You’re Unbelievable!

What I love about our country’s federal system of government is that there’s so much going on that you’ll never hear about. Yes, national politics has the highest profile, but there are also fifty smaller, distinct political spheres, each with its own cast of characters and soap-opera-ish sagas.

Today is the Republican primary for the New Jersey governorship. When I was a kid growing up in northern New Jersey, I didn’t know a thing about our state because everything was overshadowed by New York City. My parents grew up in Queens, I was born in Manhattan, and my parents were always very Manhattan-centric. I knew more about the mayor of New York City than I did about my own governor. But state politics has become interesting recently.

Politically, New Jersey is notoriously unpredictable. More than half of our voters are unaffiliated with any party, and most people don’t pay attention to political contests until the very end. This makes most polls unreliable. Still, the state has been trending left in recent years, and even its Republicans have usually been social moderates.

No offense to anyone, but lately I’ve wondered if I’m actually living in Louisiana.

Just five years ago, our U.S. senators — both Democrats — were well-respected statesmen: Bill Bradley and Frank Lautenberg. Today, we still have two Democrats, but they’re Jon Corzine, who bought himself a Senate seat last year, and Bob Torricelli, who’s currently under an ethics investigation. And then there’s Peter Verniero, who was appointed to the state Supreme Court last year and has been threatened with impeachment, because during his confirmation hearings, he lied about what he’d known about the extent of the state’s racial profiling practices when he was state attorney general. The state senate has wanted the state assembly to impeach him, but it hasn’t.

But the governor’s race is what’s interesting now. Two-term Republican governor Christie Whitman, a social moderate, resigned a year early to become Bush’s EPA director. Under a quirk of the New Jersey constitution, she was replaced by the president of the state senate, a Republican, Donald T. DiFrancesco, who became acting governor. But he wasn’t constitutionally required to resign his state senate seat, probably because the framers of our current constitution in 1941 didn’t contemplate a governor being unable to perform the job duties for more than a short time. So, as fully sanctioned by our state constitution, we currently have a blatant violation of the separation-of-powers doctrine: the head of the executive branch is also the head of the legislative branch.

DiFrancesco was going to run for the governorship on his own this year, but back in April he dropped out of the race because of questionable business dealings. Whoops! To replace him, the state Republican establishment chose Bob Franks, a moderate who nearly upset Jon Corzine in last year’s U.S. senate race. So, six months after he conceded defeat in a statewide race and was expecting to laze around for a while, Bob Franks — who was a nobody a year ago — is running in yet another statewide race. Great name recognition, right? And maybe he could resurrect his statewide campaign theme, “Franks on a Roll.” (Which he did.)

To give Franks time to campaign, the Republicans postponed their primary until today, three weeks later than originally scheduled. This turned out to be a bad move, because…

…all this time there was another candidate for the Republican nomination, an annoying and inconsequential gadfly who had no backing from the state Republican establishment: Bret Schundler, a social conservative, who has strong support from the abortion opponents and the gun owners. I bet you didn’t think we had those kinds of people in New Jersey, did you? Neither did I. And the weird thing is that Schundler also happens to be the mayor of heavily Democratic and minority-populated Jersey City, where I live. I’d refer to him as “my” mayor, but I feel no connection to Jersey City at all. (Still, there were a couple of campaign workers passing out Schundler literature at the PATH station this morning.)

Anyway, Schundler was at the bottom of the polls and Franks was sailing his way to the nomination, but in the last ten days the race has become an inexplicable dead heat — and in fact, in the final polls, Schundler actually had a slight lead over Franks. This is because he’s hush-hushed his social views in favor of his views on tax cuts. It’s also because conservative Republicans of all stripes are energized and excited that they can finally unite behind one candidate, and Franks is congenial but doesn’t excite anyone. (Sound familiar?) If there’s a low turnout, this favors Schundler.

The Republican establishment dreads the idea of the conservative Schundler winning the nomination, because if he does, they foresee a disaster at the polls in November. DiFrancesco has already said he won’t support Schundler if he gets the nomination. Actually, whoever wins the nomination, most people seem to think the Democratic candidate will win in November. He’s Jim McGreevey, the mayor of Woodbridge, who came thisclose to unseating Governor Whitman four years ago.

If Schundler wins the nomination, it’ll be interesting to see what happens to the state’s moderate Republican party, and it’ll be a heck of an interesting summer and fall… stay tuned.