President

DNC Chairman Tim Kaine, left, enters the Polish National Hall on Thursday night and is greeted by Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy

HARRISON - In New Jersey this evening to stump for Gov. Jon Corzine, Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Tim Kaine said his organization has committed another layer to the final week street-level campaign operations of Gov. Jon Corzine.

"We're putting in a chunk of dough from contributions we have received over the last couple of months and ours and Obama's best people are helping out," said the governor of Virginia (term-limited out of office at the end of this year) and 2008 short-list candidate for vice president. 

Just days before President Barack Obama's final campaign rally across the river for Corzine in Newark on Sunday, Kaine made three campaign stops here in New Jersey for the governor today, finishing at the Polish National Hall at a bi-annual party fundraising event hosted by Harrison Mayor Ray J. McDonough.

"The issue is there are good partners and there are bad partners, and President Obama recognizes the fact that Gov. Corzine is a good partner for the White House," Kaine told PolitickerNJ.com. "I think the governor's opponent is a guy who talks a good game but who's pretty empty ultimately with no economic experience."

Essex County Corzine Campaign Coordinator Leroy Jones, left, and Assemblyman Albert Coutinho (D-Newark) Thursday in the East Ward.

NEWARK - After months of mostly unobservable underground movements and five days in front of President Barack Obama's appearance at the Rock, there is evidence of effort on behalf of Gov. Jon Corzine in a city the governor needs to win amply in order to land another four years in office.
 
Of course, Democrats are leaning heavily on Corzine-Obama linkage.

In 2005, Corzine defeated Republican challenger Doug Forrester in Newark, 39,573 to 3,336, while carrying Essex County overall, 131,312 to 45,789 on his way to statewide victory.
 
By comparison, Obama punished Republican Sen. John McCain in Newark by a vote of 77,112 to 5,957 last year, as he carried Essex County, 240,127 to 73,975, recording a larger number of votes here than in any other county on his way to winning New Jersey by a 15% margin. 

"Certainly for Obama, people had a clear and distinguishable reason for coming out," says Essex County Democratic Party chairman Phil Thigpen. "Now, it's not as visible when you talk about quality of education or property taxes and you're a renter, for example. So we've got to jazz it up."

Pa. Governor Ed Rendell today in Asbury Park

ASBURY PARK - The event at the West Side Community Center appeared to lack coherence from the beginning, as operatives with furrowed brows tried to figure out how to get more people burrowed in, while headliner Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell sat in a sedan outside in the rain and Newark Mayor Cory Booker was MIA.

"I told him whenever he needed me, I'd be there," said Rendell, referring to an August conversation he had with Gov. Jon Corzine, who's deadlocked in his reelection bid with GOP gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie on the same day Corzine campaign manager Maggie Moran on "Power and Politics" for the first time blasted independent candidate Chris Daggett, who this past week inched up in a Rutgers-Eagleton poll to 20% behind the frontrunners' 36%.

Whatever the thrills provided last week by President Barack Obama and other Democratic Party luminaries, this particular rainy weekend campaign episode was not looking like the rally that would propel Gov. Jon Corzine into a second term on "the wheels of inevitability" described by Martin Luther King, Jr., in a favorite Booker quotation.

A poll of New Jersey voters taken three weeks before the 1968 presidential election had independent George Wallace with 14% of the vote, with Richard Nixon leading Hubert Humphrey by a 43%-38% margin.  Both parties agreed that Wallace was taking more votes from the Democrats than the Republicans. 

A Gallup poll conducted outside two New Jersey auto plants had Wallace getting 73% of the vote among 500 members of the United Auto Workers Union.  "Listen, the men in the plants want to zap the Negros by voting for Wallace.  It's that simple.  And I don't see how anyone can stop them," a UAW official told the New York Times in a quote that 41 years later appears rather incredible.

On Election Day, Nixon carried New Jersey by 61,261 votes, 46%-44%.  Wallace took 9%, less than where he was polling, receiving 262,187 votes.

Jon Corzine's campaign still won't confirm it, but U.S. Rep. Steve Rothman (D-Fair Lawn) says Obama will be back in New Jersey one more time.

"I think Obama's presence will help in New Jersey significantly.  He's coming back to New Jersey as well," said Rothman, who would only put the date as "before the election."

Getty Images Photo

HACKENSACK – Stumping for Gov. Corzine this evening, President Barack Obama took some direct shots at Republican gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie.

Obama said that Corzine “understood that Pre-K isn’t babysitting – it’s a ticket to a world class education” – a reference to a point Christie made in a Republican primary debate.

Christie's cam[aign today put out a web ad showing struggling New Jersey communities with inspirational Obama speech excerpts in the background, in which the President urges an end to partisan rancor.  Throughout the general election campaign, Christie has remained largely uncritical of the President, sometimes even highlighting cases where the two agree.  But the rhetoric from the president this evening was not mutual.

“Listening to Jon’s opponent, you’d think New Jersey was the only state swept up in the [economic crisis]” said Obama, who did not once mention Christie’s name in his 25 minute speech.  “There seems to be some selective memory about how we got into this fix.”

The last time Barack Obama was in New Jersey, he gave a shout out to Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy, calling him “the pride of New Jersey.”  That was July 16, the day five Jersey City police officers were shot in the line of duty.  Healy was also one of Obama’s leading New Jersey supporters in his bid for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination; he endorsed Obama while most of the state’s Democratic establishment was for Hillary Clinton.

Seven days after Obama’s visit, federal agents arrested a group of Hudson County politicians, some with close ties to Healy.  The next day, Healy acknowledged that he was the local official referred to in federal criminal complaints against Deputy Mayor Leona Beldini, political consultant Jack Shaw, and Edward Cheatam, a former city housing authority commissioner. 

Now, as Obama returns to New Jersey to campaign for the governor’s re-election, expect him to stay away from Healy.  Democratic sources say that the White House had some problems with at least one of the Hudson County politicians on a guest list Democrats submitted for a VIP meet and greet with the President.

Mayor Doug Palmer addresses guests at his fundraiser with, from left, Mercer County Executive Brian J. Hughes, Gov. Jon Corzine, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, former President Bill Clinton, and Palmer's wife.

TRENTON - A wounded county came out here tonight to get a glimpse of former President Bill Clinton before the Secret Service propelled him away - again - to some more voter-concentrated region of the state for what Democrats hope will be a pay dirt rally at Rutgers University.

"I knew you weren't here to see me," Mayor Doug Palmer told a crowd at his $150 fundraiser for his nonprofit Trenton First, over one of his shoulders stood Gov. Jon Corzine with two weeks to go in a dead-heat gubernatorial contest.

Over Palmer's other shoulder stood Clinton.

"God, he looks great, Clinton - so slim," said Assembly Majority Leader Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing).

"You're here to see the president," supplied Palmer with a smile and deafening war whoops filled the banquet hall here at the Marriott, a building Palmer helped bring to Trenton.

The mayor acknowledged Corzine at last, and threw in a "first and foremost" when introducing him. Corzine, it should be said, received raucous applause. 

Only six independent candidates have hit the five percent mark in New Jersey statewide elections.  Five of the six were running for President; only Murray Sabrin, the Libertarian candidate for Governor in 1997, was running for state office.

Only two independents made it into the double-digits in New Jersey: Theodore Roosevelt finished second with 34% against Gov. Woodrow Wilson (41%) and President William Howard Taft (21%); and  Ross Perot, in his 1992 presidential campaign, won 16% in a three-way race with Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush.  When Perot ran again in 1996, he received 9%.  John Anderson (1980) and George Wallace (1968), clearly on opposite sides of the political spectrum when they made third party White House bids, each won 8%.

U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch), center, in the crowd today with Assemblyman Joe Egan (D-New Brunswick), left, and Middlesex County Freeholder H. James Polos.

EDISON - Against a landscape of Middlesex County Democratic Party strife, Vice President Joe Biden this afternoon stumped for Gov. Jon Corzine, arguing the international context of the recession, which he said Republican candidate Chris Christie has tried to pin solely on Corzine.

"Jon has said he governed in tough times," said the vice president. "Let's give him the chance to govern in good times."

Deadlocked with Christie, according to most polls, Corzine's handlers want him to repeat a double-barrel message from here until Election Day two weeks from now: remind people that he acted early to blunt the impact of the recession, and that the pro-unon, pro-choice, anti-gun incumbent shares the values of most New Jersey voters. 

Biden was here to amplify that two-pronged argument.

"Isn't it great we have Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the White House?" Corzine asked the crowd. "Their values are our values, right?"