Politics: Corzine’s Crash

Like Barack Obama, Jon Corzine won an election by promising to bring change, courage and transparency to government. But three years into his rocky first term as New Jersey’s governor, he’s left to wonder if people really want politicians who tell the truth

He faces a difficult reelection bid later this year. But the story of Jon Corzine is prophetic, with ramifications that stretch far beyond Trenton. America has just elected another eloquent, hyper-intellectual pragmatist who promised to speak directly and truthfully to the citizenry about the many painful sacrifices and concessions needed to right a floundering nation. If Jon Corzine is any guide, President Obama might soon find that while change is easy to believe in, it’s nearly impossible to pull off.
 

 

"THE STATE," DICK Codey famously declared upon handing Corzine the reins, “is pretty much broke.” Yet if anyone seemed up to the challenge, it was Jon Stevens ­Corzine.
 
The son of a farmer and a schoolteacher, he’d grown up in central Illinois and earned an MBA from the University of Chicago; in 1975, he landed a bond-trading position at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street. Twenty years later, as Goldman’s co-chairman — and against the wishes of co-chairman Hank Paulson, who would go on to serve as George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary — Corzine steered the company public. While history has pretty much adjudicated this the right decision (and while it made everyone at Goldman insanely rich, with Corzine hauling in upwards of $300 million), it cost Corzine his job after Paulson staged a coup while Corzine was away with his family, skiing. In hindsight, the incident might have been emblematic of a leadership style that continues to cause him problems. According to Charles D. Ellis’s The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs, Corzine’s headstrong independence — his tendency to go it alone in pursuing business deals, his supreme confidence in his own ideas, and an “informal, intuitive, undisciplined way of making senior-level decisions” — damned him.
 
Around the same time, a U.S. Senate seat in New Jersey opened up. Corzine spent $60 million of his own money to win it. He quickly found the Senate, with its arcane seniority rules, boring, and by the time Jim McGreevey announced he was resigning, Corzine decided he wanted to be a chief executive again. Never mind that the acting governor, Dick Codey, had high approval ratings and was said to be planning to run. The governor and Codey have maintained that the latter’s decision not to run was voluntary. But Codey is now more … forthcoming. “Was I a bit resentful? Of course I was. You take over in an absolute chaotic situation, and after a couple months people are saying, ‘Hey, this guy looks pretty good, he’s doing a good job.’ And instead of the party saying, ‘Jon, step back, stay in the Senate, this guy looks like he’s catching on’ … ” He trails off. Corzine ran — and won — on promises not to punt the state’s fiscal problems the way his predecessors had, and to make tough, but fair and ethical, decisions. Just as Obama would three years later.