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.

Yeah, More Verbosity, I Know

Anyway, back to my life. It’s been a good week; since I came back from West Virginia I’ve felt pretty darn refreshed. Let me review the last seven sun-and-moon cycles. Friday and Saturday night, West Virginia. Sunday night, home. Monday night, hung out with Sparky. Tuesday night, stayed overnight at Bryan’s.

Spending as little time at my apartment as possible, and forcing myself to get across the river and spend time in the city, seemed to be doing me some good, so I decided to keep that up. Therefore, on Wednesday night I decided to go to the Lesbian and Gay Community Center to attend a meeting of the Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats. I had wanted to try new things, find new social outlets, get more involved in the issues of the day, give something back to the community, a là some combination of Arthur Frommer, Barbra Streisand and Mother Theresa. So my friend Nick had suggested several weeks ago that I check out GLID, and lo and behold, when I scanned the Center’s meeting schedule on Wednesday, it turned out GLID was meeting that very night.

I got to the Center about half an hour too early, and this was even after killing time by walking up Hudson Street and along one of the side streets in the oft-forgotten land of the Meatpacking District (that name’s kind of arousing, isn’t it?) and then back along Greenwich Street. So I did what I sometimes do when I first get there, which is go up to the second floor and use the bathroom. I’ve never written about this here, but I have a pretty sensitive stomach. Sometimes after eating a meal at a restaurant — because they usually give you more food than you need, and because I love to eat and usually wind up cleaning the overloaded plate — well, sometimes bad stuff starts to happen, and not necessarily right away. This really wasn’t a case of restaurant-related bathroom panic, because I hadn’t been to a restaurant. But when you’re walking along the streets of Manhattan, it can be difficult to find a place that will let you use its bathroom. Bars are good, and so are hotels, but when none of those are around, there can be a problem. Some people have this fear that they’ll get an upset stomach while stuck in a traffic jam on the highway and have no place to go, in both senses of the word. Something similar sometimes happens to me when I’m walking along the streets of New York. I might start to feel queasy, and then sidewalk bathroom panic occurs.

I don’t really know why I wrote about that. I know I tend to be verbose here. Sorry about the verbal diarrhea. Ba-dum-pum.

After my ablutions I went back downstairs and sat on the benches in the lobby, skimming through the Village Voice, turning first as I always do to Savage Love, Dan Savage’s hilarious sex column, and doing some people-watching. I killed more time by going up to the library to see if some particular books were on the shelves; I was hoping to find this new one, but it wasn’t there.

Finally it was 8:00 and I went upstairs for the meeting. There was a handful of people milling around, all of whom seemed much older than me. I kind of stood there awkwardly, looking around, and so forth, and then someone announced, “If you’re a candidate, please sign in so we can determine the order in which you’ll speak.” It turned out this was going to be a night of listening to political candidates give speeches and then voting on endorsements in the upcoming primaries, and this seemed incredibly boring to me, so — well, I left.

After that I wandered around the streets for a while. Somehow it got to be 9:30 and I was walking down Sixth Avenue, on my way to the PATH station, when I ran into an old law school classmate whom I hadn’t seen in two years. She and I were in the same first-year law section (a section consists of 30 people and you take all your first-year classes together), and she’s now working in a New York firm and living by herself on the Upper West Side. We decided to get some ice cream and catch up. We got our chilled dairy products and walked a few blocks to a parkbench where we yammered about the last couple of years. I did lots of rubbernecking as nice-looking guys walked by, which elicited comments from her, as well as the news that she already knew I was gay, because apparently during our third year of law school a friend had mentioned to her that he’d run in to me with another guy at a restaurant on Valentine’s Day.

Eventually we wrote our phone numbers and e-mail addresses on little scraps of paper and parted ways. It wound up being a varied, enjoyable evening, something that wouldn’t have happened had I stayed at home. This was borne out by last night, when I did stay at home, and wound up getting online and ultimately meeting up with this nice, attractive guy for an hour of nakedness. Six feet tall, red hair and fair skin, a smooth gym body with the broadest, most chiseled and pornolicious pecs I’d ever seen, and a nice, intelligent guy to boot. Afterwards he suggested we explore Jersey City together some time. I agreed, but still, I wanted to kick myself when the night was over, because lately I’ve been trying to stay away from Internet-initiated sex. Part of what’s made this week so nice is that I’ve been too busy in the evenings to resort to sitting at home in front of a computer screen and feeling like a pathetic antisocial sex addict. I have no weekend plans and so I’m worried about what might happen.

Between August 15, 2000, and January 1, 2001, I had no sex at all. None. No sexual contact, not even a kiss, nothing. I was too busy getting used to my new job, and mooning over my friend Nick, and taking advantage of the novelty of living so close to Manhattan. No sex at all for four and half months, and barely any time spent in chat rooms, and it was terrific. And now I’m trying to be like that again. Not the monasticism — I probably wouldn’t turn down good sex. It’s just that I’d like to be too busy to look for it online.

(By the way, sorry if the comments aren’t working. I can’t seem to win. E-mail me!)