Politics: Corzines Crash
THE REASONS 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.”
While it’s become conventional wisdom that pork spending is the root of all budgetary evil, the truth is that public employees’ health-care and retirement costs are the single most pressing economic burden facing cities and states. And yet the situation has somehow become a third rail in politics, utterly untouchable. (This fact is clear to Philadelphians, who elected their own version of a post-political politician in 2007, only to watch Mayor Michael Nutter fold to the city unions.) This is the vicious catch-22 that is contemporary American governance, whether at the local, state or national level. We say we want leaders to make the tough choices, to spear the sacred cows, to put the common good above the special interests. But we then either skewer them when they come up with bold ideas (Corzine’s toll plan) or let them off the hook when they kowtow to those same interests (Corzine, Nutter, and every other politician, when it comes to the public unions). So how can we ever hope for good, honest government?
Which brings us back to Barack Obama. There can be no question that Obama is a far more skilled politician than Corzine. But Obama’s message has been an amorphous series of slogans — Yes, we can! Change we can believe in! — requiring nothing more than hope and optimism. When it comes down to the hard concessions — increased taxes to eventually pay for the federal government’s unprecedented borrowing bender; fewer government services and limited choices for health care so more people can get health care; even, potentially, a more modest way of American life — one can’t help but wonder whether an electorate that acts like a willful child, that says no to cutting public employees’ benefits, no to smaller government, no to increased taxes, no to increased tolls, no to closing a neighborhood pool or a library branch or a fire station, will ultimately get what it’s really asking for: nothing.
