Politics: Corzines Crash
In fact, it wasn’t until April 12, 2007, that most New Jerseyeans learned even the most basic of his biographical details: that he had three adult children, whom television cameras recorded flocking to Cooper University Hospital. While speeding at 91 miles per hour on the Garden State Parkway in Atlantic County, Corzine’s state police driver lost control of the governor’s black SUV, ramming it into a guard rail and flinging Corzine, who wasn’t wearing his seatbelt, into the backseat. For a week, Corzine — who suffered 18 fractures, including his sternum and his femur (which pierced his skin), and lost most of his blood supply — lay in a coma; doctors worried whether he would survive, and if he did, whether he’d be paralyzed. His recovery has been, to say the least, miraculous.
Corzine has rarely spoken of the accident. When I bring it up, it’s one of the only times I see emotion rise in him. His eyes seem to well as he says, “I shouldn’t be alive.” I ask if he remembers much from the accident. “Too much,” he answers solemnly. But while the crash, he says, “obviously” changed him, it can be hard to tell how. After being released from the hospital, he pressed ahead, bullish as ever. Still on crutches, he clambered onto stages across the state, trying to sell the toll-hike plan.
THE REASON FOR his political difficulties seem multiple. One might be intrinsic. Despite the size of his checkbook and his Wall Street background, Jon Corzine is at his heart one of the most liberal governors in New Jersey history — arguably the most liberal governor in America currently — a person who believes resolutely in government’s responsibility to intervene. Paul Mulshine, the conservative columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger, says Corzine is wrong to assume that all New Jerseyeans — even if they are among the wealthiest, best-educated and bluest of Americans — share his almost utopian version of government. “He’s like a Woody Allen copy of an Ingmar Bergman movie,” Mulshine says. “He’s a deeply conflicted northern-clime guy. He is this guy who believes in this sort of Swedish welfare state, and he wants to move towards it, and it just can’t be done.”
Consider the stance he’s taken when it comes to public employees, whose benefits are the stuff of private-sector employees’ dreams. As is true across the nation (and in strapped cities like Philadelphia), the cost of paying for a retirement system stuffed with 700,000 former workers is crippling the state, a condition made worse by the collapse of the economy. This is a legacy of both Democrats and Republicans: It was during the Whitman administration that legislation was enacted allowing public employees to retire at 55 with full pension and health-care benefits. Every attempt at reducing benefits has been met with predictably vociferous objections from public employees, including, early in Corzine’s term, 10,000 workers who showed up outside the capital to protest even mulling possible cuts. “You would typically expect a governor to stay in the statehouse and let it be known that he had some sympathy for the workers,” recalls Mulshine. “But Corzine goes out and takes the microphone and gives a stem-winder of a speech, as if he’s a labor leader: ‘We will fight for a fair contract!’ And I’m going, ‘What do you mean, “we”? You’re management.’ That, to me, was a defining moment.”
