Corzine for a Bruisin’

It’s not just that Franks is 14 points down in the polls. It’s that he’s out of dough. Bled by a four-man primary that cost the candidates $ 6 million in local contributions, running in a presidential year twelve months after George W. Bush sucked dry the state’s major money men, Franks hoped to raise about $ 10 million, a modest budget for the most densely populated state in the union. Now his staffers talk about raising “four, five, six . . . we’ll see.” That means four. In fact, Franks is coming into the home stretch with only about $ 1.7 million. And he’s running against the best-funded senatorial candidate in history.

Democrat Jon Corzine is a former chairman of Goldman Sachs, where he was ex-treasury secretary Robert Rubin’s protege. He was cashiered when Goldman went public in 1999, but received $ 400 million in stock for his pains. He has shown an inclination to spend however much of that is necessary to replace retiring senator Frank Lautenberg, and has thus far spent almost $ 50 million — as much as any two Senate candidates in history. Much of this money has gone into media. The state that Benjamin Franklin described as “a keg tapped at both ends” by New York and Philadelphia is the only state in the union without a network television station. Successful New Jersey candidates have traditionally relied on, first, the state’s mammothly powerful county organizations, and, second, parsimonious ad buys in the first- and fourth-most-expensive media markets in the country.

Corzine’s trick has been to use his money to do both. There have been other moneybags candidates for Senate — Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, Corzine’s predecessor Lautenberg, Michael Huffington of California, Johnny Edwards of North Carolina. Minnesota had two this year — trial lawyer Michael Ciresi and department store heir Mark Dayton, the nominee — and Washington state has high-tech baroness Maria Cantwell. Democrats are now running enough megamillionaires to turn the Senate into a House of Lords. But Corzine has married money not just to media but to political institutions themselves. In so doing he has revolutionized politics.

Optimistic Republicans say that Franks ought to be able to win against Corzine. They note the third-place primary finish in the 1998 California governor’s race of insurance magnate Al Checchi, who also had Bob Shrum as an advertising manager and tens of millions of dollars at his disposal.

Well, yes, Checchi had a silk purse — but he was a sow’s ear of a candidate. Corzine, by contrast, has the most appealing biography of any candidate running for any office this year: grew up on a farm in Taylorville, Illinois, married his high school sweetheart, played varsity sports, joined the Marines, and got a graduate degree at the University of Chicago while working a nine-to-five job. He’s huggy, always clapping his arm around people he’s never met, but modest. He never exploits his family, a la Al Gore; when I asked him about the regressivity of cigarette taxes, which he proposes increasing, he talked about health hazards and revenue curves, but never mentioned that his father had died of lung cancer 18 years ago. He’s an observant Methodist. (He and Franks, in fact, attend the same Union County church, although the two hardly know each other.) And he has a great sense of humor. Pouring coffee for union activists after a visit to a Melitta plant, he says: “It’s okay. My first job was getting coffee.” Granted, the sense of humor can get him into trouble — as when he asked an Italian-American contractor whether he made cement shoes — but Corzine is managing to appear, in an almost Reaganite way, the commonsensical outsider running against Slick Washington, the Mr. Smith of this race.

Corzine is a workaholic who sleeps about four hours a night and spends his spare mornings in train stations shaking hands with voters. He follows with visits to local diners. Thus one of the ironies of the campaign: Corzine, the television candidate, is so free of money worries that he can engage in traditional New Jersey handshaking politics. Franks, perhaps the best face-to-face guy in the state, has to scramble around raising paltry sums of money in order to get on TV.

“This race is about guns, the environment, and a woman’s right to choose,” says Corzine’s spokesman Tom Shea. Well, if that’s what Corzine wants it to be about, then that’s what it’s going to be about, because Franks lacks the money to say otherwise.

But these are all issues on which Franks could have an advantage. Franks has always been pro-choice, but he thinks “it’s a national disgrace that we have the reliance on abortion that we do.” He favors parental notification and opposes partial-birth abortion. These are winning positions in every state, but in heavily Catholic New Jersey — whose legislature in 1997 overrode a gubernatorial veto during a fiery anti-partial-birth revolt — they’re volatile winning issues.

Franks has such a good environmental record that the Sierra Club endorsed him in 1998. (Corzine got the nod this year.) And he adds some issues of his own. Franks solidly beat Corzine in the first of two televised debates by stressing the marriage penalty, and nothing that Corzine’s version of marriage-penalty relief would exclude anyone who owns a house. And he’s battled Corzine on health care and prescription drugs, claiming Corzine’s employer levies would retard hiring. (“There’s one thing more unfortunate than an employee without health care coverage,” Franks said in the first debate, “and that’s an employee without a job.“) He complained that the United States should have vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel; Corzine thought America’s abstention satisfactory.

But Corzine has enough money that Franks stands no chance of defining him. Corzine defines himself — and he has defined himself as such a reliable liberal that he looks likely to enter the Senate next year as the leftmost member of his class. On Supreme Court matters he is a straightforward litmus-tester, on both abortion and guns. “I don’t buy the language of ‘litmus test’ — but I would like to know how [nominees] would vote on these issues,” he says.

What’s shocking — in a refreshing way, actually — is that Corzine is always further left than he has to be. Take his address to a roomful of mostly chubby, mostly white, mostly working-class shop stewards at a local food workers’ union. Corzine, a vacuum cleaner of information who is always well-briefed, discussed COPE ratings, card-check recognition, binding-arbitration-on-first-contract, and ergonomics until he had the assembled organizers eating out of his hand. Then, when he could just as easily have stopped, he added: “A woman has a right to choose. . . . We need to strengthen civil rights laws, end racial profiling, and make sure there is affirmative action in the workplace.” White working-class males are not famously fans of any of this stuff. But Corzine is principled about such matters: He even fought to expand Goldman Sachs’s affirmative action programs. (“Why did you say that in there?” I asked him on the bus after the union meeting. “Because I don’t believe in making different speeches to please different audiences,” he replied.)

If this is potential ammo for Franks to use on Corzine, Corzine has his own ammo to use on Franks. As one New Jersey Democratic consultant puts it, “All I want in a congressional race is an opponent who’s had some association with Newt Gingrich.” While Franks is indeed a moderate, he bet wrong during the Republican revolution, voting for 95 percent of the Contract With America. Recently, Corzine has stopped introducing himself to voters and started introducing Franks, by slamming him on really old votes. As a congressman, Franks is lily-white on the NRA, which even opposed him in the 1992 primaries. He’s voted for the Brady Bill and an assault-weapons ban. But Corzine notes that he voted against a state assault-weapons ban as an assemblyman in the 1980s. Similarly, Franks, who has voted for minimum wage increases in Congress, gets accused of being “slow” on the minimum wage. (Since the proposed increase was lower than the state minimum, it wouldn’t have affected New Jersey workers.)

Franks would like to slam Corzine’s record, but it’s all in high finance. Under his watch, Goldman was involved in the $ 3.6 billion bailout of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, had dealings with Daily Mirror owner Robert Maxwell, the newspaper tycoon who looted his employees’ pension system, and did business with Sudanese dictators. Corzine’s camp dismisses Franks as merely “repeating Florio’s campaign.” And these narratives are very hard to convey without a lot of TV time. Such is the power of the airwaves.

But not just the airwaves. The typical media strategy involves using television to reach voters over the heads of an entrenched party establishment. To describe what Corzine has done as a mere “media strategy” is to sell him short. The wisest move Corzine made was to hire former New Jersey Democratic party head Steve DeMicco and his partner Brad Lawrence, whose Message & Media is the top Democratic consulting group in the state. “They met with Corzine and said, ‘We can do media,'” says one New York consultant who has worked with DeMicco. “‘But county organization matters, too.'” So Corzine, a longtime big-money donor to the Democratic party, went around to the local bodies and bought them, with campaign contributions and soft money.

In other words, Corzine did not “bypass” the Jersey organization in any sense. Cooper Union historian and New Democrat theorist Fred Siegel describes his move rather as “a leveraged buyout of the New Jersey Democratic party.” Corzine’s camp claims that the number of New Jersey voters irked by Corzine’s money is negligible, but there’s some evidence to the contrary. Seventeen percent of voters, according to a Quinnipiac poll, say Corzine’s money makes them less likely to vote for him.

But ex-governor Jim Florio, who was on the losing side of the Corzine strategy in last spring’s New Jersey primary, says of this race, “It’s over.” He admits that Corzine has been really smart: “You’re going to see a lot more self-financing candidates, and this will cause a permanent change in the way they do business,” Florio says. “A tactical mistake that the Checchis and the Huffingtons made was to spend all their money on media. From now on, rich candidates will spend their money trying to buy political organizations.”

Corzine is buying not just politicians but institutions. In April, a reporter asked him at a press conference whether he’d paid any of the 43 black religious leaders who had endorsed him. Corzine stayed silent, while the Baptist minister Calvin McKinney angrily denied the charge. In September, Corzine admitted he had anonymously given $ 25,000 to African Methodist preacher Reginald Jackson, but that it had been before he’d started running. It hadn’t been, and speculation that Corzine’s charitable foundation had been used as a slush fund to win political allies was dispelled only when he disclosed its finances on his website. Franks continues to ask that Corzine release his tax returns. Corzine refuses on the grounds that he has a binding confidentiality agreement with Goldman. (And is probably glad he does.)

For the closing stretch, Franks’s campaign has come up with a strategy. “The game plan when you have less,” says his campaign manager Charlie Smith, “is you make an introduction to voters late and suffer through intimidating polls early.” And Franks still needs to be introduced. As recently as a week ago, his state name-recognition was at 55 percent. Sitting over a turkey burger in the Sun Tavern, just down the street from his headquarters in industrial Roselle Park, he noted ruefully that polls showed more New Jerseyites were focused on Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate race than on their own. Franks says, “We need enough money late for critical mass in New York and Philadelphia. But we can’t match him. For every $ 1,000 we spend, Corzine will add $ 10,000.”

Standing in the whipping cold at the intersection of Routes 4 and 17 in Paramus, Franks admits to reporters, “We’ve cut overhead, because we know we have to get on TV those last ten days.” He even risks insulting voters in order to convince the press that he can win. “New Jersey voters are famous for paying attention only very late in a campaign. The more compelling reality is that after the $ 50 million he’s spent, we’re still in a tight race. If you’d liked what you’d seen, you’d’ve bought.”

All right, but you can’t buy what you can’t see. The greatest comeback in recent New Jersey electoral history was Christie Whitman’s. She rallied from 7 points behind with three weeks to go, to beat Florio in the 1993 governor’s race — and that was with an election-altering tax-cut plan. At 14 points down, Franks needs to go up with ads next week or he’s finished. His campaign seems to realize this, and is making its first major ad blitz in Philadelphia and New York. But the spots are only 15 seconds long — hardly a media barrage.

Franks staffers hope to get a coordinated expenditure from the Republican senatorial committee. But its chairman Mitch McConnell pulled the plug on Franks when this was still a five-point race, so nobody in Roselle Park should be holding his breath.

Still, that New Jersey Senate staffer continues to think of Franks as the ideal candidate. “If this doesn’t end up within four points,” he says, “it’s a profound statement about . . . ” And he trails off. He probably meant either the cowardice of McConnell, the poison of Gingrich, or the obscene power of money.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.