist as his opponent claims. He is opposed to the growing disaster of Obamacare and believes in a strong military, court system and system of laws.
Cory Booker was the candidate for whom my research surprised me. The man has a reputation as a slum-lord, owning a multiply-cited building that remains in dreadful repair. It also showed him to be an absentee mayor who has let Newark’s crime spin out of control.
He is inconsistent in his politics and seems to vote based upon personal opportunity rather than either supporting the wishes of his constituents or from a political conviction. I find it ironic that some who self-identify as progressive liberals have spoken out strongly against Booker because of his conservative actions. Some of the articles below show that they are frustrated and angry. Given these findings, I do not view this election so much as liberal vs. conservative but rather a proven hard worker with a consistent ideology vs. a typical politician.
There is one other unexpected event that caused me to strongly favor Steve Lonegan. I searched for positive information about each candidate and then negative information (among other things). I found so many negative “hits” associated with Cory Booker that I was taken aback. Yet, I tried multiple times with different keywords to find negative information on Steve Lonegan and found nothing. The man appears to be “clean as a whistle.”
Conclusion
My vote will be for Steve Lonegan. The links below show him to be an honest man. The uncertainty that we see resulting from Cory Booker’s behavior is far too great to risk.
If people are consistent throughout their lives, as is said, then we can expect Booker to stay in a mode that builds his image. We can expect Lonegan to buckle down, work hard and work in the interests of his constituents, the people of New Jersey.
PART 2 – WORDS FROM THE ETHER
I’ve excerpted some key information from each of the articles below and presented it below the titles. Each title also serves as a link.
Steve Lonegan
Steve Lonegan has a strong educational, business and political background. In contrast to Booker, he’s proven that he’s done what he says he will do.
“When he became mayor of Bogota, NJ in 1996, Lonegan immediately cut municipal spending, eliminated wasteful and duplicative services, privatized some functions and instituted a more cost-efficient, user-friendly government. As a result, Bogota’s municipal spending remained constant for the entire 12 years of Steve’s tenure. He also kept debt and tax increases far below inflation despite massive state mandates and aid reductions to suburban towns like Bogota.”
Steve earned a B.A. in business administration from William Paterson College where he was football team captain and an All Conference Division Center. In 1981, he earned an M.B.A. from Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Here’s more on Lonegan.
In 1995 Lonegan was elected Mayor of Bogota, defeating incumbent Democrat Leonard Nicolosi. He was reelected in 1999[7] and 2003 by double-digit margins. As Mayor, he cut municipal spending, merged several municipal departments and privatized some services.
Lonegan was active in the opposition to a proposed 2003 fifteen-cent per gallon gasoline tax increase and developed the website www.nogastaxhike.com to oppose the increase.
Lonegan makes some good points about his expectation that Booker would be an absentee senator. The evidence that I found showed that Booker has done just that as mayor of Newark. We’d be naïve to expect him to change now.
Lonegan: Cory Booker Is and Would Be an Empty Desk
“Booker has a penchant for being absent when duty calls. Not only is he an absentee property owner, but he is also an absentee mayor. The people of New Jersey have every reason to believe he would be an absentee Senator, if elected.”
“Cory Booker’s new ad got one thing right,” Lonegan said. “If he is elected to the United States Senate, he will be an empty desk. Even as mayor of Newark, he spends his time traveling from coast to coast, peddling his failed policies, at the expense of his city.”
Cory Booker
Cory Booker’s credentials are impressive.
Booker was born in Washington D.C. His father, Cary, who was from North Carolina and the son of a single mom, and his mother, Carolyn, a Detroit native, both worked for IBM and relocated the family to Harrington Park in Bergen County. Housing rights activists helped the family buy their first home after initially being turned down because of the color of their skin.
Booker earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford, where he played for the Stanford football team. He also ran a crisis hotline for students and worked with disadvantaged youth in East Palo Alto. Booker then attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar where he ran a student tutoring and mentoring program in a disadvantaged community and served as president of the Oxford L’Chaim Society. Booker earned his juris doctor from Yale Law School, where he helped lead free legal clinics for New Haven residents. After moving to Newark, Booker lived for eight years in Brick Towers, a public housing complex. He now lives in Newark’s South Ward community.
Any number of publications now have articles challenging the claims that Booker is making about his supposed success as the mayor of Newark.
Cory Booker's legacy in Newark under spotlight as he looks to Senate
His campaign ads boast that crime is down (well, sort of).
They say he’s brought jobs to Newark (unemployment is down one point in a year).
People are challenging some of his exploits — saying a guy named T-Bone he saved from the streets actually didn’t exist. (Maybe he did? It’s complicated.)
But there is more. He will leave the city with a balanced budget for the first time in a decade, though he had to gut the police department and raise taxes by 20 percent to do it.
But a review of the stats and interviews with city officials and civic leaders show Booker will be leaving one of the city’s meanest problems largely in the hands of his successor: Crime.
A safe Newark has eluded city leaders for decades. It’s a problem that Booker often claims he has begun to get under control, but the stats say the needle is moving back toward the danger zone.
This article is from the Huffington Post, a left leaning periodical and was out-of-character for them.
Ron Rice, Democrat New Jersey State Senator: 'Thank God' Cory Booker Is 'Out Of Newark'
Newark Mayor Cory Booker just won the Democratic nomination for Senate in New Jersey Tuesday, and while many are happy to see him face off with Republican Steve Lonegan, some are just ready for him to get out of town.
“We’re glad he’s gone, or at least I am,” New Jersey state Sen. Ron Rice (D) told Politico
Here, many weigh in regarding their disappointment with Booker’s variable and unpredictable politics. This article left me wondering just who or what Cory Booker is and just what he believes in.
Why Do Liberals Hate Cory Booker?
Yet Booker's triumph was greeted not by cheers but by scathing takedowns in two prominent liberal publications. Salon called him "an avatar of the wealthy elite, a camera hog, and a political cipher"; The New Republic declared Booker only interested in "agitating for the cause of himself" and doing the bidding of "the moneyed classes." Booker has faced a steady drumbeat of criticism from sites like Daily Kos, where a contributor asserted last year that he "would actually be much more at home in the Republican Party."
Again, others express their dissatisfaction with Mr. Booker.
Cory Booker Will Be A Senator, But Many On The Left Don’t Seem Thrilled About That
Given all of that, you would expect that Progressives would be excited by Booker’s candidacy and his eventual rise to the Senate. In reality, though, the opposite seems to be the case, at least among many of the more vocal voices on the left.
Instead of rallying around Booker, many of these people have taken up the banner of Congressman Frank Pallone or Congressman Rush Holt, both of whom have spent the majority of their rather unproductive campaigns going after Booker’s ties to Wall Street and the Newark business community and seeking to draw him out on issues like NSA surveillance and the War On Terror. One excellent example of the Progressive dissatisfaction with Cory Booker can be seen in a piece today by Alex Pareene in which he asserts that Booker will be an awful Senator:
Lonegan refers to a decrepit building that Booker owns by calling him a “slumlord.” The building exists and is in terrible shape.
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Steve Lonegan lashed out at Democratic Newark Mayor Cory Booker in their final debate on Wednesday, saying too much of the state's income and sales tax money "gets poured into a big black hole" in Booker's city and its residents may not be able to swim in its river because of all the shooting victims' floating bodies.
Lonegan, a former state director of the conservative Americans for Prosperity, has been relentless. He held a press conference on a Newark street corner where someone had just been killed to call attention to city violence. He rolled out a red carpet while Booker was in California raising money with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. And he showed up outside a derelict property Booker once owned to highlight its decrepit condition.
Newark’s Crime Rate
Newark’s crime rate has risen constantly and significantly during Booker’s tenure, making one of the nation’s most dangerous cities worse. Yet, Booker has claimed that it’s gone down.
Senate Candidate Booker Presides Over Rising Crime in Newark
According to the annual Uniform Crime Report issued annually by the New Jersey State Police, the total number of crimes committed in the city of 277,000 rose from 12,364 in 2009 to 13,199 in 2010 to 14,512 in 2011 — more than a 17 percent increase in those years.
Broken down by category, the report found, violent crime rose from 2,679 in 2009 to 2,974 in 2010 and to 3,360 in 2011 — a 25 percent hike.
The report also found that murder went up in Newark from 80 in 2009 to 91 in 2010 to 95 in 2011 — nearly a 19 percent increase in that time frame.
The sharper increase is found in robberies in Newark: 1,373 in 2009; 1,655 in 2010; and 2,038 in 2011 — a 48 percent rise.
(Not an excerpt) This article shows that the murder rate for Newark (0.34 murders per 1000 people) is nearly seven times that of the national average (0.05 per 1000 people). Similarly, robberies in Newark are more than six times higher than the national average (7.21 vs. 1.14 per 1000 people).
