George W. Bush

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is pushing hard to convince biotech millionaire John Crowley to reconsider his decision not to run for the U.S. Senate, and are moving to ask President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain to call him and encourage him to run, according to Republican sources.

President Bush will visit New Jersey today, speaking in Freehold to tout a new mortgage hotline.  But U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez says Bush should have joined him a year ago when he began sounding “alarm bells on the housing crisis.”

“For more than a year, this tsunami of foreclosures has washed away the American dream for millions. The president has bent over backward to stabilize Wall Street, but he has never exerted much effort on helping the homeowners on Main Street,” said Menendez, a member of the Senate Banking Committee. “Homeowners across the country are drowning in out-of-control mortgage payments. The president must finally realize that their dire situation not only threatens to take away the American Dream from millions, it also has a direct effect on property values, on the credit crisis and on our entire slumping economy.

Congressman Christopher Smith has an interesting election year choice to make on Friday: travel to his district on Friday and stand with President George W. Bush, or stay home in Virginia.

U.S. Senator Robert Menendez will deliver the Democratic response to President George W. Bush’s weekly radio address on Saturday.

New Jerseyan Ray Odierno is the new Army Vice Chief of Staff: White House Photo
New Jersey’s seventeen daily newspapers, and PolitickerNJ.com, missed President George W. Bush’s March 3rd appointment of Lt. General Ray Odierno, who grew up in Rockaway, as the new Army Vice Chief of Staff. Odierno led the platoon that captured Saddam Hussein, and served most recently as the Commanding General of Multi-National Corps-Iraq.

Back in December 2003, Assemblyman Richard Merkt told PolitickerNJ.com that Republicans “would be smart to consider” Odierno as a possible U.S. Senate candidate against then-incumbent Jon Corzine.

Ramapo College Professor Murray Sabrin may not be the best messenger for an attack on GOP U.S. Senate candidate Anne Evans Estabrook’s Republican credentials. In a statement released today, Sabrin accused Estabrook of “speaking out of both sides of her checkbook” by making past campaign contributions to Democratic candidates, including Bob Menendez for Congress, John Kerry for President, Linda Stender for State Assembly, and the New Jersey Democratic State Committee.

Seventeen-year-old Dave Landstrom lives in Flemington, the county seat of one of New Jersey's most Republican leaning counties. He was a 10-year-old when George W. Bush was elected President, and he turns 18 this October 26th, making him eligible to vote on Election Day in November.

The State Assembly has scheduled a vote Thursday on legislation – pushed by Democrats -- that would require New Jersey's electoral votes to be cast for the candidate who wins the national popular vote, not necessarily the statewide count in New Jersey. The bill seeks to include New Jersey in an “Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Popular Vote,” which would be effective only if enacted by enough states to "collectively possess the majority of the electoral votes required to decide a presidential win – currently 270 of the 538 electoral votes. So far, only Maryland has passed similar legislation.

States are permitted to decide the rules concerning the election of their own Electoral College members. But what if New Jersey alone had this law in the 2004 General Election?

As recently as the American boyhoods of John Kerry, John McCain and George W. Bush, it was nearly impossible to think of becoming president without going through the ritual of combat.

World War II vets threw down a gauntlet that members of the succeeding generation couldn't hope to wield unless they donned uniforms and picked up rifles. But the motif of warrior as leader goes back most vividly and foundationally to Washington.

The general on horseback myth worked so well and the country's early talent pool tested in war went so deep, few men thereafter could assume the chair of presidential power without showing battle stripes. From the country's founding all the way up to 1908, only the elections of 1800 (Adams v. Jefferson), 1844 (Polk v. Clay) and 1861 (Lincoln v. Douglas) failed to feature war hero candidacies.