FREEHOLD – A guy in a plaid shirt arrives late to the packed Elks Lodge meeting for Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Lonegan. Oversized boots. Laces untied. You can picture the four-by-four parked out front as he tugs off work gloves to get thickset fingers around a glossy “Dump Corzine, Elect Lonegan” bumper sticker. 

Lonegan’s up at the front of the room, going all out. 

“There are two races in the country this year, governor’s races in Virginia and in New Jersey,” says the former Bogota mayor, leader of the state’s conservative movement. “Virginia’s kind of mellow. That means all eyes are going to be on New Jersey. New Jersey’s the number one race. If we don’t stand and fight for conservative Republican principles, we’ll be sent off to political Siberia for the next 20 years.” 

He promises the Battle of Trenton all over again, with big government Democrats and their schemes for affordable housing mandates in the role of high-hatted Hessian strongmen and Lonegan troops the tough guy Continentals who tramped across Jersey to Pennsylvania then came back over the river again to blow out the imperial forces.  

In a two-revolution metaphorical stroke of compacted New Jersey history, Lonegan suggests, too, that his anti-government battle on the Delaware will reclaim the state’s industrial jobs base that once prompted state fathers to declare unequivocally, “Trenton makes, the world takes.” 

“More men died here in the American Revolution than in any other state,” says Lonegan. “It’s only appropriate that it comes back to New Jersey, where (Democratic Gov.) Jon Corzine is so much better equipped, better financed. But let me tell you, by the time I’m done with Jon Corzine, he’s going to have to move into one of those government COAH (Council on Affordable Housing) units.” 

It’s brutally cold outside and snowing in spurts. The parking lot’s packed for Lonegan. A few days before the NFL league championships, most people here in Monmouth aren’t far south enough to feel any bird or Flacco buzz, and just far north enough to still be bummed by Plaxico. 

“Monmouth rules,” someone in the audience shouts at one point. 

Under the dimmed disco ball hanging from a low ceiling, Lonegan, ex-high school linebacker, former team captain and small town businessman, delivers a 45-minute working class hero jam - in the boss’s hometown no less - looking and sounding like a still-standing specter of Jersey’s disappeared manufacturing era ready to lead the currently routed forces of middle-class taxpayers, immigrant offspring, bright orange-shirted guys who still get their hands dirty for a living, FOX News devotees, Jersey nationals, hunters, fishermen, small businessmen, anti-government pro-lifers and the same 20 percent of those self-identified conservatives who said they voted for President-elect Barack Obama. 

The 70 people here in the audience love it, offering up at least two standing ovations for Lonegan, who in his second underdog run for governor can now boast of a steadily building grassroots network of conservatives and over $1 million he’s raised along with government matching funds. 

Apparently former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, the frontrunner for the party’s nomination, hit his own power chords in a Bergen County Republican Organization (BCRO) meeting Tuesday night. But to the Lonegan camp, Christie with his early declarations that COAH and Abbott funding for urban and poor school districts just need to be reined in, make the former U.S. Attorney an easy target for RINO (Republican in name only) branding. 

In any case, at this point they mostly wouldn’t know what he is because he only speaks in platitudes, they complain.

“And their strategy is to keep him away from me as long as possible,” Lonegan says of Christie. 

Lonegan partisans and Christie skeptics already impatient to hear some give and take from the frontrunner, and also fearful of a GOP coronation, say all he did on Tuesday – again, they mutter – was give a blistering drum solo of words to rock the crowd before walking out without taking questions. 

BCRO Chairman Bob Yudin offers his own take on Christie’s performance in a telephone interview. 

“It was a homerun,” he says.  

“Let let be very clear,” he adds. “We have a real convention here, unlike most other counties. All our officers vote on who they want to give the line to, and I will not do what (former BCRO chair) Rob Ortiz did. He gave Pennacchio the line last year and then supported someone else. I’ll support who gets the line. 

“But Christie gave a dynamite speech to a room of 300 people. Look, to these bloggers out there who are demanding he get specific on the issues, Chris has been very clear that he will outline his programs in detailed fashion after he formally gets in the race the first week of February.” 

His supporters celebrate Lonegan’s appearance at the Elk Lodge, in the meantime, where their candidate’s not only doing the inspirational bit but offering specific cuts to state government and exhaustively taking question after question from the audience after his speech, pledging to stay all night if he has to address everyone’s concerns. 

Like Christie, Lonegan’s half Irish and half Italian, a native of North Jersey, and when he goes into his keynote riff about his immigrant roots, he throws feeling into the stories about his grandparents toiling in a garment factory and his father working at Honeywell, and the values he learned the hard, hand-over-hand way in Bergen County and how all that’s changed since the Democrats ruined the state.

It started in 1965, he says, under Gov., Richard Hughes – and at the mention of the name, there are some boos. New Jersey had no income tax and no sales tax. The government imposed a three percent temporary sales tax. Then the tax went to five percent, then seven percent and permanent, where it stands now; plus a nine percent income tax. 

“The Democrats think they can run our lives sort of like those tyrants our ancestors escaped in Europe and Asia,” shouts Lonegan. No disrespect to Christie, he says - a good lawman, yet finally a conflation of Republican compromise if his remarks to date are any indication; and after John McCain’s “me, too” pro-bailout package vote and Nov. 4th fall apart, unfocused ideology won’t work, Lonegan insists.  

An unabashed conservative, he promises to cut the size of a $33 billion state government by 20 percent. He wants to fight the intrusiveness of state Supreme Court decisions by deepsixing Abbott and COAH, and he wants to demolish the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) as it now exists. 

When he thinks about his parents’ pride of ownership in being able to buy a house after years of toil and contrasts that with a government plan to throw up 100,000 units of housing to confront the state’s affordability crisis, he says, “Sure, I can’t wait for my daughters to graduate college and move into a government housing project. 

“Come on, that’s not what America’s about!” 

Claps and cheers. 

At one point during the evening, a door opens and the night blows in an old man frowning under a camo baseball cap. His arms aren’t even out of the sleeves of his overcoat before he hears Lonegan campaign consultant Rick Shaftan at the front of the room likening Christie’s early operations to the doomed 1948 presidential candidacy of New York Gov. Thomas Dewey. 

“This is a guy, Dewey, who ran a campaign with slogans like ‘the future is ahead of us,’ ‘the rivers are full of fish,’ and ‘we need bold answers,” says Shaftan, triggering a wave of snickering in the audience and the GOP operative, unflappable at the microphone, adds, “No, this is no joke. Those were his speeches.” 

After an oratorical genuflection in the direction of Ronald Reagan, a 1980 presidential candidate pundits deemed “too conservative to beat Jimmy Carter,” Shaftan drives in the point: timid, platitude-driven candidates like Dewey and, the implication’s clear, Christie - lose, while uncompromising conservatives like Reagan – and Lonegan - win, bringing down-ballot Republicans with them. 

Craig O’Brien, the campaign’s field director, moments later weathers an ensuing hiss when he invokes Obama, but it’s only to hold up a political model of the same kind of grassroots organizing Lonegan’s building. They want campaign leaders in each of New Jersey’s 567 municipalities, talking to neighbors and pressuring local party leaders with the Lonegan message. The state requires 1,000 signatures to get a gubernatorial candidate on the battle. O’Brien says they’re gunning for 10,000, 15,000, or even 20,000 signatures. 

In the aftermath, efforts to find the old man to ask him about the Dewey-Christie comparison and what memories he has of Dewey fail amid the maelstrom of bodies who want to either sign up to volunteer or get close to Lonegan to shake his hand. 

“If you get the nomination, Corzine will be whipped over like a hurricane,” Dick Ludwig of Manasquan tells the candidate. 

But getting the nomination will be tough in the face of a well-connected Christie mostly everyone concedes, not to mention millionaire self-financing Corzine's money in a general; and it’s no swipe at democracy, he says, but a mournful repudiation of process when Warren Burry of Howell gripes, “The greatest weakness in our system is you have to get elected.”