Christie Has the Lead, Corzine Has the Cash in N.J. Governor Race
Dressed in full Ralph Lauren (blue-striped shirt with a polo player logo, khakis with the designer’s label visible and moccasins without socks), Republican gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie was greeting voters Saturday afternoon at a street fair in this suburban town 30 miles southwest of Manhattan.
In his first major political race, the chunky 47-year-old former federal prosecutor accompanied his handshakes, hugs and back pats with this refrain about the record of Democratic incumbent Gov. Jon Corzine: «Worst unemployment in 20 years . . . highest tax burden in the nation.”
Even though Christie has led Corzine in every published poll, often by 8 to 10 points, since he defeated a conservative challenger in the June primary, the Republican might be considered — surprisingly enough — the underdog. Corzine, the former head of the investment banking house of Goldman Sachs who is fortified with a nine-digit net worth, will lavish a minimum of $40 million (mostly his own money) on his reelection campaign, while Christie will be limited to about $10 million in donations and state matching funds.
But the race is about more than just cash, a phrase you rarely hear in money-talks New Jersey, where more than 150 state and local officials have been indicted for corruption in the past decade. Corzine also benefits from New Jersey’s blue-state orientation (Barack Obama won by more than 500,000 votes in 2008) and potent county-level Democratic machines that boost turnout in non-presidential years.
Christie is banking on the first of two televised debates Thursday night to rebound from a fusillade of Corzine attacks ads, including a recent spot that snidely accuses the GOP nominee of «throwing his weight around» to avoid traffic tickets.
«The cat’s out of the bag on the fact that I’m overweight,” Christie conceded during an interview in Woodbridge. «So if that’s the kind of stuff that the governor wants to talk about, it just shows how he’s trivialized the governorship.”
Talking about his debate strategy against Corzine with a group of voters in Livingston last Wednesday night as I listened in, Christie confided, «My biggest challenge will be not looking like a bully.» When I asked the Republican nominee, who was appointed by George W. Bush in 2002 as U.S. attorney for New Jersey, to explain his concerns about being too aggressive in the upcoming debate, Christie said simply, «I’m a prosecutor, so that’s my background.”
If New Jersey were not one of two states (Virginia is the other) holding gubernatorial elections this November, the outcome of the Corzine-vs.-Christie clash might only matter to its 8,7 million residents and out-of-state relatives of the candidates. But instead the results will be parsed as intently as each scene in a «Mad Men» episode looking for clues about the 2010 congressional elections and Obama’s popularity. The Corzine campaign, concerned with potentially lagging African-American turnout, has even rented billboard space in cities like Trenton, pretending that the governor is running this year on the same ticket as the president.
«KEEP IT GOING,” the billboards read, with the names of Obama and Corzine directly under the slogan. The White House (which has deployed Obama pollster Joel Benenson and campaign surrogates like presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett on Corzine’s behalf) and the Republican Party (which is expected spend as much as $10 million through groups like the Republican Governors Association to buttress Christie) have done what they can to turn this gubernatorial race into a national referendum.
But in a rare show of unity, both Corzine and Christie in interviews scoffed at the notion that the New Jersey race is a proxy battlefield testing Obama’s popularity. Thursday night, as he was taking his tie off after a speech to a county Democratic dinner in Edison, the bearded Corzine said, «I think it’s important that we enhance the president’s political capital by a victory in New Jersey. . . . I think it will help him if we win here. But I don’t think it’s a statement about him.”
As Christie put it, «The people of New Jersey will decide this race based on the issues that Jon Corzine and I are discussing — his record, my record, a look to the future. I don’t think the national Democrats or national Republicans have much to do with it.» A top Republican strategist said it even more succinctly, «If Jon Corzine can’t win here after spending more than $40 million, I think it is hard to blame it on Barack Obama.”
The bearded, gray-haired, often rumpled, 62-year-old Corzine has a similar pedigree to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, another Wall Street veteran who did not balk at spending more than $100 million of his own money to create and sustain a political career. But even though Corzine has won two statewide elections (for the Senate in 2000 and for governor in 2005), he has not left nearly as strong a political imprint as Bloomberg, who is coasting to a third term as mayor.
«There’s been a conspicuous lack of conviction and an excess of timidity to Corzine’s time as governor,” said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University. «He’s become almost as tax averse as New Jersey voters themselves.”
With a 9,7 percent unemployment rate and a looming $8-billion state budget deficit, New Jersey has been reeling from the same maladies that have afflicted other states that were already on shaky fiscal ground before the recession. New Jersey residents are also saddled with the highest local property taxes in the nation, which is a political burden for Corzine, but is also related to a high statewide median income, strong financial support for the public schools and a failure of long-term efforts in Trenton to reform the property-tax system.
Corzine’s record as governor might have been more ambitious if he had not endured a death-defying accident in April 2007 when his SUV, driven by a state trooper, crashed into a guard rail on the Garden State Parkway, while traveling at 91 miles per hour. Sitting in the right seat and not wearing a seatbelt, Corzine suffered 18 bone fractures and lost half his blood.
«His auto accident is very critical to his record as governor since he lost critical months just as he was rolling into the legislative reelection season,” said Brigid Harrison, a political scientist at Montclair State University. «Corzine has spent the rest of his term playing catch-up.”
Not surprisingly, Corzine rejects this interpretation. «There were four or five months where we weren’t able to do as much as might have wanted to do to push an agenda,” Corzine said, perhaps over-using the conditional tense and the royal-we pronoun because of his discomfort at the question. «But I don’t think that’s really a significant factor at all.» During our interview, Corzine did wince when an enthusiastic but thoughtless supporter shouted «Break a leg» to a candidate all too familiar with broken bones.
Complicating the electoral calculations of both Corzine and Christie is the presence in the race of a credible independent candidate, Chris Daggett, a socially liberal and fiscally conservative former state environmental protection commissioner under Republican Gov. Tom Kean. Scoring as high as double digits in some polls, the 59-year-old Daggett, wearing a fleece windbreaker and an open-necked blue shirt, was also campaigning Saturday afternoon at the street fair in Woodbridge.
«I’m the first candidate with a broad-based background ever to run as an independent in New Jersey,” Daggett told a middle-aged woman voter. In an interview, Daggett repeated this refrain: «We’re at a point when it is a perfect time for an independent. If the economy improves, you watch, the Republicans and Democrats are going to go back to the same old stuff — tax and spend, borrow and spend. That’s all they do.”
Aided by New Jersey’s campaign-financing program that matches private donations (the independent expects to spent $1,5-$2 million on the race) and a participant in the campaign debates, Daggett, in theory, appeals to liberal Republicans upset with Christie’s anti-abortion views and vague budget-cutting plans and anti-Corzine Democrats who cannot bring themselves to vote Republican but want to send a message.
«Every poll so far shows that Daggett hurts Christie more than he does Corzine,” said Mickey Carroll, the director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, which polls on the New Jersey race. In fact, there are leading New Jersey Democrats who believe that Corzine can never reach 50 percent of the vote, so he needs Daggett in the race to win with a plurality.
So far, Daggett’s major contribution to the campaign has been airing a humorous, if heavy-handed, TV commercial (his only ad) that uses look-alike actors to capture popular dissatisfaction with both Corzine and Christie. In the spot, both Corzine and Christie are on a stalled escalator (symbolizing the plight of New Jersey) as the governor vaguely muses, «I wonder what’s going on in Manhattan tonight» while his Republican challenger angrily shouts, «If somebody doesn’t fix this right now, people are going to jail. Jail!”
It may seem puzzling that the clean-government issue appears to be a minor motif in the gubernatorial election even though three mayors, two state assemblymen and — yes — five rabbis were indicted by the federal government in late July in a New Jersey corruption investigation that included the illegal sale of body parts and a $97,000 payoff delivered inside a box of Apple Jacks.
Part of the explanation may be that Corzine embodies the too-rich-to-steal appeal of a wealthy candidate while Christie is a former United States attorney who prosecuted such officials as former Newark mayor Sharpe James. But an even stronger factor may be that New Jersey voters, based on long experience, are cynical that any governor can clean up the state. «Maine advertises itself as ’The Way Life Should Be,’ ” says Ross Baker. «New Jersey’s slogan might as well be, ‘The Way Life Actually Is.’ ”
The way politics is played in New Jersey this year is that Corzine is going to continue to saturate the TV screens with 30-second spots accusing his rival of everything from opposing mammograms for cancer screening (based on an exaggerated interpretation of Christie’s position on mandated insurance coverage) to being . . . well . . . a Republican.
Christie, for his part, will continue to insist that he can magically lower taxes and cut the budget without specifying precisely what programs will be trimmed or eliminated. («Everything is on the table» is Christie’s imprecise mantra). For voters in the middle, the election is apt to be about «who do you hate less» rather than «who do you like more.» About all that is certain is that the outcome will have little to do with Obama and the political direction of the country in 2010.
politicsdaily.com
07/7/2008
— Filed under: World
Tags: Chris Christie, Corzine, polls
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