With Gov. Chris Christie emerging as Mitt Romney's most effective surrogate and potentially a consideration for running mate should he get the GOP nomination, it matters more and more who runs President Barack Obama's re-election campaign in New Jersey. And how it's run.
Today, we learn that Jackie Cornell-Bechelli has been named the President's State Director for NJ. Jackie put time into Organizing for America (OFA) as NJ State Director after Obama's campaign morphed into the OFA structure. I'm not a fan of OFA, which always struck me as trying hard to look like a bottom-up organizing effort when it was actually quite the opposite. And not a fan of curtailing DNC's wildly-successful 50-State Strategy (under which we took the White House, and both Houses of Congress, and many state & local offices) in favor of OFA's expensive concentration on the fortunes of just one candidate, the President. That said, it makes sense that Obama's re-election campaign rely on somebody already "in the family" who is both known and appreciated by the Obama campaign structure.
Plus, Jackie Cornell-Bechelli also spent a year as New Jersey Citizen Action's Political Director, a well-staffed citizen watchdog organization I admire. She leaves that job for the Obama position. For 7 years, she also worked for Planned Parenthood, for which organization every woman I know is grateful.
It's a struggle to suppress my dissatisfaction with the President's first term. Well, until I look at the GOP alternatives, particularly the clown car passenger who nearly won the Iowa caucuses last night. And Romney hisself, who has yet to rise above platitude and the reciting of patriotic song lyrics (as one @BlueJersey Twitter follower pointed out, bet we won't hear 'ole Mittens recite Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land on the stump).
Congratulations to Jackie Cornell-Bechelli. We'll be interested to see how she intends to wean New Jersey away from Chris Christie's idea of the best direction.
Well, we assumed that Jon Corzine couldn't fall any further politically, but now it's just about over.
President Barack Obama's re-election campaign returned campaign contributions from Jon S. Corzine, former chairman and chief executive officer of MF Global Holdings Ltd., according to a Democratic official.
All that's left is the legal end.
Fortunately, there's a lot of little green pieces of paper to cushion the final fall.
Gov. Christie was on Morning Joe today. He got more air time than Mitt Romney, also on, was given. Here's both videos, and a little of what Christie talked about:
Take a damned breath: (3:55 mark) talking national politics, overtalking co-host Mika Brzezinski (like everybody there does). She gets him back, questioning his certainty on Romney.
And as The Jersey Journalreports, it's gotten to the point that Mayor Jeremiah Healy is now reaching out to President Obama:
"The proposed pipeline would transport an unprecedented, potentially disastrous quantity of gas through the heart of Jersey City - traversing everything from low-income neighborhoods to high-rise communities to the nationally critical financial district known as 'Wall Street West' ...On behalf of Jersey City, its quarter million residents, its ever-burgeoning development, its thriving, multi-billion dollar economic sectors, and its precious and diverse ecosystems, we ask you to put a stop to the New Jersey-New York Expansion Project's pipeline plans."
Soaring! And hey, maybe the president will step in! And double hey, what's Governor Christie got to say about this? Why isn't he swooping in to grab a choice opportunity to defend his state?
Good question. If you're in Iowa or Massachusetts or whatnot, do us all a favor and ask him.
In what constitutes an article by Politico's standards, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's recent tantrum, which some have described as an audition for the VP slot with the seemingly inevitable Republican Presidential nominee (unless one of the other six candidates not named Herman Cain and hopefully named Michele Bachmann have something to say about it), Mitt Romney, about President Barack Obama's so-called failure to lead the so-called supercommittee to reach a deal on our country's budget deficit, was basically reprinted for public consumption, including Christie calling Obama "a bystander in the Oval Office" and asking him "What the hell are we paying you for?". His tirade goes further to say the following:
"In New Jersey, the reason [problems got solved] is because I called people into the room and said we're going to solve this problem and I had people of good will on the other side who said they believed it was their obligation, regardless of party, to get done things like pension and benefit reform," the governor said, adding, "Why the president of the United States refuses to do this is astonishing to me."
As obnoxious as Christie's entire tirade was, what bothered me most about the "article" was his stenographer's unwillingness or inability to compare and contrast the political dynamic here in New Jersey with what is going on in Washington and recognize that both are broken for very different reasons.
In Washington, there is a Republican minority in the Senate that can bring our entire government to a standstill by filibustering everything that comes before them and a majority in the House that passes legislation that is so extreme that there is no chance that it would ever survive a Senate committee much less get a vote in the Senate.
Meanwhile, in Trenton, we have Democratic "leadership" that is bought and paid for by party bosses who have more in common with our state's Republican Governor than our party's rank-and-file. As a result, we have a facade of bipartisanship presented to the general public and the lazy mass media, where the storyline is always that Christie presents an initiative in its purest, right-wing form, the Democratic leadership presents a modicum of resistance, making a little bit of noise in the process, Christie scales his initiative back slightly, and the Democratic leadership claims victory, delivers the votes needed for Christie's initiative to pass, while everyone else votes against it, lamenting its passage, while retaining the "high road" even though most, if not all of them, elected and recently re-elected the leadership that continues to enable Christie on each and every issue, while he crows about all of his "bipartisan" successes.
So who are the real bystanders? To be fair, I think that President Obama failed our country, once again, this summer when he refused to heed former President Bill Clinton's advice and unilaterally raise the debt ceiling on constitutional grounds and let the fight go from there. It was not as if the latest in what seems like an endless string of compromises earned him any more good will with the Republicans in Washington, who continue to block him on everything that he tries to do, than every other compromise before it.
But Obama's willingness to capitulate to Republicans on every issue pales in comparison to what we have seen from the Democrats in Trenton who went so far as to let the Republican minority write the first budget that they would pass without even considering for a moment the possibility of a government shutdown like the one which took place when they could not reach an accord with then-Democratic Governor Jon "MF Global Clusterfuck" Corzine on their first budget. The pen/ben debacle was only the latest in an almost equally long string of capitulations that started before Christie was even sworn in as Governor, when 9 Democrats did not vote for marriage equality legislation that could have passed and been signed into law by Governor Clusterfuck (kudos to Rosi for making it not only acceptable, but cool, to use a word like clusterfuck in political discourse - this is second only to the omnipresence of the phrase "batshit crazy" that people like the aforementioned Congresswoman Bachmann have inspired).
Contested statewide Democratic primary elections do not happen very often here in New Jersey. Since I started paying close attention to New Jersey politics in 1997, there have only been four seriously contested statewide Democratic primary elections. In 1997, then-Woodbridge Mayor Jim McGreevey defeated Congressman Rob Andrews and Morris County Prosecutor Michael Murphy for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. In 2000, Jon Corzine bought more votes than his senatorial opponent, former Governor Jim Florio, was able to earn. In February 2008, Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama in the Presidential primary election. In June of that year, Andrews lost his second statewide primary election when he challenged the incumbent U.S. Senator, Frank Lautenberg.
It appears as if we will have a hotly contested Democratic gubernatorial primary election in 2013. The most likely candidates at the moment are State Senators Barbara Buono, Dick Codey, and Steve Sweeney. It is possible that other candidates could come out of the woodwork over the next year or so, but for the sake of this discussion, the names are less important than the questions that the current political dynamic in the state, which has Democratic Party bosses, including but not limited to Steve Adubato and George Norcross, closely aligned with Republican Governor Chris Christie, raises about how serious these bosses are about defeating Christie.
These bosses and their acolytes in the State legislature have enabled Christie to get more of his agenda passed than our last Democratic Governor, Corzine, and have never even come close to a government shutdown like the one which occurred as a result of the conflict between Corzine and then-Assembly Speaker, Joe Roberts, a Norcross minion, over whether the state sales tax should be increased, and if so, how the additional revenue should be spent. So it stands to reason that Adubato, Norcross et al would probably prefer to have one of their own (Steve Sweeney being the most likely candidate, but Assemblyman Louis Greenwald is another possibility) as Governor than Christie, but in lieu of that, it would not be safe to assume that they would prefer someone else, like Buono or Codey, over Christie.
Unless a miracle takes place this Tuesday and Republicans in LD1, LD3, and LD4 pull off major upsets, South Jersey party boss, George Norcross, will have more than enough votes to replace his primary adversary in the Assembly, Majority Leader Joe Cryan, with his top ally in the legislative body, Louis Greenwald, sending Cryan to the back bench.
What remains to be seen, however, is what Cryan will do once he is sent there. Will he unite with his fellow back bencher in the Senate, Dick Codey, to build an opposition movement that will contend not only for the Governor's office in 2013, but also all 120 legislative seats? As much as I would love to see this, I do not expect that this will happen. It is very possible that Dick Codey will run for Governor in 2013, but it is also possible that Cory Booker, Barbara Buono, and Steve Sweeney will run as well and it is unlikely that any of them will run opposition slates against the party lines that they do not win, which means that regardless of who wins the gubernatorial primary, there will not be much change in the legislative roster or its leadership.
If I am right about this, then Cryan will most likely remain on the back bench for most of the next decade. That is, unless he finds a new office for which to run or that office finds him. There have been times in the past decade when Cryan expressed an interest in running for Congress in the 7th district, but admitted that the current configuration of the district made it extremely difficult for a Democrat to win.
This is very true. Our best chance to win this district came in 2006 when a very popular Assemblywoman, Linda Stender, challenged a very unpopular Congressman Mike Ferguson in a year that Democrats were trending up and Republicans were trending down. However, despite these trends, Stender came a few thousand votes short of victory. Two years later, Stender did not run as strong of a campaign as she did in 2006 and faced a very popular State Senator, Leonard Lance. Despite huge turnout increases inspired by Barack Obama's candidacy, it was not enough for a Democrat to win the 7th and Lance defeated Stender by a much wider margin than Ferguson did two years earlier.
He was once touted as a possible replacement for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. He was the solidly progressive United States Senator whose progression to New Jersey governor was once seen as a stepping stone to a White House run. He is a top bundler in Barack Obama's re-election. And he, and the generosity he showed with his ample checkbook, built the New Jersey Democratic Party during his rise, funding downballot candidates and struggling local parties. But as CEO of the securities firm MF Global, Jon Corzine presided over a company that eventually bet too heavily on European sovereign debt, was rocked by credit rating downgrades and investors pulling out, filed for bankruptcy protection just yesterday amid rumors that $700 million in client funds were missing, then confirmation that federal regulators were indeed investigating $700 million - $700 million! - unaccounted for.
Now multiple news sources (here's WSJ and Associated Press) are reporting that MF Global has admitted to federal regulators that money had been diverted out of customer accounts, which is against the law.
Impossible to know at this point how deep this goes, who if anyone will be held culpable, and what will happen in the Chapter 11 filing, or in the future of the man running the show at MF Global. The press on this 8th largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history and on MF Global's chief have been brutal (see Wow, Jon Corzine - Way To Fly Your Company Into A Mountain at Business Insider). And may get worse. You'd expect that. This sounds like a clusterfuck of gigantic proportions. That said, we don't know what facts will eventually shake out here, or who the pointy knives will come out for. But I'm for more regulation of of financial institutions that gamble big for bigger payouts.
President Obama's remarks today announcing a drawdown - to zero - of American troop presence in Iraq is not directly New Jersey news.
But more than 100 people with ties to New Jersey have died in the allied wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And at least 539 New Jerseyans died at the World Trade Center attack tied to both wars. For them, for NJ soldiers deployed in Iraq and veterans of 2 wars there, and for the $40 billion spent by NJ on the Iraq War, here is the speech ostensibly ending it, from the President:
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
ON ENDING THE WAR IN IRAQ
James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
12:49 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon, everybody. As a candidate for President, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end -- for the sake of our national security and to strengthen American leadership around the world. After taking office, I announced a new strategy that would end our combat mission in Iraq and remove all of our troops by the end of 2011.
Governor Christie may be a mean and heartless, and he has an ego the size of Mount Everest, so there's no doubt in my mind that he wants to be President. But he's also not stupid, and he knows that his chances are much better in 2016 than in 2012. But that can only happen if Barack Obama is re-elected next year.
If he runs for president now, Christie may fool many of the independent voters into supporting him due to the tepid performance by President Obama. But the governor knows that he will have difficulty with the radical base in the Republican Party. His appointment of a judge who happens to be a Muslim causes Republicans' heads to explode, and the fact that Christie is a northeasterner rubs many in the GOP the wrong way. A Christie entry into the 2012 presidential race would virtually guarantee the emergence of a third party radical Tea Partier which would split the Republican vote and give Obama a second term.
The biggest roadblock to an eventual Christie presidency would be the election of a Republican in 2012. Waiting to the end of a second Obama term in 2016 might seem to be a long time in political life, but the potential of a two-term Republican would leave Christie out of the picture until 2020 - an eternity in American electoral gamesmanship.
So why would 2016 be any different than 2012? Christie may be counting on the American public and mainstream media waking up and realizing that the Tea Party is an extremist cult, whose members follow their leaders blindly even if it is against their self-interest. And like most cults, the Tea Party will self-destruct over the next few years.
So instead of running now, Christie is pandering to all factions in the Republican Party, fundraising and generating IOUs for future support. Like Sarah Palin, he is leveraging the idolatry from the press to his advantage. He will most certainly endorse the eventual candidate, but look for him to promote himself more than the candidate as he hits the campaign trail. And look for that little smirk on the SOB's face when Barack Obama gets re-elected.
This evening, the President addressed a joint session of Congress to deliver a major speech on job creation. If you missed it, here's the video. After the jump, I'll post the full remarks as released to press before the speech. I'm catching up to the speech myself, so it's posted here without comment.
On June 3, 2009, Chris Christie defeated Steve Lonegan in the Republican gubernatorial primary election with 184,085 votes to Lonegan's 140,946 votes. On this same day, Jon Corzine, who ran for re-election virtually unopposed (yes, there were other Democrats on the ballot, but none represented a credible primary challenge) received 154,448 votes.
I think that it is reasonable to argue that most, if not all, of the 150K+ voters who went to the polls on this day to vote for Jon Corzine wanted him to win re-election in November as well. If I am right about this, then I think that it is also reasonable to argue that these voters would have improved the chances of achieving their desired outcome if they had cast their votes for Steve Lonegan and not Jon Corzine.
Regardless of how unpopular Corzine might have been at the time, Christie won in 2009, because he did well with independent voters. I defy anyone to argue that a far-right-wing gadfly like Lonegan would have performed nearly as well with these voters. While it is conceivable that many more independents would have voted for the independent candidate, Chris Daggett in November if Lonegan would have been the GOP nominee, I do not believe that he would have received enough votes to win or tip the election to Lonegan.
So if you accept my premise that 45,000 Democratic votes for Lonegan instead of Corzine in June 2009 would have done more to help Corzine win in November 2009, please continue to below the fold so that we can talk more about what this premise could and should mean for progressive activism in the future.
This is a little unusual a thing for us to talk about here. We don't usually make ourselves about doing the Democrats' business for them, but this just came across my desk and started throwing sparks.
The White House is looking for interns.
Usually, these kinds of notices go out along infrastructural party lines - Dems email Dems, GOPs call other GOPs. But this notice was forwarded to me by an activist - labor rights & healthcare advocate and Plainfield community activist (Blue Jersey community member) DottieG. And she got it through another activist who is about as hooked in to the infrastructural Democrats as anyone I know personally - Babs Casbar (who blogs here as Babs NJSD). Babs, a businesswoman, climbed into her position in the Democratic Party strictly through her activism on gay and transgender rights. Babs is a former NJ Stonewall Dems president, now Dep. Vice Chair of NJDSC. But nationally, she's also the first transgender person ever appointed to the DNC, and now vice-chairs the Eastern DNC caucus. (She's still the onlytransgender member of the DNC).
So, given that this call for young interns landed in my inbox via these two Jersey girls, I thought - - why shouldn't the call for White House interns - a plum get for any young politico - go through progressive lines and not just party lines?
Want to work at the White House next Spring? Have an accomplished young activist to recommend? Jump and I'll tell you how.
As a blogger, I've joined many of my colleagues in speculating about Chris Christie's presidential ambitions. Unlike many in the Republican field, Christie is smart enough to know that you don't just declare yourself as a candidate and go out and give stump speeches. That may work for elections to town council, but becoming the Leader of the Free (?) World requires a little more finesse and planning.
I've speculated that there are three signs that would indicate Christie's readiness to throw his hat into the presidential ring. Not this time around, but in 2016 when the nation is ready to switch parties after eight years of Barack Obama.
The first is weight loss. Like it or not, this is an issue that should not be. But reality says that some voters value appearance more than positions. Dieting to lose weight is difficult, but so is being president. Christie is working on his weight, has a personal trainer, and if his determination is as big as his ego, he will succeed in slimming down over the next four years.
If you've been following the Public Policy Polling releases like me, you've noticed one thing missing: The 2012 Presidential match-up numbers. Now those New Jersey numbers are out:
Romney's 14-point deficit, 53-39, is only a hair less than McCain's 15-point loss in 2008. Christie falls behind by 17, 56-39; Michele Bachmann by 20, 55-35; Tim Pawlenty by 22, 54-32; Herman Cain by 26, 55-29; and Sarah Palin also by 26, 59-33.
We already knew this, but it is worth saying again: In his home state, Christie is not even competitive against Obama. New Jersey may get attention for the Senate race, but we're going to have to live on Philly TV commercials if we want to see the Presidential candidates.
"Senate Restores Sanity" is a headline on Senator Frank Lautenberg's latest statement as he proudly says it "took a stand against the extreme House Republican agenda by voting down this sham bill that would have devastated middle-class families." Senator Bob Menendez joined Lautenberg in this vote.
Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (N.J.) noted "a little separation" between Obama and his former Senate caucus."
That's a lot nicer but the content isn't necessarily much different. Our Senators have to make sure that they don't support a "sham bill" just because their otherwise fine President negotiated it.
Update: 11:18AM The President is speaking now, or you can read his USA Today article. Unfortunately, he could have accomplished everything he says about taxes on the rich last December without a single Republican vote.
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