Steve Lonegan

MORRISTOWN – Citing a mutual love of family and similar views on the issues, Freeholder John Murphy and former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie reconciled publicly today as Murphy endorsed Christie for governor in a short ceremony at Morris County GOP headquarters.  

“We share a lot of things in common,” said Christie. “Jack and Bridget (two of their children) sit next to each other in class at Assumption School. …I’m thrilled to have John here.”

“Our differences are pretty well documented,” Murphy said. “Certainly they have sold newspapers. What was not alluded to is we are both family men who believe in public service.”

The pair of Morris political products waged a memorably hardnosed war in 1997, when Christie ran for re-election to the Freeholder Board and Murphy beat him, then Christie filed a defamation lawsuit against Murphy, which they settled out of court. Family events and their children’s crisscrossing paths – two other children played on the same two-person team at a recent sporting event – have helped quell any lingering inner turmoil from their drawn daggers encounter of more than a decade ago.

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FLEMINGTON - You don’t have to look beyond a stuffed trophy on the wall at the Croton Rod and Gun Club to know they mean business here, as it’s not just the bear head but a torso, arms and paws jutting out of the paneling over the bar and baseball caps and one straw cowboy hat perched on a delighted audience member who claps again as gubernatorial candidate Steve Lonegan tears into another subject.

“In my first four years, two judges will retire and two will be up for confirmation,” says Lonegan, who promises he won’t reconfirm the two who presumably will try to remain on the Supreme Court bench. “I will be appointing the four most conservative judges New Jersey’s ever seen.”

“Yeah!”

The crowd of about 60 people at this scheduled Hunterdon County meet-and-greet applauds heartily.

The former mayor of Bogota running for governor as the hard-line conservative says as governor he would require each judge to go before the voters every six years. “We’ll keep them in check that way,” he says over the growing applause. 

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Barred from the debate last night because he hasn’t raised the money to qualify under public financing rules, GOP gubernatorial candidate Assemblyman Richard Merkt (R-Mendham) described his two rivals’ slugfest as mainly a futile exercise in one-upmanship on the issue of taxes, with each promising a more impossible largesse of relief than the other, in Merkt’s view.

The retiring 25th District assemblyman from the beginning of his campaign has argued that has primary opponents would not be able to effect the structural tax changes they champion because of the Democratic Party’s control of the legislature.

“I’ve been in the legislature for 12 years, and it’s like trying to herd cats to get 120 legislators in line,” Merkt said. “The only way to do it is to cut the Gordian knot, which is the State Supreme Court. Both of these gentlemen are astute enough to know ther tax promises can’t be accomplished without the legislature, and when they make their arguments, they are misleading the public."

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A day after competing with Steve Lonegan in a debate on NJN, Chris Christie kept his sights on Gov. Jon Corzine, strenuously objecting to Corzine’s proposal to take out a $2 billion bridge loan to make up for a budget shortfall, even as questions inevitably tugged Christie back to his ongoing fight with Lonegan, with three weeks remaining in the Republican primary.

Christie called Corzine’s bridge loan proposal “emblematic” of the governor’s poor economic stewardship.

Joined in a conference call with former Prediential candidate and flat tax champ Steve Forbes, Christie laid on a pro-business barrage by pledging as governor to “roll back over-zealous regulation,” which he said has created a toxic business climate in New Jersey. He also reiterated his desire to cut the corporate income tax.

In this, his second teleconference call at least with Christie, Forbes lauded the presumptive Republican frontrunner.

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TRENTON – Democratic State Chairman Joseph Cryan released this statement following tonight’s GOP Gubernatorial Candidate Debate:

"Both men showed tonight that they would bring more of the same George Bush policies that got us here in the first place.  In their zeal to win the votes of the extreme right wing of their party, these two Republicans are out of touch with the mainstream voters of New Jersey.  They offered no new ideas and no new solutions, just the same repeat loop of political sound bites that bring no hope and no new leadership to the people of New Jersey.  We don't need someone that is going to run from making the right choices to protect our kids education, our healthcare, our seniors and our most vulnerable.
 
All I heard tonight are bad ideas. These are two men that don't have the right answers for New Jersey. These are two men that are re-circulating the same bad policies and same destructive ideas we saw from national Republicans out of Washington the past eight years."

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Assemblyman and Democratic State Chairman Joe Cryan (D-Union) gave his two cents on the Republican debate between Chris Christie and Steve Lonegan tonight, linking both to former President George W. Bush.  

Below is his statement. 

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Today, Chris Christie's campaign sent around their "pre-debate spin" -- encouraging supporters to write canned letters to the editor even before Christie walks on stage.

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-- “Longer School Day.  Longer School Year”

ORADELL – Following on the footsteps of Barack Obama's call for a longer school day and a longer school year, Chris Christie this morning proposed the same thing for New Jersey.

"Chris has already promised NOT to cut taxes in his first year in office and now we see why.  His plan to expand school days and the school year will increase education expenses by anywhere from 10 to 25 percent," Lonegan explained.  "That’s billions of dollars."

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Murray Sabrin, a conservative college professor who ran Ron Paul's presidential campaign in New Jersey before entering the GOP primary for U.S. Senate last year, has endorsed former U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie for the Republican nomination for Governor.

In an email to his political friends and allies sent today, Sabrin, who teaches finance at Ramapo College, said he had a conversation with Christie this morning and concluded that “Chris’s vision for New Jersey is best suited for the current economic crisis” because he “understands the need to lower the tax burden and decrease spending.”

He also criticized the flat tax plan of Christie rival Steve Lonegan, who is running as the more conservative alternative, for raising the tax rate on a significant portion of New Jerseyans. 

“Steve Lonegan’s ill conceived tax plan is nothing more than a political ploy that will penalize working families, particularly those with stay-at-home moms who are the backbone of the conservative movement in New Jersey,” wrote Sabrin. Read More >

On the eve of this evening’s NJN television debate, former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan said the maneuvers of the Democratic Party are not his concern.

“I don’t care what they do,” he told PolitickerNJ.com in a Monday night phone call. “I want them to go after me.”

But hearings on deferred prosecution agreements scheduled by a U.S. House Subcommittee, prosecutorial legislation authored by state Senate President Richard Codey (D-Roseland) and reported efforts by the Democratic Governor’s Association to target Lonegan primary opponent Chris Christie all add up to evidence that the rival party fears Christie more than Lonegan.

Lonegan, leader of New Jersey’s conservative movement and running nine points behind Christie in a Quinnipiac University poll issued last month, insisted the Democrats would rather face Christie than himself.

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