Ensign, a big loser in NJ Senate race twist and turns

In New Jersey, John Ensign is settling for his third choice in the race for U.S. Senate
Add New Jersey to the list of states where John Ensign has meddled and lost. The National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman made a brief foray into Garden State politics last week when he sought to clear the field for John Crowley, a biotech millionaire with an incredibly compelling life story, to enter the race for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination.

After Crowley’s first announcement last Monday that he wasn’t running, Ensign engineered a full-court press to get him in the race. He had John McCain and five other Republican U.S. Senators call him. He promised him money and pledged to make 84-year-old incumbent Frank Lautenberg an NRSC target. And for a while, it looked like Crowley would run.

But by the weekend, Crowley decided -- for business, family and military (he’s a Navy reservist) reasons – that he could not transition his life into politics by today’s New Jersey filing deadline. On Sunday, a spokesman announced Crowley’s second withdrawal in seven days.

This leaves Ensign with his third choice: the seemingly flawed Andy Unanue, a 40-year-old heir to the Goya Foods fortune. That’s if Unanue stays in the race at all – Ensign asked him to drop out last week.

Unanue entered the race on Easter Sunday with an announcement e-mailed from his ski home in Vail, where he has remained on vacation for the last two weeks. His campaign got off to a bad start with news – broken by PolitickerNJ.com’s Matt Friedman – that he was actually a resident of New York City, where he owned a trendy Manhattan night club. He was further damaged by details of his employment with Goya, where he was fired amidst a feud within the family-owned business.

The other two candidates are: Joseph Pennacchio, a State Senator whose campaign is already in debt and slightly wounded after the publication of a 94-page manifesto he wrote in 1991 that, among other things, calls for the elimination of Medicare and government-run camps for the homeless; and Murray Sabrin, a Ron Paul follower who was the 1997 Libertarian candidate for Governor.

Unanue is Ensign’s third choice – he had already contributed to Anne Evans Estabrook, a millionaire businesswoman who got in the race to challenge Lautenberg last year. But Estabrook dropped out in March after suffering a minor stroke – and losing some early county party endorsement contests.

Ensign has failed to recruit top-tier candidates in South Dakota and Arkansas, where Mark Pryor is running unopposed. Now as the Democrats move into a potentially bitter primary contest between Lautenberg and ten-term Rep. Rob Andrews, Ensign may not have anything going in New Jersey, except for some angry local party leaders who don’t understand who this guy from Nevada is and why he messed up their U.S. Senate race.