One of the more arduous and expensive tasks for a young politician running for statewide office for the first time is gaining name recognition. The task is made orders of magnitude easier if your name just happens to be one recognizable due to your father having been governor. Thomas R. Kean Jr. has announced that he will run for the Senate seat being vacated after John Corzine successfully purchased the New Jersey governorship. Corzine beat Doug Forrester 53/43 so Kean has an uphill battle. Moving 5-6% of the electorate over to the Republican column would be next to impossible for an unknown.
Kean's entry just made the Democrat's lack of money even more troublesome. Corzine spent $63.5 of his own to purchase his Senate seat four years ago. The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee has $19 million on hand at the moment and will probably be fortunate to have $50 million to spend in total for the cycle. The loss of union soft money contributions will hit New Jersey particularly hard because of its heavy unionization.
I do not rate Kean's probability of success in this first go around at higher than 45% but he is going to make many valuable contacts during this campaign and Lautenbergs seat will be up in '08. It is very unlikely that Lautenberg will run in '08 because of age and because serving in the minority suits him even less than it does Corzine. In the '06 run Keating's opponent will be a one year incumbent appointed by Corzine as soon as he takes office. Given the history of New Jersey politics, there is a reasonable chance that Kean's opponent in '06 and/or '08 will come under investigation or be indicted sometime during the campaign.
Kerry only beat Bush by 7% in New Jersey in '04. If Kean's opponent doesn't have good statewide name recognition and the DSCC doesn't have enough dough, this could be a very interesting race.
** Thanks to Jedrury for catching an error.
16 comments:
Well, while we're airing recent local dirty laundry, lets not forget the Toricelli/Lautenberg handoff which--tho SCOTUS declined to hear it--was expressly forbidden by state law, but went ahead anyway, apparently on the strength of a thitherto unknown legal principle now popularly known as "Fuggitaboudit".
You're right--they did such an excellent job of making a virtue of neccessity that the whole issue of legality became 'technical' and 'controversial' and pretty much legless, as the well-known campaign-winner stepped up and took the situation in hand.
Personalities and PR successes aside, tho, no one can say that the precedent set isn't a step backward in political evolution.
Where did all this current bad behavior come from, after all, other than a couple decades of rationalizing that the other side did something like whatever it is, "first"?
You have to understand, buddy, NJ is a deeply corrupt state. markg8 might whine about 'suppressing' the vote in Newark, but when thousands of dead people are still voting (Democratic, that is), in the state, its pretty much a moot point.
The only reason Torricelli got dumped was because it wasn't possible to put any sort of face on it. Unlike say, coming up with Lautenberg at the last minute, and managing through the machine to get him elected, despite it all being against the law. But that doesn't matter a great deal in NJ. As you can see.
Eric,
You're right about the lower Dem turnout that comes from denying the dead their God given right to effective represntation. I forgot that one. It's probaly only worth a quarter to a half a percent but in a tight race it could make the difference.
We know that Reps can win statewide races in New Jersey. Whitman is the last prominent example of that. Even if Keating loses he's going to bleed the Dems wrt money unless Corzine finds another moneybags candidate who wants to spend $60 mil to be able to cast meaningless votes.
Well, it's pretty clear that the garden state grows enough albatross for EVERYbody's neck.
Knuck, there's a motel billboard--facing east on the westbound side of I10 a half-hour or so from New Mexico, that says "The Sun Has RIZ, And the Sun Has SET, and You Ain't Out of Texas YET!"
Knuck,
I won't be calling New Jersey until after the lawsuits after the election. Keating running is a great move though, buying ad time in Philly and NYC is rather expensive and watching Dem fund levels drop is a hobby that I find very entertaining.
Corzine might find another rich fool but paying $60 mil to cast useless votes is someting for which even he didn't care.
Think maybe those "Make Him Spend it ALL" bumper-stickers may've stung a little?
Mark, that last sentence would look really cool in crayon. With little floral designs around the border, hanging on the bulletin board in Miss Smith's 4th grade classroom.
Didn't something like 48,000 snowbirds from NJ vote in Florida also?
mark:
When Clinton gives the evidence to Bush I guess he can tell the rest of us all about it.
After all Bill not only said the stuff was definitely there he guranteed us Saddam would use them.
This is what makes Democrats such a joke.
Think Bush's numbers are bad? Last I heard the Democrats are polling at 25% approval and 70% disaproval.
woo hoo!
The Republicans should never have impeached Clinton, it only made the Democrats nuttier than they already were.
OIF is part of an effort to change the dynamics of a lethally flawed set of power relationships that sitting atop the world's fuel tank was well on its way to firing up another BIG war.
To crawl around in the aftermath of huge, exigent actions looking for anything and everything that can't be proven to've been 100% optimal,in order to misrepresent them as conspiracies to do in the nation in favor of haliburton or somesuch, is small, obvious, pathetic, unworthy of your party's history, and a shitty way to say 'thanks', Mark.
And the party which built, maintains, and fiercely protects a huge civil-service structure that year-in-and-year-out returns less than half the work product per dollar as the private sector, has little standing to preach efficiency to an emergency operation with a shooting enemy, such as OIF.
A giant machine that takes the citizens' dollars at virtual gunpoint and returns them as forty or fifty cents worth of services, retaining the difference to fund the unneeded half of the payroll and/or four of eight hours unworked or double-paid--that is, the Democratic party--is certain to be institutionally tolerant of less-than-perfectly-efficient spending. So, there's your proof, the outrage is ALL politics--masquerading as citizenship. Fooey.
The name is Thomas Kean is not, not Keating,
Thanks, Jedrury, I'll correct it. Thomas Keating was McCain's love if I remember correctly. Odd the tricks the mind plays.
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