From the perspective of Steve Lonegan supporters, New Jersey voters just offered a clear verdict that will doom their state to another miserable four years of Gov. Jon Corzine. They rejected a full-spectrum conservative for a lightweight political neophyte, a wannabe white knight with mud on his boots, who will be hoist with his own petard and painted as a laughable hypocrite.
From the perspective of Chris Christie supporters, Republican voters offered a clear verdict: They rejected a fire-breathing ideologue who would repel independents as few other statewide candidates ever had before, and nominated a tough guy who has the street cred to clean up Trenton and who is already well ahead of a strikingly unpopular incumbent.
Over the next five months, we will see who is right.
The Lonegan folks contend that the party has just entrusted its bid to dislodge Corzine to a candidate with a glass jaw worthy of Waterford crystal. As a U.S. attorney, Christie won convictions or guilty pleas from 130 public officials — both Republican and Democratic, on the state, county, and local levels — without losing a single case. He exploded on the state’s political scene as one of the most relentless forces against the epidemic of corruption among elected officials: He was New Jersey’s version of Harvey Dent. But Christie made his share of controversial decisions in that job, including awarding a multimillion-dollar federal monitoring contract to former U.S. attorney David Kelley. Three years earlier, Kelley had indicted 15 colleagues of Chris Christie’s brother Todd on securities fraud, while not indicting Todd — even though the SEC found that he had made 1,600 “improper” trades.
To Christie, this is a desperate attack; he says he picked Kelley because he had the right expertise and experience for the monitoring job. The sinister interpretation of the contract requires us to believe that Kelley spared Todd Christie further legal troubles because he somehow knew that in three years, his brother would steer him a lucrative contract. (A simpler explanation was that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York hesitated about indicting the brother of the U.S. attorney for New Jersey.) Nonetheless, fairly or not, the term “lucrative no-bid contract” is synonymous, in many voters’ minds, with an unfair deal.
A frustrated source close to the Lonegan campaign laments that Lonegan failed to make good use of this issue. “Chris Christie held himself to such a high standard running as a crime-fighter cleaning up Trenton that this presented a way to define him early,” the source said Wednesday. “And [this line of criticism would have painted] him as a hypocrite . . . [and] a flip-flopper who will say anything to win the nomination.”
Others within the Lonegan camp concluded that New Jersey voters don’t care about ethics: The state’s government has been a parade of scandals large and small, and the consequences are visible much more frequently in courtrooms than in election results. (New Jersey voters never got a chance to render a verdict at the ballot box on the state’s two most infamous bad boys in recent memory, former Democratic senator Bob Torricelli and former Democratic governor Jim McGreevey. Both resigned rather than face the voters.)
The primary debate focused more on Lonegan’s support of the flat tax, and on who would benefit and who would pay more under it. The candidate who planned on running as the true conservative was left making highly technical arguments about progressive taxation, socialism, and redistribution of wealth, while Christie had the simpler argument that some New Jerseyans would face higher taxes under Lonegan. (The frustrated source close to the Lonegan campaign concludes, “I’m now convinced that if you can’t win on the flat tax with GOP primary voters in New Jersey, the highest-taxed state in the country, you can’t win with it anywhere.”)
Lonegan was a rock-ribbed conservative: a passionate pro-lifer, staunch opponent of illegal immigration, and furious foe of eminent domain. All these issues are important, but not necessarily the top concerns of voters one year into a severe recession.
Beyond that, Lonegan faced an inescapable style issue. He is already the subject of a documentary, Anytown, USA, which depicts his 2003 reelection campaign. The movie’s site promoted him as “the ornery incumbent,” and, in most of the clips, Lonegan comes across as a figure familiar to anyone who’s worked in party politics: the relentlessly determined pol, over-caffeinated, living up to his pledge to “run an election like you’re behind all the time.”
Christie’s campaign used footage from Anytown, USA in some web ads, but it’s not clear that they were particularly damaging. More likely it was Lonegan’s relentlessly mad-as-hell rhetoric, coupled with that quirky personality, that amounted to a particularly tough sell in uncertain times. New Jersey voters may seem always to be mad about something, but their elected officials actually tend to be sunnier or more soft-spoken personalities — Tom Kean, Christie Whitman, Bill Bradley, even McGreevey. The political world needs perpetual-motion workhorses like Steve Lonegan, but they’re hard to elect to statewide office.
On to the general election: There’s some evidence that the “Christie’s no white knight” attack won’t work for the endangered incumbent in this particularly brutal economic environment. The Democratic party’s Mid-Atlantic Leadership Fund has already run about $1 million in ads attacking Christie on this topic. Yet Christie took the lead in head-to-head matchups with Corzine at the beginning of the year, and this has remained stable since March.
Beyond that, as a senator, Corzine was the man who stood by Torricelli and McGreevey to the bitter end. He’s the wrong messenger to shout “Corruption!” and, perhaps in recognition of that, his reelection-campaign kickoff speech took a different tack: He alluded to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, and referred to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, and Corzine’s disapproval of the war in Iraq, reassuring voters that he would not be invading Iraq in his second term.
Between now and November, though, the incumbent will probably be shouting “no-bid contract” and “George W. Bush” until he’s blue in the face. He’ll mention all that because of the difficulty in discussing other topics; to say the state has budget problems is like saying the Hindenburg had a difficult arrival in Lakehurst in 1937. By every one of Corzine’s own preferred criteria, he’s left the state in worse shape than Gov. Jim Florio did when he was defeated in 1993.
The wind is at Christie’s back, but the race has only begun.
—Jim Geraghty writes the Campaign Spot blog for NRO.
