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

CORZINE SHELLED OUT $200,000 of his own money to sell the idea to the public, traveling to 13 of the state’s 21 counties to hold town-hall-style meetings. His approach was professorial: Standing on stages in schools and fire halls, the governor offered a 45-minute PowerPoint presentation complete with pie charts, graphs and complex statistics. Debt, he told the crowds, was strangling the state: The first $860 in taxes paid by every household went toward interest and debt. Without the toll plan, the only other options to pay down the debt were to raise income taxes by 20 percent, raise the sales tax by 30 percent, or raise the gas tax 45 to 50 cents a gallon. He added that half of all Garden State tolls are paid by out-of-state travelers, and that discounts would be offered for frequent drivers.
Unfortunately, Corzine forgot one basic fact: New Jersey is the most heavily taxed state in the nation. Amid heckles and boos (some protesters even dressed in flying-pig costumes), Corzine struggled famously in a town hall meeting in Toms River that bordered on the absurd. (“I’m trying to come up with an answer that actually solves the problem,” he pleaded with the crowd.) As his approval numbers plunged, he was forced to concede the inevitable: His plan, endorsed by scholars, business leaders, the New York Times, and some Republicans (including both his Senate and gubernatorial opponents), was dead. “It was probably too hard to grasp,” Corzine muses. “The recession actually started in 2007, and people were pretty upset already with their position, and so I don’t think they were particularly open to thinking about the kinds of challenges this might bring. And I don’t know that I made a good enough case to talk about the benefits.”
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.

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.