William Cahill

The Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University will release a poll on the race for Governor on Thursday morning.  Eagleton began polling in September 1971 (Gov. William Cahill had an upside-down 45%-49% job approval rating), and they polled their first gubernatorial race in 1973 -- Democrat Brendan Byrne had a 43%-23% lead over Republican Charles Sandman in October, their fourth poll of the year; Byrne won by 721,000 votes, 66%-32%.

Barack Obama is the fourth President to visit to New Jersey to campaign for the re-election of an incumbent Governor. This is his second visit; there is speculation that he will return again before Election Day.

Bill Clinton stumped for Jim Florio in 1993, Ronald Reagan for Thomas Kean in 1985, and Jimmy Carter for Brendan Byrne in 1977.  Lyndon Johnson did not visit New Jersey when Richard Hughes ran for re-election in 1965, although the First Lady did join Hughes for a tour of a Head Start center in Newark.  And Richard Nixon did not come to New Jersey in support of William Cahill, who lost the Republican primary to a White House ally, U.S. Rep. Charles Sandman.

The New Jersey Supreme Court meets to discuss cases during the 1970s. (Left to right): Associate Justices Sidney Schreiber, Morris Pashman, Worrall Mountain, Chief Justice Richard Hughes, Associates Justices Mark Sullivan, Robert Clifford, and Alan Handler.

Sidney Schreiber, who served as an Associate Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court from 1975 to 1984, died on Wednesday in West Palm Beach, Florida.  He was 94.

A former Yale Law Review editor and a Republican, Schreiber was named to the top court by Democratic Gov. Brendan Byrne following the retirement of Justice Nathan Jacobs.  He began his legal career as an associate at the law firm of Joseph Weintraub, who served as Chief Justice from 1957 to 1973.  Gov. William Cahill appointed him to serve as a Superior Court Judge in 1972.  He came from Elizabeth.

Rick Shaftan is getting his way.  The veteran conservative political consultant has been arguing for years that one of the best ways to beat a Democrat in New Jersey is for Republicans to run a Catholic candidate of Irish or Italian descent for statewide office.  Now the Republicans are running two Catholics - the first time they have nominated a Catholic since William Cahill in 1969.  GOP gubernatorial candidate Christopher Christie's father is Irish and his mother was Italian; his running mate, Kimberly McFadden Guadagno, is Irish, and his married to Superior Court Judge Michael Anthony Guadagno.  Christie and Guadagno are the first Irish Republicans to run statewide since Cahill, and Christie is the first Italian American to win a Republican nomination for statewide office.

One factoid that has appeared on PolitickerNJ.com numerous times in recent years is being reprinted in honor of Republican National Chairman Michael Steele's visit to the Garden State: Republicans haven't won a statewide election in New Jersey since 1997; since then, 49 other states have elected a Republican to statewide office.

Despite their winning streak, New Jersey Democrats went fourteen years without re-electing an incumbent to statewide office.  U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-Cliffside Park) was re-elected in 2008, having last won re-election in 1994.  Besides Lautenberg, the last New Jersey Democrat to win re-election was Bill Bradley in 1990.

PolitickerNJ.com's Matt Friedman had an interesting observation during his coverage of the Republican gubernatorial debate.  He notes that Christopher Christie, "in recounting the damage he says has been done by seven years of Democratic governors," skips Richard Codey - he goes from James E. McGreevey straight to Jon Corzine. 

For New Jersey Democrats, there was never a better year than 1973.  Republicans ousted their incumbent Governor, moderate William Cahill, in the primary and replaced him with Charles Sandman, a conservative Congressman.  Democrats, helped by the Watergate scandal in Washington (two weeks before the general election, Richard Nixon fired the Watergate special prosecutor in what was called "The Saturday Night Massacre") and the criminal conviction of top GOP officeholders in New Jersey, won the governorship by 721,378 votes (68%-32%).  Brendan Byrne won every county but Cape May - Sandman's home county.  Sandman's defeat was the worst for a Republican in New Jersey history.

Democrats picked up thirteen State Senate seats and 26 Assembly seats, leaving the Legislature with ten Republicans in the Senate and fourteen in the Assembly.  Only four legislative districts out of forty elected Republicans to the Senate and both Assembly seats; 36 districts sent at least one Democrat to the Legislature, including Hunterdon, Ocean, Morris, Sussex and Warren counties.

The announcement today that U.S. Senator Arlen Specter is switching parties is of little significance to New Jersey politics, except that it comes at a time when establishment Republicans are engaged in a fierce battle with conservatives for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.  Specter’s decision will likely upset some party leaders who view him as the type of Republican who can win a state that is trending Democratic.  And his switch will probably evoke a sort of “good riddance, rino” attitude from the conservative wing of the New Jersey GOP.

New Jersey, which hasn’t elected a Republican U.S. Senator since Clifford Case won a fourth term in 1972, has tossed two of their last three GOP Senators before the general election: Albert Hawkes was dumped by party leaders in his bid for a second term in 1948, and Case lost the 1978 GOP primary to conservative Jeffrey Bell.  And New Jersey Republicans have tossed one of their last three GOP Governors: incumbent William Cahill was ousted in the 1973 primary by Charles Sandman, a conservative Congressman.  (Another Republican Governor, Christine Todd Whitman, has been battling conservatives in a bid to keep moderates in the Republican Party.)

Jerome M. Epstein (R-Scotch Plains) served in the State Senate from 1972 to 1974.

New Jersey's history of corrupt politicians even included a State Senator who went to jail for being a pirate. 

During the energy shortage in the 1970's, former State Sen. Jerome Epstein (R-Scotch Plains) was sentenced to nine years in prison after a jury convicted him of pirating about $4 million worth of oil from Exxon tanks on the Arthur Kill in Linden.   

Epstein, whose family owned fuel oil companies and gas stations, rented a 115-foot barge, the Luzitania, recruited a crew, and stole about 12 million gallons of oil during a systematic series of thefts that began in 1968.  He rigged gauges on the barge so that he could take 4,000 gallons of oil and have it look like he only took 2,000. After a nine week trial, the former Senator, his father and uncle, were sentenced to prison terms.

There is some risk involved as political rivals of former U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie seek to make Herbert Stern an issue in the 2009 gubernatorial campaign.  A former Federal Judge and U.S. Attorney, Stern is a man of considerable gravitas.  Making him look like a common pay-to-play lawyer could backfire if they seek to impugn his integrity. 

Stern was a career prosecutor who went from law school to trying Homicide cases as an Assistant Manhattan District Attorney. (He was the DA sent to the scene when Civil Rights leader Malcolm X. Shabbaz was murdered.) He spent four years as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice's Organized Crime and Racketeering Section. When Frederick Lacey became the new U.S. Attorney for New Jersey in 1969, he hired Stern as Chief Assistant. The two met a year earlier during the prosecution of Peter Weber, the powerful head of the New Jersey Operating Engineers Union. Stern was the prosecutor and Lacey was the defense attorney; Stern won.

Stern was named U.S. Attorney in 1970, when Lacey became a Federal Judge. In 1974, Stern joined Lacey on the bench and was replaced by his deputy, Jonathan Goldstein, also a career prosecutor.

This trio of federal prosecutors won national attention for their war on political corruption and for their aggressive prosecution of organized crime figures. While nominally Republican (they were appointed by Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford at the suggestion of GOP U.S. Senator Clifford Case), they were viewed as fairly non-political. In fact, they took town several key members of Republican Governor William Cahill's administration; that scandal contributed toward Cahill's defeat in the 1973 GOP primary.