Robert Torricelli's blog

There is a deep tradition of New Jersey Democrats miscalculating in presidential politics.

Governor Meyner withheld support from John Kennedy in 1960 in order to cast the decisive vote at the Los Angeles Convention. When they called the roll call, Robert Kennedy told him that his brother did not need him.

A single question in the Las Vegas Democratic Presidential Debate exhibited everything that you need to know about the contemporary American media. Wolf Blitzer, CNN moderator, asked each candidate to choose a priority between human rights and national security.

Blitzer didn't want to be troubled by analysis. He wanted an answer as simple as the thought process that developed the question. It must be nice to live in a world without nuance. There must comfort in choosing policy without the burden of history or experience.

At a Manhattan restaurant earlier in the year I was confronted by someone whose actions remain central to our current national calamity. While politicians and pundits debate the errors and miscalculations that led America into a foolish and dangerous war, she has remained safely out of the fray.

Former NY Times Correspondent Judith Miller offered a casual greeting and continued with her meal. She resumed her conversation but my mind returned to late 2001 and the early months of 2002.

The eloquence of their words and the powerful example of their lives has given the Rutgers Women's Basketball team an important victory over ignorance. An important element of this success was public reaction and another was economic power. Advertisers decided that subsidizing ignorance was bad business.

Removing Imus from the air is hardly enough to solve a national problem. Entertainment by divisive, hateful speech is an epidemic. It is also a disease that can be found in New Jersey.

When 101.5 began to build itself into a state-wide forum for news and ideas, I was a willing conspirator. I wrote to the FCC in support of expanding the station's license and even assisted with a new station acquisition.

It's the most contentious issue in politics. Every decade the state must redraw districts for the Congressional delegation. Friendships are lost and hours of productive time is squandered.

The tendency of the delegation and the redistricting commission has always been to approach the issue on a bipartisan basis. Both parties and all incumbents are accommodated to the fullest extent possible.

The remarkable thing about the public policy priorities facing New Jersey is the general consensus regarding which issues should be priorities on the agenda. Nobody seems to argue about the need to fulfill our moral and legal responsibility to rebuild aging schools in less affluent areas. The financial ruin of the Schools Construction Corporation is the worst failing of this generation of New Jersey political leadership but the need to resolve the problem crosses all partisan and ideological lines.

The most interesting thing about history is how it turns on events that are little noticed at the time. That's exactly what happened in the Middle East last week.

There are now two Palestinian states. Hamas staged a successful rebellion and has occupied the entire Gaza Strip. The result is that forty years of Israeli defense policy is beginning to unwind.

The defense of

It's now all in jeopardy. A series of events threatens to move the front lines of radical Islam to

A failed war in Iraq, a misguided Israeli invasion in Lebanon, a corrupt Palestinian leadership, a detached American Administration and an incompetent group of Israeli leaders have inadvertently conspired to give Israel's worst enemies an opportunity. The

It's quite a situation and it dominated the news for less time than Paris Hilton's jail sentence.

It's all so predictable. An idiot shock jock makes outrageous and bigoted comments and African American leaders demand that he be fired.

The only difference is that the shock

When the Legislature passed the Property Tax relief legislation it enacted about half of the 98 recomendations made by the four special legislative committees this past summer and fall. So that's forty odd reasons to believe that property taxes will decline. I've got one reason to suggest that they won't. 

The execution of several young school children in Newark challenged all of our abilities to understand. Senseless death in an Iraqi city or a Colombian jungle doesn't challenge us. Separations of space and culture allow us to accept the tragedy as just another mystery of life. The Newark murders were different. They were senseless, cruel and here.