Democratic Newark mayor Cory Booker’s Republican New Jersey Senate opponent Steve Lonegan says he helped cancel a Booker rally with Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel by criticizing both mayors’ appalling records on innercity crime.
Former Obama White House chief of staff Emanuel was slated to hold a Booker endorsement in Jersey City Friday, prompting Lonegan, the former mayor of Bogota, to announce his own “Murder Mayors” rally across the street highlighting the violent crime epidemic in both Booker’s Newark and Emanuel’s Chicago. After Lonegan announced his event, Emanuel canceled the pro-Booker rally and headed home to Chicago, where 13 people were injured in a South Side shooting late Thursday.
Lonegan believes he was the reason the Emanuel event was canceled.
“They were doing it as of this morning. I can only assume that we influenced” the cancellation, Lonegan told The Daily Caller while on his way from his “Murder Mayors” counter-rally to a meeting of the state’s Federation of Sportsmen.
Booker was not scheduled to appear alongside Emanuel at his own rally.
“Booker’s been out in California since the beginning of the week. He’s campaigning in Hollywood and San Francisco. He has, from what we understand, a fundraiser at a disco in Hollywood tonight and another one tomorrow night. In the meantime we’ve had a rash of murders” in Newark, Lonegan said.
“Booker is a Hollywood stand-in for Barack Obama, and Rahm Emanuel came in to give him his marching orders,” Lonegan said. “California doesn’t need a third senator. New Jersey needs its own senator.”
Actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and filmmaker J.J. Abrams are hosting a separate Hollywood fundraiser for Booker Monday.
“Newark is worse now than under Mayor Sharpe James,” Lonegan said, referring to the legendary Democratic machine politician whose imprisonment on corruption charges at the hand of then-prosecutor Chris Christie allowed Booker, who lost to James in the 2002 mayoral race, to win James’ old office in 2006. “His city is disintegrating and yet he’s walking around Hollywood.”
Newark police responded to three different shootings in the city Thursday, with four people wounded and one killed. Newark has seen more than 60 homicides so far this year, including ten murders in a streak of ten days in late August and early September.
“Everybody’s so worried about ‘Booker’ that…we are forgotten. The people of the city of Newark. We are hurting here. This crime is killing us. The blood runs on our streets,” the Newark Anti-Violence Coalition’s Donna Jackson said after a murder earlier this month.
Booker’s campaign blasted Lonegan’s counter-rally and shifted focus to the national debate about gun control presided over by the Obama administration.
“Steve Lonegan continues to attempt to exploit tragedy for his own political gain,” Booker’s campaign said in a statement.
“The truth is that mayors across America are working to curb the epidemic of gun violence, but when common sense measures to keep illegal guns off the street, including new penalties for straw purchasers and expanded background checks, came before Congress earlier this year, the gun lobby stood in the way – the same gun lobby holding a political fundraiser tomorrow for Steve Lonegan,” Booker’s campaign said, highlighting a Lonegan event Saturday at the South Jersey Shooting Club in Winslow sponsored by the NJ Second Amendment Society and hosted by Bangers Sport Shop.
Media favorite Booker leads Lonegan by between 16 to 35 points in recent polls.