In a world brimming with publicity-hungry porn stars and talkative lesbian mud wrestlers, it takes a special kind of politician to win air time on Howard Stern’s radio show. Christie Whitman has done it effortlessly. Stern, whose support of the New Jersey governor in 1993 was so effective that she named a highway rest stop after him as an expression of gratitude, seems to adore everything about Christie Whitman — her tough talk on crime, her tax cuts, her enthusiastically pro-choice views. Plus, as Stern often reminds his listeners, she has fantastic breasts.
“You didn’t buckle under to the right wing of the Republican party,” Stern told the governor in late September, on one of the many occasions she called his radio show to promote her candidacy. “If the Republican party is ever going to be anything great again, they have got to get rid of these religious freaks.” Whitman didn’t deny that this was true. Later, the subject turned to romance. Whitman admitted that she was sexually attracted to Kevin Costner. Interesting, said Stern. Speaking of which, How’s the sex with your husband? Is it “hot”? Whitman allowed that “things are always more relaxed” at Pontefract, the family farm where she and her husband spend the weekends. For a middle-aged woman, Stern said enthusiastically, your body is “smokin’.” The governor giggled. “Thank you,” she said. The banter continued, and after a while Whitman signed off. Stern kept going, speculating aloud about which sexual positions Whitman preferred. I wonder, said Stern, “what it’s like to do the governor?”
Whitman, meanwhile, met up with Dan Quayle, who had recently arrived in New Jersey to join her final swing across the state. Quayle’s mission: to convince social conservatives that the governor was — in a spiritual sense, at least — on their side.
Only if Whitman were desperate would she have subjected herself to this, and she was. Days before the election, polls showed her almost even with Jim McGreevey, a small-town mayor so forgettable that half the electorate still had no opinion of him. Whitman, by contrast, was a nationally prominent figure — a first-termer hailed by the press as the Future of the Republican Party, the subject of no fewer than four fawning biographies, who was running on a solid record in an economically booming state with a falling crime rate. No one had laughed six months earlier when Whitman’s aides predicted that she would get at least 60 percent of the vote. By early fall, it looked like she might lose. As it turned out, Whitman received 47 percent of the vote, one percent more than McGreevey, winning with a margin of about two votes per polling booth.
Most of the analysis the day after the election pointed out that Whitman’s poor showing might hurt her political career, possibly even affect her chances of becoming president in 2000. (The Whitman mystique has been remarkably resistant to the evidence.) Whitman herself tried to spin the results as a stunning victory and claimed to be “just extraordinarily pleased” with her 1 percent edge. Perhaps she is. Still, one wonders, how did Christie Whitman come so close to losing?
Just about everyone agrees that Whitman lost control of the defining issues early in the campaign. Months ago, she settled on a slogan — “Promises made, promises kept” — meant to remind voters that she had stayed true to her pledge to cut taxes and had otherwise been a pretty good governor. It might have been an effective strategy, except that, midway through her term, polls began to show that voters were upset about the state’s high car-insurance rates. Whitman could have turned the discontent to her advantage, promising, perhaps, to cut car insurance the same way she had cut taxes in 1993. She didn’t.
Instead, Jim McGreevey, listening to the chatter of his own focus groups, decided to put car insurance at the center of his campaign. “Reporters got frustrated with the issue because it’s so boring,” says Rich McGrath, McGreevey’s press secretary. “But the fact is, it resonated.”
The fact is also that McGreevey had little else to talk about. Aides in both campaigns admit that there is hardly an ideological divide separating Whitman and McGreevey. Both supported affirmative action, both were opposed to the attempt by state Republicans to ban partial-birth abortion. McGreevey even voted for Whitman’s 30 percent state-income-tax cut. In a race without ideas or ideology, car insurance became the debate, and McGreevey clung to it for dear life. By the time he gave his concession speech, McGreevey had talked about car insurance so much for so long that he appeared unable to stop. “New Jersey has the highest auto-insurance rates in the nation,” he informed a ballroom full of his dispirited supporters.
For her part, Whitman couldn’t seem to take the issue seriously. Four days before the election, Lyn Nofziger, one of the governor’s longtime advisers, gave an interview to National Public Radio in which he scolded voters for being concerned with something as silly as car insurance. People in New Jersey, he said, “look at all the little things that annoy them. There’s no great thing that unifies them, like the Cold War. That unified the country. But that’s gone now, so they can sit around and be cranky because they have nothing better to do.”
Nofziger may have been on to something. But in a race in which Whitman was being successfully portrayed as a rich airhead insensitive to the concerns of ordinary working people, he probably should have kept it to himself. With only days to go, Mike Murphy, Whitman’s media consultant, pushed the campaign into running the now-famous “mea culpa ad,” in which Whitman apologized for failing to comprehend the deep importance of auto-insurance rates. ” You’ve sent me a message,” Whitman said, wearing pink and looking earnest. ” I’ve heard you loud and clear.”
Sappy as it may have been — “I feel your car insurance” — the ad worked. Almost instantly, Whitman’s poll numbers rose. The state’s single-issue car- insurance voters apparently were appeased. Pro-lifers, though, were a harder sell.
It was clear from the moment she did it that Whitman’s veto of the partial- birth-abortion ban would cost her. “She knew,” says Murphy. “We had polls and I told her. We all made it very clear that it could cost her the job. She said, ‘Hey, it’s what I believe in. Piss off.'” Whitman should get credit from conservatives for acting on principle, Murphy argues, and though it’s possible to see his point, it’s hard to imagine that many conservatives in New Jersey will forgive her. Whitman’s inflexible position on abortion enraged important elements of her Republican base. Most damaging of all, it created room for Murray Sabrin, a pro-life Libertarian who became the first third-party candidate in New Jersey to qualify for matching campaign funds, and wound up with 5 percent of the vote.
Sabrin’s presence in the race hurt both candidates (in McGreevey’s case, by siphoning off anti-incumbent voters), but it’s likely that he hurt Whitman more. The damage was by design. While Sabrin had some compelling issues of his own — raising the state’s speed limit to 65 and eliminating carpool lanes were two of the most appealing — his campaign seemed to exist to punish Whitman for her liberalism. His own staff said that the message of the Sabrin ads was “Get rid of Whitman” and that the Sabrin camp was hoping to take credit for showing that Rockefeller Republicans can’t succeed.
Whitman, of course, did win, but barely, and without the help of many Republicans. Exit polls suggest that fully a third of all conservatives in the state voted for someone other than the governor. And so the Sabrin campaign — four full-time staffers working out of an unmarked office next to a pest-control company on Route 1 in Edison — did manage to underscore one of the most reliable precepts in Republican politics: alienate pro-life voters at your own risk.
Even without her self-inflicted disabilities, Christie Whitman might have had a difficult time getting elected in New Jersey this year. “This is a tough state,” Whitman said in her noticeably brief victory speech, and for Republicans it is true. There are close to 270,000 more Democrats than Republicans in New Jersey, an advantage equal to 10 times Whitman’s margin of victory. Many of them are organized in a way Republicans only read about, usually in books about deceased Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley.
On Election Day in Linden, a blue-collar city near the Newark airport, state assemblyman Joe Suliga oversees a phone bank at McManus Hall, the city’s Democratic-party club. A dozen volunteers are eating sauerkraut hot dogs, smoking cigarettes, and working the phones trying to convince voters to elect Democrats. There are 19,000 registered voters in Linden. Suliga and his lieutenants have called 13,000 of them — every Democrat and independent in town — at least once and asked each one to vote for Jim McGreevey. Other volunteers with cell phones monitor polling stations around Linden, keeping Suliga apprised of turnout. Residents who live in wards with light voting get phone calls urging them to vote. Suliga makes many of the calls himself. The assemblyman, who runs an Italian-ice company on the side, works from a computerized list of every person he has met in the last decade or so, thousands of names, each with an identifying note that allows Suliga to apply precisely targeted pressure. “He was our waiter” at a local restaurant, reads one notation. “Democrat. Parents in teachers’ union. Friend of Debbie’s.”
Scenes like this are repeated in Democratic clubs around the state. (the machines in some towns, reportedly, are even more efficient than they are in Linden.) And with the huge amount of union support Democrats traditionally receive, winning big as a Republican in New Jersey isn’t easy. It is possible, however. It was little more than 10 years ago that Gov. Tom Kean, another liberal Republican from an affluent background, was reelected with 70 percent of the vote (after winning the first time by a mere 1,700 ballots). Then again, people liked Tom Kean.
It is close to midnight when it becomes clear that Christie Whitman will be reelected governor. Whitman partisans gathered for the victory party at the Princeton Marriott have spent the last several hours milling around the cash bar looking glum, or else searching for a television set to get the latest vote count. (McGreevey led for much of the night, so it was not until late that the Whitman campaign tuned the enormous television monitors flanking the stage to a news channel.) With more than 90 percent of the vote tallied, the crowd can see that Whitman has just barely passed the mark where it is safe to declare victory. On a small television at the side of the room, McGreevey is giving his concession speech. He looks unbowed and seems to be promising another fight four years from now. Up on the stage, however, the bandleader can only see triumph. “Did we kick the Democrats’ asses, or what?” he screams into the microphone. A few people look confused. But most of them just start cheering.
Tucker Carlson is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
