June 5, 2005 Down to the Final Insult in Primary for Governor
By Josh Benson and Terry Golway
NEW YORK TIMES
TRENTON - "THE Honorable Doug Forrester," Mr. Forrester repeated after a relatively florid introduction at a news conference in the State House the other day. "That's one of the nicest things that's been said about me in weeks."
Indeed, it was like a splash of cold water after the mud bath that he and his nemesis, Bret Schundler, had shared just days earlier as they kicked off the last full week of the crowded Republican gubernatorial primary campaign.
Such is the tenor of the political death struggle of the campaign between Mr. Schundler and Mr. Forrester - the two front-runners best recognized for their previous failed bids for office -in its the final days.
After a relatively civil beginning, both candidates and their staffs have fallen upon each other over their political records and property tax proposals with enough rancor to rival some of the most notoriously divisive primaries in this state's political history, and with a desperation born of the sense that for both, this is quite possibly the last best chance to seek statewide office.
"Instead of being about values and issues, it has degenerated into name calling and potential misleading of the public that, I think, carries consequences that we're going to need to work on after this primary's over," Guy Talarico, chairman of the Bergen County Republican Party, said last week.
Mr. Forrester - the wealthy founder of a prescription-drug business who has spent $8.5 million on the primary - has broadcast campaign commercials in recent weeks that carry no hint of the gentility he normally exhibits in public. The ads deride Mr. Schundler's record as mayor of Jersey City and paint him as a hypocritical flip-flopper unfit to lead the Republican Party.
For his part, Mr. Schundler - a retired Wall Street broker who lacks the personal resources to broadcast his attacks on television - has taken to staging political muggings, lobbing headline-stealing broadsides at debates and as recently as last Monday launching into an unlikely confrontation with Mr. Forrester for his "lies" before a Memorial Day parade in Bergenfield.
After months spent carefully repressing the Bret Schundler of 2001 - the candidate widely perceived as a wild-eyed ideologue who struck fear into the hearts of mainstream Republicans - the civility and single-minded attention to the details of property tax policy have vanished.
"It's crunch time, and I think we're seeing a certain amount of underdog desperation, particularly from Schundler," said David Rebovich, a political science professor at Rider University.
To be sure, Mr. Schundler's end game is being driven by the harsh political calculus.
Results from the most recent Quinnipiac University Poll, made public last Wednesday, showed Mr. Forrester leading Mr. Schundler, 40 percent to 29 percent, among likely primary voters - casting doubt on the notion that a committed conservative base would again carry Mr. Schundler to a primary victory - and coincided with Mr. Forrester's multimillion-dollar advertising barrage as the Tuesday primary drew near.
As has been the case throughout the campaign, support for each of the other five candidates remained in single digits in the Quinnipiac poll: John Murphy, a freeholder from Morris County, received 9 percent, and the other four - former Bergen County Freeholder Todd Caliguire, Mayor Steve Lonegan of Bogota, Assemblyman Paul DiGaetano and Bob Schroeder, a businessman - each registered at 4 percent or less.
But before Republicans decide to sit out this election on the theory that the result is preordained, there is one crucial caveat: The poll also showed that 42 percent of the prospective voters indicated that they could still change their minds.
"This is par for the course for an unexciting primary," said Clay F. Richards, assistant director of the poll. "It is a fact of life that you've got two candidates who have already lost statewide, and voters aren't rushing to support any of the candidates."
The uneven interest among Republicans may have more than a little to do with the fact that the winner will face the unenviable task of going up against Senator Jon S. Corzine, the presumptive Democratic gubernatorial candidate, in November.
Many Republicans agree with Mr. Forrester's contention that Mr. Corzine will be vulnerable because of his ties to Democratic Party bosses. After all, they reason, this is the man who embraced James E. McGreevey just weeks before the former governor resigned in disgrace; who was involved in a multimillion-dollar business venture with Charles Kushner, a developer who is now in federal prison; and whose mentor, former Senator Robert Torricelli, dropped a re-election bid amid questions about his ethics.
Still, there are some unavoidable facts that make Mr. Corzine - a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who is reported to be worth several hundred million dollars - a daunting opponent. Although polls show his popularity has slipped somewhat in the face of unanswered Republican criticism, he still handily wins a matchup against any of his potential opponents.
Despite that sobering prospect, many leading Republicans are oddly confident - though that comes from taking the longer view.
For one thing, State Senator Thomas H. Kean Jr., the rising son of the popular former governor, has announced his intention to run for the United States Senate in 2006. And looking toward the next statewide election in 2008, for the other United States Senate seat, there is always the possibility that United States Attorney Christopher J. Christie, who has had a very active tenure investigating and indicting Democrats, will have an appetite for public office.
Though few will say so publicly, many Republican insiders are far more optimistic about the party's prospects in 2006 and 2008, or even the governorship in 2009, than they are about winning this fall.
"I think the wild card here is whether Republicans in New Jersey even put a lot of effort into the fall campaign instead of saying 'Hey, our real chances are next year or a couple of years down the road, but not this one,' " said Mr. Rebovich. "I think the Republican gubernatorial nominee really has to worry about that."
A Lack of Enthusiasm
Given the lack of widespread enthusiasm - coupled with the last-minute accusations of lies and deceit - the race has become all but impenetrable to some of the most avid Republican partisans.
State Senator Gerald Cardinale, a conservative Republican who ran in a crowded gubernatorial primary in 1989, told of attending an event over the Memorial Day weekend where he was peppered with questions about whom to support.
"I haven't endorsed anyone yet, and I didn't want to tell them how to vote," Mr. Cardinale said. "These are all active Republicans. I told them they should go read about the candidates and make up their own minds."
But that was nothing, Mr. Cardinale admitted, compared with the shock he received when his daughter, whose position on abortion is more liberal than his own, told him recently that she would vote for Mr. Schundler because "he's the only pro-choice candidate."
"I said, 'Oh my God,' " recalled Mr. Cardinale, who well knows that Mr. Schundler is an outspoken opponent of abortion who has been endorsed by New Jersey Right to Life. "This is my daughter who said this, but I don't think it's unusual. People still don't know a lot about these candidates and their positions."
Much of the confusion may stem from the way that the argument has come to focus on the distorted details of Mr. Forrester's two single-year terms as mayor of West Windsor and Mr. Schundler's nine years as mayor of Jersey City, with each candidate accusing the other of taxing and spending without the benefit of context.
The other topic of much contention has been each candidate's plan to lower the state's property taxes, the highest in the nation. Mr. Schundler says he wants to limit state and local spending with a constitutional amendment, while Mr. Forrester has touted a simpler-sounding arrangement with the state picking up 30 percent of the tab for property taxpayers for the next three years.
Each candidate has said that the other's plan cannot work, culminating in Mr. Schundler's angry accusation in front of reporters at the Memorial Day parade that Mr. Forrester was deliberately trying to overstate the benefits of his plan.
"These candidates are a lot more similar than they are different, so their efforts to try to distinguish themselves from each other are bound to sort of result in some pretty heated rhetoric," said Tom Wilson, chairman of the state Republican Party. "Like efforts to differentiate similar products from one another - cars, breakfast cereals - it almost becomes this hyper-focus on small degrees of difference."
Of course, the rising animosity between the Forrester and Schundler camps in recent days carries potential risks for each candidate.
For Mr. Forrester, the attacks could galvanize Mr. Schundler's committed supporters, splitting the party along ideological lines.
To hear Mr. Schundler's aides, that has already begun. Mr. Schundler's director of communications, Bill Pascoe, insisted that the campaign had seen a sharp rise in donations and volunteers since the negative Forrester ads began appearing.
While campaign documents made public last week showed Mr. Schundler with just under $500,000 on hand, Mr. Forrester has wealth that gives him a huge advantage.
As for Mr. Schundler's accusations that Mr. Forrester has run a smear campaign, Sherry Sylvester, a spokeswoman for Mr. Forrester, said, in effect, that Mr. Schundler simply could not handle the truth. Mr. Schundler "said on the campaign trail, 'Look at my record,' " Ms. Sylvester said. "We went right back at him with some facts, and that's what we continue to do."
But Mr. Forrester's own assertiveness has raised the risk of worsening relations with some county chairmen and other party officials that have already been strained by challenges over ballot placement.
"The starting point for whoever is victorious is to go to those chairmen who were openly opposed to them and get them on board," said Mr. Talarico, whose organization is backing Assemblyman Paul DiGaetano of Bergen County over Mr. Forrester. "And to the extent that the chairs were put off by the legal attacks" - the ballot position challenges mounted by Mr. Forrester - "you're going to have to spend some time on them."
For Mr. Schundler - who is lagging in support and campaign financing - the perils are at least as great.
Although memories are notoriously short in politics, many Republicans remember 2001 as if it were yesterday. With Mr. Schundler at the top of their ticket, Republicans lost not only the governor's office, but 10 seats in the Assembly and 5 in the Senate.
While not of the magnitude of Republican legislative victories in 1991 and 1993, the Democratic sweep in 2001 reversed the momentum the Republicans had built up after Christie Whitman defeated the incumbent Democratic governor, Jim Florio, in 1993.
The specter of another such top-to-bottom defeat at the hands of Mr. Corzine - who faces token opposition in the primary - could be pushing some pragmatic-minded Republicans toward Mr. Forrester.
"Much of the regular Republican organization has coalesced around Forrester because they fear a repeat of 2001, when Republicans across the state suffered," said Joseph Marbach, chairman of the political science department at Seton Hall University.
Professor Marbach noted that Mr. Forrester's ability to self-finance his campaign - though not on the same scale as Mr. Corzine - would allow Republicans to spend more to defend local offices and perhaps even knock off a Democratic incumbent here and there.
"That is the big benefit to having Forrester on the top of the ticket," he said. "It means that money raised in, say, Cape May County can stay in Cape May County, rather than be sent to Trenton for the governor's race."
Some Republican officials privately admit they were supporting Mr. Forrester for precisely that reason. And even some of those supporting other candidates concede that having a candidate with the ability to pay for extensive advertising could help stem a Democratic tidal wave.
"Is it a concern?" asked Assemblyman Sean Kean of Monmouth County, who at 42 is ambitious and clearly interested in keeping the state party from any long-term disintegration. "Absolutely. You're always going to be concerned about coattails, especially when the money is so distorted."
While so many of the calculations revolve around money, the Republican disaster of 2001 was not merely a question of cash. The party was bitterly divided after Mr. Schundler's primary victory over former Representative Robert Franks, who was drafted when acting Gov. Donald DiFrancesco decided not to run for a full term amid ethics questions. After the primary, supporters of Mr. Franks and Mr. DiFrancesco did not rally around Mr. Schundler, whom they considered too conservative on social issues.
'Sat on Their Hands'
"People sat on their hands," Republican Assemblyman Bill Baroni of Mercer County conceded.
This time, said Professor Marbach, Mr. Schundler has more mainstream support, increasing the chances of the party coming together regardless of who wins on Tuesday.
"If Schundler is the nominee, there will be concerted Republican effort to turn out the vote," he said. "He is not persona non grata, as he was four years ago. So it should not be the disaster it was in 2001."
Much also depends on how quickly, and how enthusiastically, the party's moderates and conservatives put aside their differences for the common effort of defeating Mr. Corzine, or at least preventing him from piling up a landslide and sending Republican legislators and freeholders into involuntary retirement.
While Assemblyman Kean - who is backing Mr. Murphy - said he will support whoever emerges from the seven-member field, there is no guarantee that Republican voters will do likewise.
Marie Tasy, the director of New Jersey Right to Life, which has endorsed Mr. Schundler, hinted strongly that abortion opponents - who constitute a crucial part of the Republican base in New Jersey - might not support the more-moderate Mr. Forrester in the general election.
"That's what happened to him in the general election last time," Ms. Tasy said. "Pro-life voters stayed home."
