The Tweeting Hero of Snowpocalypse: Meet Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark

First there was the massive holiday blizzard on the East Coast, and then there was the cleanup (or lack thereof in New York City) and various accusations of wussiness in the City of Brotherly Love.  Amid all the snowy mess and loud repercussions, I gotta hand it to Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark: Kudos, sir. Kudos indeed.  If nothing else, one can't ask for better optics and public relations than that in the Internet age: a young, vigorous mayor shoveling snow like everyone else ... and helping whomever he can while using Twitter to keep in touch with his city residents. (Here's his Twitter page, by the way.)



Blurb from the Time magazine article:

If you're a mayor of a northeastern U.S. city, you probably despise Cory Booker right now, because the tweeting mayor of Newark, N.J., is now a social-media superhero, able to move towering snowbanks in a single push — or by sending the shovels and plows your way.

After a blizzard started blanketing the Northeast on Dec. 26, an event that earned the Twitter hashtag #snowpocalypse, Booker turned the microblogging site into a public-service tool. Residents of the city, which has a population of around 280,000, swarmed Booker's account (@CoryBooker) with requests for help, and the mayor responded. He and his staff have bounced around Newark shoveling streets and sending plows to areas where residents said they were still snowed in. "Just doug [sic] a car out on Springfield Ave and broke the cardinal rule: 'Lift with your Knees!!' I think I left part of my back back there," he reported in one message. One person let Booker know, via Twitter, that the snowy streets were preventing his sister from buying diapers. About an hour later, Booker was at the sister's door, diapers in hand.