M. Teresa Ruiz

Councilman Luis QuintanaAt-Large Newark City Councilman Luis Quintana this week told PolitickerNJ.com that he intends to go to Texas to campaign for presidential candidate Barack Obama in the lead-up to that state’s Democratic Party primary on March 4th.

"I love this candidate, Barack Obama," said Quintana, who admitted his own local efforts to stare down the machine makes it easy for him to identify with the first-term Illinois senator’s attempt to buck the system.

Quintana last year campaigned unsuccessfully for state Senate in the 29th district, losing to establishment Democrat - and Sen. Hillary Clinton supporter - M. Teresa Ruiz.

A big whoop rose from the mostly Latino crowd when a woman held aloft a doll of Sen. Hillary Clinton in Schuetzen Park in North Bergen on Wednesday night. But that was low-key compared to the raise-the-roof response elicited a few minutes later when the New York senator and Democratic presidential candidate actually appeared on stage.

"I know how incredibly important family is to the Latino community," Clinton told several hundred cheering supporters. "Let’s take care of families with real resources."

Newark Mayor Cory BookerAfter M. Teresa Ruiz won her general election senate race, Steve Adubato finally let Cory Booker know what he thought about the mayor’s primary election efforts on behalf of Bilal Beasley in the 28th district.

Adubato, lifelong political warrior and Newark native, frankly wasn’t impressed.

Beasley, with Booker’s so called muscle behind him, had failed to beat the always independent and hard-to-gauge Sen. Ronald Rice, perennial west ward cowboy and activist, and a mutual bane to Adubato and Booker.

Adubato’s telephone tongue-lashing awakened another old frustration for the mayor.

State Sen.-elect M. Teresa Ruiz
Newark Mayor Cory Booker jumped onto stages in the spring and fall to lend his political heft to the senate candidacy of M. Teresa Ruiz.

Ruiz won, and now with that contest over there rises another election on their mutual political horizon, and that’s the presidential contest on Feb. 5th.

This time the two public speaking machines won’t be allied.

Booker favors Sen. Barack Obama, and has huddled up around the candidacy of the man from Illinois along with Newark Council President Mildred Crump and Councilman Ron Rice, Jr. The mayor’s name will be on the ballot beneath Obama’s as a candidate to be a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

They hear it on the streets of Newark.

But on the first and third Wednesdays of each month, members of the City Council can be sure to receive a barrage of complaints from residents who are worried not only about the murders and gangs but about the cost of living and the threat of corporate interests upending local concerns.

"You're supposed to be standing up and fighting for us," the poet Amiri Baraka cried during the public comment forum of a meeting. "Until I see you fighting, then you're not a good council."

"You're giving tax abatements to developers," cried resident Frank Hertz. "You'd better justify this tax abatement."

And always there is the complaint about the scarcity of jobs.