Cory Booker becomes the first black senator from New Jersey and heads to Washington!
TRENTON, N.J. Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a rising national Democratic star, was elected to the U.S. Senate giving him a bigger political stage after a race against conservative Steve Lonegan, a former small-town mayor. Booker, 44, will become the first black senator from New Jersey and heads to Washington with an unusual political resume. He was raised in suburban Harington Park as the son of two of the first black IBM executives, and graduated from Stanford and law school at Yale with a stint in between as a Rhodes Scholar before moving to one of Newark's toughest neighborhoods with the intent of doing good. He's been an unconventional politician, a vegetarian with a Twitter following of 1.4 million - or five times the population of the city he governs. With dwindling state funding, he has used private fundraising, including a $100 million pledge from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, to run programs in Newark, a strategy that has brought his city reso...