The county of "Putting Essex First" backs Corzine for governor in Codey country

WEST ORANGE – The Governor of New Jersey usually doesn’t wait long to address a collective of his own party, but this being Essex in a gubernatorial election year, the governor stayed on ice during a drum roll ceremony that was as much a buildup of Essex as it was a buildup to Gov. Jon Corzine.

Corzine didn’t appear to mind – and with reason.

“Barack Obama won nearly 250,000 votes in Essex last year,” the governor roared when he finally took the microphone. “If you give me 250,000 votes, this election’s signed, sealed and delivered” – a reference to the Stevie Wonder anthem a deejay played to introduce Corzine, subliminally strengthening the governor’s linkage to Obama, who  favored the song last year on the campaign trail.

The all-day buzz was that this Essex County Democratic Convention would present the unmistakable photo op of former Gov./Senate President Richard Codey (D-West Orange) and Corzine onstage together, arms raised in a ceremonial show of solidarity as the blockbuster credits rolled. 

It didn’t play out that way, as Codey – rushing to get to a previously scheduled event – gave a locker room morale-booster to the home team, then skidooed, leaving Corzine standing in a corner of a high school cafeteria while a caravan of Essex County elected officials one-by-one flourished their own praise for the sitting governor in what added up to a half an hour prelude to a speech delivered by himself.

All Wednesday evening, a crowd of state workers wearing jackets stenciled with the words “New Jersey Political Action Team,” rallied outside in the rain, ostensibly against the DiVincenzo administration, yelling in the midst of county budget talks wherein they stand to absorb layoffs during an economic downturn. 

Under umbrellas, some of the protestors washed down the driveway and into the parking lot chanting inaudibly halfway into Democratic State Chairman Joe Cryan’s speech and trying the locked cafeteria doors.

A cop came out of parade rest in the rain. Cap. Moustache. Jacket. Sergeants bars. He struck the command position and flushed them out of the area.

From a purely theatrical standpoint, Codey’s presence for the duration didn’t prove critical in a roomful of party machines – machines on top of machines - including Newark Mayor Cory Booker and state Sen. Ronald L. Rice (at the same table!), Essex County Executive Joe DiVincenzo, County Chairman Phil Thigpen, North Ward leader Steve Adubato, Assemblyman/Mayor John McKeon (D-West Orange), East Orange Mayor Robert Bowser, Sheriff Armando Fontoura, Orange Mayor Eldridge Hawkins, Jr., state Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D-Newark), Irvington Mayor Wayne Smith, Newark Council President Mildred Crump, East Ward leader Joe Parlavecchio, Essex County Clerk Chris Durkin, Assemblywoman Shelia Oliver (D-East Orange), Assemblyman Ralph Caputo (D-Belleville), Assemblywoman Cleopatra Tucker (D-Newark), Assemblyman Albert Coutinho (D-Newark), Assemblywoman Grace Spencer (D-Newark), Assemblyman Thomas Giblin (D-Montclair), Assemblywoman Mila Jasey (D-South Orange), Assemblyman Fred Scalera (D-Nutley) and numerous handfuls of other interfacing and interconnected Essex electeds and operatives.

Last summer, Codey told Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy – chairman of the Hudson County Democratic Organization – that Essex County would deliver more votes for Barack Obama than Hudson.

It happened, as Essex went 240,306 for Obama, compared to the 154,140 mustered by Hudson – more than any other county in New Jersey. Only Bergen came close to Essex, racking up 225,367 votes for the Democratic nominee and eventual winner.

Now Corzine’s challenge in this building block county as he heads toward November is to capitalize on that essential Democratic Party strength, one of the reasons he’s enlisted Adubato acolyte Phil Alagia of Newark’s North Ward, a GOTV mechanic, to be his statewide political director. 

“Fox News and the Republicans will try to use this election as a referendum on the administration of Barack Obama,” warned Booker, who labored last year to get the president elected and has built himself into a telephone-call-away advisor on urban affairs to Obama.

Cryan – a native of the Vailsburg section of Newark, the county seat and biggest city in Jersey – Wednesday night refined his standard stump speech for Corzine by adding an urban twist, even as he denounced the Republicans’ particular ineptitude at organizing in the urban areas.

He singled Booker and Bowser out of the crowd.

“Cory, Bob, you know, they would simply cut the cities out of the map and float them into the bay,” Cryan said of the GOP. “That’s the way they play, folks.” 

But there was still the matter of Corzine tanking in the polls, and inescapably a muttered undercurrent in the room that the party should pull a Torricelli 2003 and dump him, simply sit him down at some point and tell him – or at least do this if the poll numbers don’t move after mid-summer, in any event some time before the Sept. 16th deadline – that he’s done, the party’s stronger without him.

The Wall Street exec who was supposed to have leaped into presidential contention after just one reform term in office, the man who would have been Woodrow Wilson, tonight made his case for another four years in statewide office, and listened to those others among his Statehouse allies make it for him. 

“He’s a Wall Street Titan. MBA. He grew up on a farm. He’s so well-grounded, he’s comfortable wearing a sweater vest,” argued Oliver, who proved to be the final speaker to execute the hand-off to Corzine, who extolled the governor’s priorities, including $3.9 billion for new schools construction passed last year.

That was a point Corzine amplified when he mentioned the Oliver Street School in the Ironbound, with Coutinho sitting near the front row. It was a renovation project they worked together and with the crowd roused somewhat, Corzine cited the median income in Essex as $44,000, or $31,000 under his proposed threshold for property tax rebate freezes, standing by his vow to protect seniors, working people and their children.

“Public education is the foundation of the middle class,” cried the governor, who peppered his speech with regular guy references, while playfully goring the Oxford University-educated Booker.

“I didn’t go to Harvard or Yale or something – I didn’t want to pick on Cory,” said Corzine, regularly lampooned as an aloof antidote to street types like DiVincenzo and Codey.

“I went to night school!”

There were claps. There was some good feeling. There were so many political enemies in the room that among the fractured faithful, a pervasive exhaustion with intra-county rivalry and feuding seemed to find gentleman outsider Corzine to be no mean interloper, and in the end, maybe even worthy of backing.

“Of course, he’s going to throw some money in here,” explained one party insider, rubbing together thumb and forefinger. 

If it can’t be done only on issues and money, part of the argument to drive up Corzine’s numbers in Essex concerns who he should choose as his running mate, and as Booker prepares to run for reelection, at this point there are two prevailing schools. 

First of all, DiVincenzo would eventually like governor or congress, and with Corzine going for governor again and U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-Paterson) installed in DiVincenzo’s home district of the 8th, those options are out right now.  Codey, for his part, would be interested in either governor once more, or senator. 

Anything short of those offices – lieutenant governor, for instance – creates little enthusiasm in either man, a condition which can’t be ascribed to certain others when it comes to LG, especially if one is talking about Assembly Majority Leader Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) or state Sen. Barbara Buono (D-Metuchen).

Both women are said to be interested and lobbying hard.

Already a “no brainer” pick in the mind of powerful state Sen. Raymond Lesniak (D-Elizabeth), Buono paid a visit to Adubato as recently as a week ago, seeking his support.

A steely Newark native who grew up in Nutley and has legal and law enforcement credit to counteract presumptive Republican gubernatorial frontrunner Christopher Christie, the Italian-American Buono commands the senate budget committee and has a reputation as an independent thinker who’s resistant to control. 

Her detractors have one word. 

“Metuchen?”

It’s the tiny Middlesex County town where she lives – engulfed by Edison – which at times emerges at the state level as part of an ongoing debate, and an example of one of those New Jersey places that could be absorbed into a taxpayer savings plan for regionalized services.

In short, it could be gotten rid of. 

But speaking on her behalf, Assemblyman Jon Wisniewski (D-Sayreville) said Democrats elsewhere would be mistaken to box Buono into Metuchen, arguing that the senator is a Middlesex creation - another Democratic Party bastion that, incidentally, racked 194,000 votes for Obama last year.

In any event, she wouldn’t be Codey’s first choice, say sources; and former Democratic State Chairman Giblin told PolitickerNJ.com he believes Corzine should choose the African-American Watson Coleman, a boon to Essex, where the population is 41.24% Black.

Making LG politics more interesting still is that part of this county’s support for Watson Coleman might include payback in the form of Essex choosing a new Assembly majority leader from among its ranks, and sources say that would be prodigal son Cryan. 

But that’s just one piece, added into the others. The main item, Corzine, dove into the crowd after his speech with the unanimous support if not unbridled love - of a party here rarely united, but proud of its standing.

“We are the county,” said Codey, “that can decide that Jon Corzine will be governor for the next four years.”

And amid the party hoopla as he headed for the exit with Corzine still waiting, PolitickerNJ.com asked the Senate President if the feds had summoned him to testify in the corruption trial of former state Sen. Joe Coniglio (D-Paramus) regarding the state funding of Hackensack University Medical Center, and Codey said, "No."