The Corzine campaign is out with a new web ad this evening hitting Chris Christie over comments he made to the New York Times saying that he's breaking his campaign promises before he even gets elected to office. First, from the NY Times article:
Regarding property tax rebates, Mr. Christie now says he cannot fully restore them - though his commercials omit this qualifier - and that he will send back the money only "on a sliding scale depending on what the economic conditions were." He explained the turnabout by saying he was "prioritizing out of a set of bad choices."
Referring to looming deficits, he added, "It's not like I can click my heels and say, 'Make the bad stuff go away.' "
The change is one of several recent reversals. Mr. Christie now also disavows a promise, made in a primary-season debate, to roll back a sales tax increase. He has backed away from a pledge to avoid using "one-shot" revenues to close the budget deficit. And he is now deferring until later in his term plans to eliminate a business tax surcharge, cut income taxes across the board, identify a permanent financing source for open-space preservation and restore higher-education financing to 2002 levels.
His biggest surviving pledge is to roll back Mr. Corzine's tax increase on people making more than $400,000 a year.
One of the main reasons environmental groups went with Christie was because he supported a permanent financing source for Open Space. So now he not only opposes the bond question, but won't come up with a permanent solution as promised. And what happens if a Christie economy doesn't get better? Do those choices get deffered to the next Governor? Here's the ad:The Democrats have been all over Christie's comments to the NY Times today. Assemblyman Greenwald had this to say:
"It's amazing that Chris Christie has waited until only four days before the polls open to admit that his entire economic plan was built on a foundation of sand," said Greenwald (D-Camden). "The more Christie tosses his grandiose promises of the spring under the wheels of his campaign bus, the more it becomes obvious that his proposals were meant only to make good sound bites, not sound fiscal policy. New Jersey couldn't afford Christienomics in the 1990's, and we can't afford it now."
And Assemblywoman Quigley didn't miss the chance to hit Christie for his latest broken promises:
"It only took 268 days since he threw his hat into the ring, but with four to go until the election Chris Christie has finally come to terms with the devastating fact that his fiscal platform is a non-starter," said Quigley, a member of the Assembly Budget Committee. "But now he faces an even more painful reality: telling prospective voters that his entire plan was a mirage."
He may have only formally declared 268 days ago, but he's been running for much longer than that. It's amazing that of the few specifics he does give, they always seem to get him in trouble. He lost his shared values in the course of a "website re-design", he tried to delete the words mandate-free from his website altogether and since he can't hide the fact that his fiscal don't hold up when exposed to the real world, he's backing away before he can even implement them.
