It sounds like guests of yesterday's gala event with the President had the red, errr... tin foil carpet rolled out for them. Tucked in the Gloucester County Times article is this little piece of info...Only a handful of legislators attended the event held at the New Jersey Convention and Exposition Center, where attendees drank from plastic cups and were entertained by the Montgomery High School Jazz Band, an award-winning group from Wilson's hometown of Killman. I'm sure the band was fantastic and well worth the show, but plastic cups? Why not just go with styrofoam? I know you don't pay for the food at fundraisers, but i might be a little insulted being given the plastic for a $300 event.
So lets recap: many were afraid to acknowledge publicly they were attending, only a handful of legislators actually did attend, those who came had to drink out of plastic cups and the media were forced to move their TV trucks because the owner of the property didn't want to acknowledge he was holding the event. So with all this wondeful information, what did the NY Times have to say? The most prominent New Jersey Republican officials on hand were the party's top leaders in the Legislature: Leonard Lance, Senate minority leader, and Alex DeCroce, Assembly minority leader.
The event also played out without a hitch, in contrast to what happened last year when Vice President Dick Cheney traveled to Newark for a fund-raiser on behalf of Mr. Kean, the Senate candidate.
Mr. Kean was tardy after taking the usually traffic-clogged Route 1 from Trenton rather than the speedier New Jersey Turnpike. That generated speculation that while Mr. Kean wanted the money that was raised ($400,000), he did not want to be photographed with the vice president. Wow, has the bar been lowered so much that as long as you don't give a pathetic excuse, the event went off without a hitch? Yeah, sounds like a huge success to me.Update: While i've had alot of fun railing on this event for the past few weeks and the plastic cups may not be a huge issue, I think the fact that they only raised $700,000 having the President of the United States in town is very telling. Compare that number with the fact that in Dec. 2003, the Star Ledger reported on Dec 2. that Bush took $1 M for his campaign at an event in Morris County. In July 2001, The Bergen Record on July 31 reported that Vice President Cheney raised $3.5 million for Gubernatorial Candidate Bret Schundler. In fact, in 1999, Bush earned $800,000 for the assembly republicans alone, not even the State Party. |
