WHEN JERSEY CITY made a moderate Democrat its first black mayor last week, governor Donald DiFrancesco, a Republican, showed up to congratulate him. “Now Jersey City has a real mayor,” he said. DiFrancesco was there because the election was read across the state as a defeat for the outgoing mayor, Republican Bret Schundler. Schundler’s unorthodox successes in his decade as mayor have made him a star of the national conservative movement, but his name is mud among the New Jersey Republican establishment. Now Schundler wants to replace DiFrancesco as governor and is running against former congressman Bob Franks in the GOP primary on June26. Schundler’s people think a lot of Republican bigwigs would rather see Democrat Jim McGreevey in office than Schundler—and they’re right. Schundler had already announced his run when Christine Todd Whitman stepped down as governor in January to run the Environmental Protection Agency for George W. Bush. DiFrancesco, then president of the state Senate, became acting governor for the final year of Whitman’s term. DiFrancesco was already the most powerful Republican in the state. Adding the power of the governorship to his Senate position (which he got to keep) made him a prohibitive favorite for the primary. Then the New York Times published allegations that DiFrancesco had accepted loans from favored constituents, and suddenly he was out of the race. His allies attributed the stories either to Schundler himself or his supporters in New Jersey’s powerful gun lobby. It appeared Schundler had the nomination by default. But on April23, the GOP-controlled New Jersey legislature met to delay the primary by three weeks, increase campaign spending limits from $3.8 million to $5.9 million, and extend the filing deadline, which had already expired. The moves were necessary, Republicans claimed, because several redrawn assembly districts had yet to be finalized. That was true. But the effect was to open the field to Bob Franks, a former congressman and senatorial nominee and DiFrancesco’s old comrade-in-arms. Shortly after April 25, when DiFrancesco bowed out officially, Franks had the endorsement of 19 of 21 county Republican chairmen and a double-digit lead in the polls. Schundler sued, claiming that the changes had been merely a trick to hand the race to Franks. Courts rejected his lawsuit, along with one filed by New Jersey Democrats. This would be a gripping primary under any circumstances. But add each candidate’s heartfelt conviction that the other has tried to sandbag him, and you have the makings of one of the meanest New Jersey campaigns in decades. Franks launched his run by styling himself an “outsider.” That didn’t take. It was a ridiculous description for a man who had been a leader of the state’s Young Republicans in his teens, a powerful assemblyman in his twenties, GOP governor Tom Kean’s legislative field-marshal (and state chairman of the party) in his thirties, a four-term congressman in his forties, and last fall, on the eve of his fifties, a Senate candidate just narrowly defeated by billionaire Democrat Jon Corzine, who outspent him ten-to-one. That run got Franks name recognition all over the state. While he was expected to run for Senate again in 2002 against Robert Torricelli, he leapt at the chance to make a bid for New Jersey’s powerful governorship. Schundler, meanwhile, tried to yoke Franks to DiFrancesco, whom he calls Franks’s “political patron.” That didn’t take, either. Not that Franks and DiFrancesco hadn’t worked together often—and on plenty of initiatives, like the overturning of Democratic governor Jim Florio’s tax hikes in the early 1990s, that Schundler could hardly deplore. Schundler himself is running as the heir to Ronald Reagan, on a platform of lower taxes, school vouchers, and opposition to gun control and abortion. He assails “people like Bob Franks, who’ve been Republicans their whole life but have never really been willing to support what the party stands for.” It’s true, Franks staffers note, that their candidate is pro-choice and opposed George W. Bush’s tax plan when it was first announced last fall. But they add that when Franks was working for Ronald Reagan in 1980, Schundler was a college Democrat. When Franks was working for Ronald Reagan in 1984, Schundler was working for Gary Hart. Like Reagan, Schundler presents his positions as the soul of simplicity; his detractors view them as simplistic and even dishonest. The tollbooths on the Garden State Parkway—where, every ten or fifteen miles, 35-cent collection stations create legendary traffic jams—have been a centerpiece of his campaign. Schundler thinks these tolls are a bad idea, since the state spends $80 million to collect the $190 million they generate. His position: Eliminate the tolls. Franks’s position is more convoluted. “I think it’s foolhardy,” Franks explained at a recent press conference in Freehold, “to be able to make that commitment if you can’t back it up with a solid analysis that not only the operating and maintenance costs of the parkway can be absorbed into the state budget but also the $600 million aggregate debt of the New Jersey Highway Authority plus the $200 million that the Highway Authority has pledged to contribute to the regional E-ZPass consortium.” Franks would prefer to eliminate the tolls, but he wants a commission, a study, and a list of alternatives. “Bob Franks refuses to engage in over-simple solutions,” says his campaign manager Charlie Smith. True. It’s also true that a lot of Franks’s wonkery comes from a vastly deeper knowledge of the gearworks of New Jersey’s state government. But over-simple candidates tend to win arguments, and in general Schundler is driving the policy debate. As he says, “Tolls are going to come down because of Bret Schundler.” (Each candidate has the annoying habit of referring to himself in the third person.) “That is, if I win, tolls come down, if I lose we get high-speed E-ZPass.” Schundler has bested Franks in the public forums where they’ve appeared: on Sean Hannity’s call-in radio show in New York, at a meeting of the Sussex County Republicans last week, and at the first of four scheduled television debates, recorded on June 7 for broadcast over the weekend. But that doesn’t mean Schundler’s policies are resonating with voters. If they’re simple in their enunciation they’re baroque in their implications. He’s confusing people. Schundler has a faith (bizarrely reminiscent of Hillary Clinton) that each little micro-initiative will unleash a Rube Goldberg cascade of happy outcomes. For instance, he wants a $600 million state income tax credit for charitable donations. That will create money for school choice, reduce classroom crowding, stop sprawl (since schools won’t have to be built), and lower property taxes‚ and be immune to lawsuits. When he announced his candidacy two months ago, Franks boasted of having run a “positive, issue-oriented campaign” against Corzine last fall—which he had. Today he even refers to “my friend Jon Corzine.” But this is a different kind of election. Each candidate is using the airwaves to distort the other’s record as far as possible. Franks has claimed that Schundler raised Jersey City property taxes 79percent since 1994. That’s true only if you ignore that 1994 was a 7-month year—because of a tax holiday that was made possible by Schundler’s admirable sell-off of the city’s liens. Schundler’s ads are equally preposterous, using pro-forma votes to accuse Franks of voting with Democratic governor Florio 90 percent of the time; splitting up spending from the New Jersey Assembly and Congress into their constituent parts to claim that Franks “voted to raise your taxes 120 times”; and calling Franks “one of the ten most liberal Republicans in Congress,” which is absurd. On the wall of Bob Franks’s office, his campaign manager, Charlie Smith, keeps a map colored in with Hi-Liters, showing the percentage of the primary vote that went
to moderates and conservatives in statewide elections in 1993, 1994, 1996, and 2000. Whether or not this is actually a race between moderates and conservatives, Smith hopes it is. It’s easy to see why.Since the Carter malaise of 1978, when insurgent conservative Jeffrey Bell beat incumbent Clifford Case in a Senate primary, moderate Republicans have tended to pick up roughly two thirds of the vote. And this is a state far to the left of the one Bell ran in. Ultimately, Franks stands a chance of beating McGreevey in the fall while Schundler—once guns and abortion make their inevitable appearance in campaign ads—stands none. And it’s an open question whether a candidate of Schundler’s sort could, if elected, even run a state like New Jersey. Schundler faces a paradox. He favors “local control,” but the machine political structures he derides are local control in this state. What happens, for instance, if a rich community wants to opt out of a statewide voucher plan? A Schundler governorship would find itself trapped in the sort of paradox Margaret Thatcher did, and responding in the same way—obliterating local power structures in the name of making government more representative, ruling from the center while paying lip service to local autonomy. To say that this is a race between the machine candidate Franks and the activist candidate Schundler is true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far. There is an important battle going on in New Jersey right now, but it’s not so much between two candidates for governor as between local and national wings for control of the Republican party. Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
