Disgusting Campaign. My state, New Jersey, is nearing the end of the dirtiest campaign for governor that I can recall, and I'm 60 years old.
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Two multimillionaires (New Jersey is, after all, a rich state), Republican Doug Forrester and U.S. Senator Jon Corzine, the Democrat, are spending a fortune, much of it their own money — well, thank goodness for that!, tho for nothing else in this wretched mudfest — on TV ads attacking each other's stands on taxes and corruption. Forrester's ads are the ugliest, dirtiest, slimiest I have ever seen in this state. If they are not truly actionable slander, legally speaking, they are so close that if Corzine weren't a public figure he might well receive a very handsome recovery in a court of law.
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Forrester is running on a pledge to chop property taxes by 30%, mainly by 'eliminating waste' and 'rooting out corruption'. Only a fool could think (a) that the savings from those two sources alone would be enuf to cover the shortfall in governmental income and (b) that a governor — any governor — could cut LOCAL (property) taxes without inciting revolt by every municipality in the state. Property taxes are not levied by the state nor collected by the state. So how is a governor going to cut property taxes without invading local governments' jurisdiction and taxing authority?
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Alas, there are plenty of fools even in New Jersey, one of the most highly educated states in the Nation. It is easy to fool a fool, but even a fool can perceive obvious absurdities.
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Why doesn't Corzine simply run ads saying, "There is no way in the world you can cut local revenues by 30% without causing catastrophic reductions in services. Not only would we have to cut students' extracurricular activities and high-school sports teams, end music classes and art classes, reduce public-library hours or even close branch libraries entirely, close municipal swimming pools, slash the number of lifeguards at our beaches to dangerous levels (remember that the Jersey Shore is an enormous part of the state and its economy), stop picking up fallen autumn leaves, and cut back on garbage collections, but we would also have to close down some firehouses and public health clinics, slash police forces, and stop filling potholes. Do you think your streets really need more potholes? How many flat tires and dented rims can you afford? How many fewer cops on the street can your town take?"
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Forrester (hereinafter, "Mr. Slime", or words to that effect) has run ads that claim Corzine has voted for tax increases (of what kind, on whom — rich, poor, middle class, or everyone without distinction — is not stated) 133 times. Corzine's camp has responded with feckless ads that say that Forrester's claims have been found by reputable media truth squads to be misleading, but the attribution of such critical admonishments, as to The New York Times, Bergen Record, Asbury Park Press, or other respected entity, have been in small type you cannot easily read on a regular-size TV screen.
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Taking their cue from Republican Slime Central, the Corzine campaign has counterattacked, asserting that, when mayor of some (unnamed) municipality — which turns out to be tiny, inconsequential West Windsor, present population about 25,000 out of the 8.7 million people in this, the Nation's 10th most populous state, despite its small geographic size (4th from the bottom) — Forrester himself doubled property taxes!
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Another Corzine ad quotes an attack on Forrester's (campaign) tax plan that had been asserted in a direct-mail piece sent out by one of his rivals in this year's Republican primary: Forrester's (campaign) plan is a shell game that, if adopted, would end up doubling our tax bill in ten years!
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I suppose that is intended to mean that if you drop taxes of one type, you have to raise taxes of another type, but that is not stated. The direct-mail piece cited had been sent out by Bret Schundler, the Republican Party's nominee for Governor last time (2000). Schundler is the former mayor of Jersey City, second most populous municipality in the state (after mine: Newark), who had done wonders in bringing a lot of outside money (mainly from New York and foreigners deeply invested in New York) into Jersey City, which now hosts a lot of "back-office" operations of financial and other firms that were once served from Manhattan, right across the Hudson.
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(Downtown Newark is only 10 miles farther away, but that 'gaping' distance seems too far for some New Yorkers to contemplate. People in Manhattan, after all, are very insular. That may seem appropriate in that Manhattan is an island. But it's a mid-river, not mid-ocean, island, and 10 miles into the heartland is an easy distance to span, especially with the immense numbers of interconnections between New York and Newark. Come on now, people. Invest some of your billions in Newark! We've got the (English-speaking) workforce. We've got the educational and cultural institutions. We're where your money belongs and can do its best work for the best return.)
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Senator Corzine has tried not to be dragged down into the muck that Mr. Slime lives in, but has been too gentle. I guess either he or his advisors have decided to try to take the high road, with only occasional, brief trips to the upper levels of the Republican ooze, to throw doubt on Forrester's credibility.
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The Democrats recently started airing ads in which Bill Clinton says he served as a governor (of Arkansas) himself for 12 years; over the course of that time met 150 other governors; and that in all that time he never once met anyone better suited to be a governor himself than Jon Corzine. Pretty powerful stuff, and positive. But perhaps not tuf enuf.
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Can you really fite negatives with positives? Only? If so, that will be great news to the rest of the country.
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Alas, Slimeboy Dougie (Forrester) is now running a particularly poisonous ad, accusing Corzine personally of corruption. New Jersey's reputation for corruption is, unfortunately, well earned (tho I imagine there are a lot of other places equally corrupt, but not so famously), so any accusation of this sort is likely successfully to taint anyone who does not answer it forthrightly and powerfully.
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I think it's time for Corzine to blast Forrester in the most basic and plainspoken way possible:

"Doug Forrester is a slimy, detestable liar who disgraces himself, his party, and the state of New Jersey with his lies."

If Corzine does not respond in some blunt, powerful way, the taint of corruption will stick. New Jerseyans like plain speaking. Sock it to Slime Man!
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Forrester's slimy, corruption-themed ad tries to appeal, sub rosa, to antihomosexual bigotry in dragging in the name of former Governor James McGreevey, who resigned from office because he was about to be exposed as a homosexual man so infatuated with an Israeli that he tried to give him a very high office in state government (homeland security director) for which he was not qualified (despite the assertions we hear endlessly that Israel knows how to protect against terrorism). The Forrester ad accuses McGreevey of 'scandal after scandal', when in fact the only scandal anyone ever heard of was the loverboy fiasco, which was affectional (McGreevey was married to a woman at the time), not financial. So plainly Forrester's attack is intended to identify the Democratic Party in general and Jon Corzine in particular with 'faggotry'. Of course, in this royal-blue state, Forrester's scumbags can't simply say, as Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, or other Red State yahoos can, "Ain't no place in this great state for faggots!" No, Forrester has to pretend that McGreevey's sad infatuation somehow constituted corruption — in which Corzine was somehow implicated.
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Never mind that McGreevey was a terrific governor who closed a huge budget gap that George Bush's insane tax cuts for the rich opened up in every state's budget — and that McGreevey did so without raising state taxes or cutting services as far as anyone could tell. No, the mere fact that McGreevey was a faggot makes him, the party he belongs to, and that party's current candidate for the same office, (morally?) 'corrupt'.
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Corzine still leads in the polls, but not by a comfortable margin this close to November. If he doesn't answer the horrendously ugly and viciously dirty ad about his own personal corruption, he might lose this election, which would embolden Republicans everywhere to use the dirtiest of dirty politics to tighten their stranglehold on this Republic. It is thus urgently important that the people of New Jersey bury Forrester's dirt under six feet of clean electoral soil. Or that Corzine arrange to have somebody shoot the bastard. This is New Jersey, home to television's Sopranos and a host of real-life (and death) "goodfellas". If Forrester truly believed Corzine was corrupt, he wouldn't dare attack him, because there's plenty of room in the Meadowlands for Forrester's chunky corpse.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,002.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:28 AM