New Jersey Assembly and Senate Races

I listen to 770 - AM out of New York City and hear a constant stream of ads for the New Jersey State Senate and House races. I'm in Connecticut but I'd like to learn more about what's going on there. I know that the GOP suffered some fairly severe losses in 2001 - but what's the outlook for this year?

Of particular interest is Ellen Karcher vs John Bennett. Both have some really nasty attack ads on the air. The race must be a hot one!

Bennett is a 100% pro-abortion, stem cells and cloning RINO who uses his position to get rich. He spent almost 350k to beat Richard Pezzullo www.pezzullo.com in the primary and has a run for his money in the general election. Most of what she says is true. They've increased the debt and spending, never lowererd auto or malparactice insurance rates, property taxes went through the roof and they approved an $8 Billion bond issue illegally for the inner-city schools without the voters' approval. He is currently the Republican Senate co-president.

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The big winner wasn't running

Thursday, June 05, 2003

Picking the biggest loser in Tuesday's Republican primaries is easy. That would be Chuck Haytaian.

The 65-year-old former Assembly speaker came out of retirement to try to unseat one of the state GOP's rising stars, Assemblyman Mike Doherty of Warren County. Haytaian never quite managed to explain just why he got into the race, other than to say that he wanted to challenge the Democrats on spending.

That was odd, considering that Doherty is much more fiscally conservative than Haytaian. And then there's the fact that most of that Democratic spending is going to pay for programs Republicans adopted back in the 1990s, when Haytaian was a key party leader.

Some political observers thought Haytaian had entered the race to settle grudges among Warren Republicans. The former speaker seemed to confirm that view by running a negative campaign based on cheap shots. Nothing wrong with that -- if it works. It didn't. Haytaian got creamed, 42 percent to 19 percent.

Although Doherty got the most votes in that district, the big winner was his fellow incumbent, Connie Myers. Myers won even without campaigning. It was brilliant. Myers saved a lot of time and a lot of money and still beat Haytaian by a 2-to-1 margin.

The biggest winner Tuesday, however, wasn't involved in any campaign. That would be Bret Schundler. The once and probably future GOP gubernatorial contender sat this one out. A lot of conservatives had hoped Schundler would back some of the many conservative challengers to mainstream Republicans. A lot of these officeholders have been "too liberal for too long," as conservative challenger Jay Webber said of state Sen. Bob Martin of Morris County.

But Martin stopped being quite so liberal when faced with a challenge from the right. And that worked to Schundler's benefit. Martin, who was never before known as a big Schundler supporter, had a political near-death experience in which he saw the light. He even sent out a mailing showing a photo of himself next to a photo of Schundler. "Bob Martin and Bret Schundler -- holding the line on property taxes," it read.

That conversion was enough to stave off the challenge from Webber, who got a creditable 42 percent of the vote. But he wasn't able to pull off the difficult task of unseating a strong incumbent. No one else in the GOP did either. All the Republican incumbents -- liberal or conservative -- won their primaries.

But many conservative challengers managed to rack up vote totals in the 30 to 40 percent range, and this was ideal for Schundler if he decides, as is widely expected, to make another run for governor in 2005. For his purposes, the amount of conservative fervor in the electorate is much like the situation in which Goldilocks found herself when she went looking for a place to sit in the bears' cottage. It's not too big. It's not too little. It's just right.

If all those conservatives had won their races, Schundler might have looked bad for sitting on the sidelines. If they had all been blown out, some Republican would start figuring he could do the same to Schundler next time around. But as it now stands, Schundler looks like he has a 40 percent base onto which he must add a mere 11 percent or so to win the nomination in'05.

Also helping Schundler is the nasty mess in which the state's other top Republican figure finds himself. A year ago, Senate Co- President John Bennett looked like a potential rival for Schundler in the next governor's race. No more. All those newspaper articles about Bennett's financial dealings have taken care of that.

The Senate co-president barely survived a primary challenge from Rich Pezzullo, a principled conservative who got 42 percent of the primary vote despite having no staff and no money to speak of. Bennett's victory ended up costing him about $100 per vote. That may be a state record, surpassing even the lofty standard set by Jon Corzine in that memorable 2000 Senate race.

At that rate, Bennett could never afford to run for governor. And when you look around Trenton, you don't see many other Republicans who have the stature to challenge Schundler. State Sen. Diane Allen of Burlington County is often mentioned as a strong candidate against Gov. James E. McGreevey. Perhaps she would be, but she's too liberal to win a primary.

Then of course there's state Sen. Tom Kean Jr. Kean signed a no-tax pledge yesterday. He is going out of his way to court conservatives. If his dad pitches in and Kean makes a run, he could certainly give Schundler a good race in 2005. That one would be fun to watch.

But other than Kean, there are not a lot of contenders. The party establishment has no ideas, no principles and no leadership. At the moment, Schundler is it.

Paul Mulshine is a Star-Ledger columnist.

http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/mulshine/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/104252840693511.xml

State of the GOP is dismal

Tuesday, January 14, 2003

Gov. James E. McGreevey will be giving his State of the State speech today. In anticipation of this great event, the state's Republican leadership held a press conference last week to highlight all of the failures of the McGreevey administration.

It was held in the Statehouse. That's the very same Statehouse where, just one year earlier, the Republican Party was enjoying its last days in control of the state government by attempting a spending splurge of historic proportion. I was in the Statehouse on Jan. 7, 2002, and I remember it well. It was the last legislative session of the Whitman-DiFrancesco era. The Republicans were about to go out of power, but not before they did their best to clear the shelves like one of those TV contestants who gets two minutes in a supermarket to fill a shopping cart.

There was a $355 million sports arena bill for Newark. There was $46 million for other construction around the state, including a couple of sports facilities and a zoo. There was even a $180 million Camden bailout package.

That permitted McGreevey, who would take office a week later, to adopt the pose of a fiscal conservative.

"Such a proposal at this point borders on being incomprehensible," McGreevey told the press.

It certainly was incomprehensible to me. I still don't understand why, in its death throes, the Republican Party was trying to ship hundreds of millions to the Democratic strongholds of Camden and Newark.

A few days later, McGreevey took office and proclaimed, "The days of irresponsible borrowing and runaway spending are over."

By which he meant: Now the Democrats get to hand out the pork.

That's all that's changed. And the Republicans aren't fooling anybody. The 28-page handout the GOP gave reporters at that press conference last week amounted to a call for more government spending, not less.

Here's the entry describing what happened on Jan. 7, 2002: "Newark Arena Plan Stalls: In the midst of a fiscal crisis, McGreevey says he will push for a bill to help finance the project and would like to sign it into law by June."

Note the absurdity. In the middle of a fiscal crisis, the Republicans were trying to spend more on sports arenas than McGreevey ever dreamed of. And now they want to criticize him for it.

He certainly can be criticized, but not by the likes of John Bennett, the Republican Senate co- president, who was at the microphone last week, or by Assembly Minority Leader Paul DiGaetano, who was helping him present the report.

Those two were in on government giveaways that McGreevey will never be able to equal. There was that $8.6 billion school construction bond issue that the GOP put through without voter approval. Then there was that 9 percent hike in public employee pensions five months before the 2001 election. It was an obvious bid to buy votes, but the giveaway came after the state's pension fund had already begun its swan dive in the stock market. The pension costs are up; the market's down. Thank the GOP.

And then there's the question of rising property taxes. The Republicans are promising more state aid to middle-income school districts. But they won't say where the money will come from. A reporter asked DiGaetano whether he will support the next state budget if McGreevey again freezes education aid.

"If in fact he does what he did last year and talks about a freeze in education aid when it's really a decrease in aid because he ignores the increase in population in the 560 middle-income districts in this state, absolutely not," he replied. "That's not an increase. It's a decrease."

True enough, but there's only one way to increase aid to the middle-income districts without raising taxes. And that's by decreasing aid to the 30 Abbott school districts, the mismanaged urban schools that consume about half of state aid. Republicans in other states, such as Michigan and California, solved that problem years ago by equalizing aid among all districts, urban and suburban. Our boys, however, want to increase aid all around. Their handout blasted McGreevey for freezing Abbott aid as well.

Where's the money coming from? The GOP's not saying. It will say, however, that McGreevey was wrong to hike corporate taxes by $1 billion. I'll agree with that. But let's do the math. The Republicans want him to collect a billion less in taxes. They want him to spend perhaps a billion more on schools. Great. That means cutting $2 billion somewhere else. Where?

Bennett and DiGaetano aren't saying. Their specialty is increasing budgets, not reducing them.

Their message, when you filter out the nonsense, is this: Vote for us and you'll get the same policies you get from the Democrats. But we'll get more patronage to hand out.

If you're looking for the reason the Republicans are doing so well nationally and so poorly in New Jersey, look no further. Our Republicans govern exactly like Democrats. So why not vote Democratic?

Paul Mulshine is a Star-Ledger columnist.

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