Sharp James Street Fight: Mayoral Campaign

Jason Zheng
ORGB 3201
Prof Paulette
07-21-2014
Power and Leadership Analysis on “Street Fight”
The film described two mayor candidates used different approach to run the mayoral campaign in Newark, New Jersey. Sharp James, who was the 16-year incumbent mayor, had been possessed tremendous power in the city. Whereas Cory Booker, who was the upstart challenger in the race, decided to win the race by using “influence” strategy. At the beginning of the movie, it clearly shows different campaign style of two candidates. The movie started with the scenario that Cory Booker went to one of the highest poverty level neighborhood to gain people’s support. In comparison, Sharp James easily convened many of his supporters to advertise his reelection campaign at the beginning. In the following paragraphs, I will analyze how these two candidates use different approach for their mayoral campaign.
In the film, Sharp James is a ruthless “politician”, who use his muscle and power to get things done.
With 16 years at mayor position, he made many people in that community depend on. As people mentioned in the movie, James is personally popular and has raised Newark’s stature with corporate, downtown centered development, and building new baseball stadium. So, many people in Newark treat James as a really important leader who cannot be easily replace which makes his possessed both coercive power and referent power. There are some clear evidence in the movie that has proved this point. For example, he forced local merchants who display Booker sign to shut down, he asked his security to throw out the film director simply because the director support Cory Booker and asked local policeman to take off Cory Booker’s campaign advertisement on the street. He also played many dirty tricks, such as slandering Cory booker “not black enough” and “great white hope”. All of these examples reflected the abuse of power by this “political machine” in order to get supports from
people. Unlike Sharp James, Cory Booker was a councilman of the city who was running mayoral campaign for his first time. Nobody in the city really knew him and he didn’t possess as much power as sharp James. Instead of using power to force people to support him, he chose to present his great leadership to people in order to gather the supports. He started with articulating the vision that he wanted to lead people to approach. In the film, he claimed that he will lead people to work together to decrease the poverty rate, build a better education system and community. Then he criticized the current mayor that he didn’t change much in past 16 years. He claimed the fact that Newark’s sky-high murder rate, over 30% of poverty level and 60% of high school dropout rate. However, it is not easy to get people’s support immediately, especially because people had been influenced by Sharp’s power for 16 years. In the film, many people suspected his background and real intention of running the city’s mayor at the beginning. But Cory Booker used his great leadership strategy to make people go through the orchestration of conflict, and gained considerable supports at the end. Although Cory Booker didn’t win the race, the votes was really close. In fact, there are so many disadvantages for Cory Booker. I mean Sharp had tremendous power in that city for 16 years, and he could easily designate people to do whatever he wanted. Considering the fact that the race was that close, I think Cory Booker really did much better job in that mayoral campaign.

Work Cited

----Curry, Marshall. "POV." PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 5 July 2005.
-----Curry, Marshall. "Street Fight(2005)." N.p., n.d. Web.