Politics: Corzines Crash
A top state Republican wonders why Corzine didn’t play political hardball, didn’t force the legislature’s hand. “I’d have just slashed the budget by 20 percent, knowing the toll increase is the end game,” he says. “But you’ve got to bring them to their knees first.”
WHICH ISN’T TO say Corzine is wholly virtuous. Throughout his political career, he has shown a willingness to, for lack of a better expression, lie down with New Jersey’s Democratic dogs. While running for Senate, Corzine paid penance to all the county Democratic bosses. (After he gave the maximum of $37,000 to Bergen County Democrats, his mother, an elderly retired schoolteacher in Illinois, donated $37,000 more.) He enjoys a chummy relationship with South Jersey Democratic overlord George Norcross, who has regularly bragged about his easy access to Corzine (a boast borne out by an embarrassing call Corzine received last year, when a Republican candidate for a local office phoned, pretended to be Norcross, and was patched right through). But no other relationship has proved as tarnishing to Corzine’s reformer image as the one he forged with Carla Katz, then the comely president of Local 1034 of the Communications Workers of America, the largest civil service union in New Jersey. Their two-year affair would end Corzine’s marriage of 33 years, cost him $6 million in a bizarre separation “settlement,” and dog him for the duration of his term as governor. (Currently, Corzine calls Sharon Elghanayan — the twice-divorced Fifth Avenue psychotherapist who is a couple years his senior — “the gal I’m seeing,” one of his jarring Midwesternisms.)
Tom Wilson, the leader of the state Republican Party who has filed a suit to force Corzine to release e-mails between him and Katz, doesn’t understand why the governor continues to fight a losing battle. “Perhaps it’s political naïveté, perhaps it’s a detachment from how normal, regular, average citizens perceive the world, perhaps it stems from having lived too long in the ivory towers and boardrooms of Goldman Sachs,” Wilson says. “It’s just a political tone-deafness that, frankly, I don’t understand.”
And this could be where the road traveled by both Jon Corzine and Barack Obama might, mercifully, split. Because while both ran as change agents and truth-tellers, while both vowed to make the tough calls with indifference to political costs, Obama, at least from indications in these early days, seems to have figured out that success in government requires something else: charm, an ability to provoke emotion, even, dare we say, slickness. And the fact that Jon Corzine is, self-admittedly, a bad politician — and that he seems both incapable of and uninterested in becoming a good one — may be the most telling difference of all.
Corzine seems as if he’s not really a part of the state, not really known (or trusted) by its residents. He’s shared almost nothing of himself personally. Whereas predecessor Jim McGreevey was a master of gubernatorial stagecraft — recall the gauzy TV commercials of him clutching his wife and young daughter on a beach, extolling viewers, now rather ironically, to “come out — and see what’s new in New Jersey” — Corzine shakes off the confines of the office, often opting for the comforts of his Hoboken apartment over those of the governor’s mansion in Princeton. The end result is that he can seem aloof, distant.
