Max Pizarro's blog

Everyone at the top of the massive, Lincoln Memorial-like entrance to City Hall instinctively or self-consciously struck an imperial pose before descending toward the crowd.

Politicians are attentive to power.

Couple that with the race memory of a place like the Parthenon or the Pyramids, and on this day there were over 100 elected officials and ten County chairs testing their best power walks under the Ionic columns of that monumental building in downtown Elizabeth.

With the occasion of Gov. Jon Corzine endorsing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for President still 15 minutes away, the warm-up act was finally prodded as a single unit, the New Jersey Democratic Party power structure, down the stairs, compressed into two cellphone-chattering phalanxes, one on either side of the podium at the bottom. 

There is a limit to what mortals can attain, and where the mortal strivings of one group fall off, another group begins, so there is never a totality of human endeavor, only the approximation of something whole, captured in a contest of opposing sides.
Such is waterfront politics in Jersey City and Bayonne.

Gearing up for primary season, the Hudson County Democratic Organization (HCDO) presented a “dream team� ticket of district 31 Legislative candidates last Thursday that includes some diehard Sen. Robert Menendez supporters, and the widow of the late Mayor Glenn Cunningham, who warred with the Democratic Party machine.

But in reconciling onetime opposites, the ticket also fails to include some key players, who themselves are mobilizing this week to emerge as part of another “unity ticket,� headed by veteran Assemblyman Louis Manzo.

The organization ticket brings Sandra Bolden Cunningham together with her husband’s old rival, former Jersey City Council President (and interim Mayor and State Senator) L. Harvey Smith; and Bayonne Councilman (and former Assemblyman) Anthony Chiappone, a Cunningham family ally.

Monmouth County Democrats Saturday nominated retiring state Parole Board Chairman John D'Amico Jr., and Bradley Beach Mayor Stephen G. Schueler as their two Freeholder candidates.

Party Chairman Victor V. Scudiery said the party had considered recruiting incumbent Freeholder Anna Little, a Republican, who's repeatedly crossed swords with Monmouth County Republican Party Chairman Adam Puharic.

On this Saturday, as the party wound down in a West Long Branch restaurant and the unanimously approved Legislative candidates headed for the parking lot, Victor V. Scudiery looked placid.

But the Chairman of the Monmounth County Democratic Party was in battle mode.

So far it's a hard luck state here for any Republican who wants to be President whose name isn't Rudy Giuliani.

Assemblyman Jon Bramnick, who supports Giuliani for President, said Republicans raised $100,000 for the former New York Mayor's campaign at a mixer at Bramnick's house in Westfield last Sunday.

Bramnick had no problem mustering support for his own candidacy at Thursday night's Somerset County Republican Convention.

Monmouth County Democrats Saturday morning got behind Belmar Police Chief Jack Hill in his quest to be sheriff.

Upon picking up the most votes from the County Committee, Hill accepted the party's nomination and the endorsement of those who'd run against him.

That was the day's only contest. Everything else was by acclamation.

In district 12, Democrats as expected picked Fair Haven businesswoman Amy Mallett to run with Sen. Ellen Karcher and Assemblyman Michael Panter.

As an electronics technician in World War II, George Hunt of Burlington, 82, coordinated amphibious landings in the Pacific, the kind where the men ran up the beaches under fire and took territory.

"We used to sit in the navigation boat and time it so that all of our landing craft were synchronized when they hit the shore, in the Philippines, New Guinea, you name it, from 1943 until the war ended," said Hunt as he trudged within a column of New Jersey war protestors on King George’s Post Road in Edison Wednesday night.

On the other side of a police line at the New Jersey Expo Center, plain clothes-men eyed the crowd and wrote in notebooks and behind them, the Republican State Committee welcomed President George W. Bush to a fund-raiser for Legislative candidates. Ticket prices ranged from $300 per-person to attend the main reception to $5,000 for a photo-op with the President.

Rudy Garcia served in the State Assembly from 1993 to 2002, and as Mayor of Union City from 1998 to 2001.Arrested on racketeering charges, former Assemblyman and former Union City Mayor Raul "Rudy" Garcia is scheduled for an arraignment today in the Monmouth County Court House in Freehold at 1:30 PM. Garcia is one of eight Hudson County residents charged in a $500 million illegal gambling operation. Dozens of arrests were made this week.

Garcia is a partner at MBI-GluckShaw, one of the state's largest lobbying firms. Garcia has taken a leave of absence from the firm.
 

It’s an old dichotomy in New Jersey.

Republicans lay their election year battle plans in country clubs, while Democrats build their campaign bunkers out of union halls. But in Hamilton Township, home to the highest number of public employees in the state, politicians of both parties go through the unions.

You want to run for office in that gritty blue collar town that sprawls between highways east of Trenton, you do business with the workers.

That’s what Republican Assemblyman Bill Baroni’s done ever since he knocked off his Democratic opponent in 2003 to earn a seat in the Legislature. After the election he went to the Central Labor Council -- which had supported the other guy -- and told them he wanted to work with them, asked them what he could do to help. It wasn’t an unnatural gesture for the longtime Hamiltonian.

In one of three districts in the state that elects a Democrat and a Republican to the State Assembly, Linda Greenstein and Bill Baroni have been fierce competitors in the last two legislative campaigns, with Baroni winning the most votes both times.

In 2003, Baroni, in his first campaign, collected 27,181 votes in the general election; Greenstein, who was elected was elected in 1999, netted 24,752. Two years later, Baroni garnered 37,241 votes, while Greenstein received 35,816 votes.

 Now Baroni is running for State Senate, and Greenstein is tempted to go for a face off -- though everything hinges on party talks ongoing this week, and the party’s decision regarding the current Senate nominee, Seema Singh.