The Confession (18 page)

In the senate, I was a minority of one. Literally every other senator was enthusiastic about deregulation. “There is no question this will create competition,” Senator Joseph Kyrillos, the Republican cosponsor, told me. “Competition creates more companies, and more companies means more jobs. Jim, it's a win-win. Lower cost to the consumer and more jobs in the community.”

“That's bull,” I said. “Mrs. Smith doesn't want a menu of options to choose from. Mrs. Smith wants to know her toaster oven will work whenever she needs it. And she wants a fair price. That's what she's got now.” Besides, I said, “the multinational corporations will be running our utilities, Joe. Do you think that when my Little League team's playing in Woodbridge and the power browns out, somebody in Montreal is going to give a shit when I call up there?”

I couldn't get anybody to listen; the great mythos of competition was too alluring. Even the AFL-CIO fell into the chorus. Whitman's program passed with overwhelming support. Soon, our local utilities were controlled by a firm in Akron, Ohio, as I'd projected. And the alleged benefit to
consumers never materialized. Prices never went down—and to this day nobody has ever seen a menu of providers to choose from.

But something else happened that nobody had anticipated. Some of our utility companies split into several businesses, separating the physical plants from the transmissions firms, then selling off the plants. As we later discovered, they had used this sleight of hand to divest themselves of some extremely polluted pieces of property—increasing their profit margins while taxpayers had to pay to clean them up.

This was one time when I wish my colleagues had relied on pollsters and consultants. One or two phone calls, and they might have realized what Mrs. Smith was thinking.

 

AS THE YEAR PROGRESSED, I BEGAN GETTING COURTED BY STATE
Democratic Party officials urging me to consider running for governor against Whitman. It seemed quixotic. She had quickly become a towering national figure and an icon among women. Magazines like
Vogue
and
Mirabella
did big features on her; Newt Gingrich was touting her as VP material. In 1995 she was the GOP's choice to rebut Bill Clinton's State of the Union address, live on national television. She was the first Republican governor chosen for the job, and the first woman.

I wanted Kari to come back home and help me decide what to do, but the thought of another political campaign was revolting to her, and higher office terrified her. She told me she'd once overheard a radio shock jock making fun of Morag's name. “What kind of a person would ridicule a child?” she asked. Throughout the late summer of 1995, I implored her to return. I tried to convince her that we were just in a bad patch. “This is a long march,” I said. “Just hang on with me—we're going to get to the Promised Land.”

“Jim, it's about us. It's about how we chose to live our lives. I want to share my life with people who have the same value structure as I do. People who value decency, who value kindness, who value respect. We're not going through some dark and desolate night toward a new dawn, Jim. We're coming to a dark and desolate dawn.”

That's when I noticed that she'd taken all her things out of the house, and everything Agnes and Morag needed too.

“Jim, this isn't how I want to spend my life,” she finally told me a few months later. “Life's too short. I want to spend my life loving my family, living in a community that respects me.”

I tried everything to get them back. I cashed in my stock from Merck and put a down payment on an elegant home in town with a lawn and slate roof; I mailed pictures with a note that said, “I finally get it.” It didn't help. I flew to Vancouver to beg her, but she wouldn't let me stay in the house. As a husband and father, I knew I had failed.

Kari brought Morag back to New Jersey from time to time, but just for visits; their home was in Vancouver now. She never asked me to move to Vancouver with her, either. She knew I was too attached—desperately attached—to this life in New Jersey, this invention of mine.

NEW JERSEY IS THE NATION'S MOST URBAN STATE, THE DENSEST
in the country, squeezing 1,165 people into every square mile of land. No other state comes close. Even India, with 914 people per square mile, and Japan, with 835, have more elbow room. When Whitman became governor, with her promises to deregulate and cut big government, pressure intensified to put houses on every inch of soil. Not even the coastal wetlands were off-limits. We were quickly running out of open space. At the prevailing pace, urban planning experts warned that we could soon become the first fully built up state in the nation, unable to sustain even one more McMansion. Whitman had no interest in countering sprawl; it consumed farms at a remarkable pace, fifty acres every single day. Of course, not every part of the state was at risk. The estates owned by the wealthiest were immune to development pressures.

Unfortunately, pro-environment senators couldn't do anything about it. Most of us were Democrats. And being in the minority at the statehouse meant we were not able to get traction on any policy initiative. It was a terrific frustration to all of us, and to me especially—I'd been spoiled by my tenure on the assembly side, when we were still the dominant power. As a senator, I felt like I was just spinning my wheels. I supported efforts to roll back unplanned development, with no progress to show for it.

On top of our high real estate costs, we also had by far the highest property tax in the nation. For years the governor had administered a rebate program, sending homeowners a check for $500 or so each year to offset the exorbitant bill. We were stunned when Whitman cut that back—but then again, when it came to money, she just didn't get it. “Funny as it might
seem, five hundred bucks is a lot of money to some people,” she once told a reporter.

The governor didn't lift a finger to counter the one issue voters cited over and over in polls as the thing that made them angriest, and the first thing they wanted changed: exorbitant auto insurance rates. The literary critic Edmund Wilson once dismissed New Jersey as a “region that one traverses to get somewhere else,” namely Philadelphia or New York City. That's not my experience; small towns like Carteret are filled with families who have lived and worked there for generations. Yet of course New Jersey is also a drivers' state, crisscrossed by highways and commuters. Ironically, no other state is less friendly to drivers. In 1997, it cost the average driver $1,000 a year to insure her car. In Iowa, she would pay less than half that.

Whitman must have been aware of the problem. It had been raised by voters in every election for the last twenty years. A formal inquiry had determined that the high rates were due to fraud. In most states, people committing insurance fraud were prosecuted and thrown in jail. Not New Jersey. Instead, the costs were simply absorbed by the companies and passed along to customers—more than 15 percent of the price of every policy was fraud related. Whitman didn't increase prosecutions appreciably in her four years. Meanwhile, auto insurance went up on twelve separate occasions, and profits doubled. Communism was dead everywhere except Cuba and the New Jersey auto insurance market.

I thought:
A person could make a go at unseating Whitman just by running on auto insurance alone.

But I wasn't sure I wanted to be the one to do it. It was Paul Weiner, my law director, who first brought up the possibility in earnest, over breakfast with Ray Lesniak and Jack Fay one morning at the Reo Diner in Woodbridge. Of all the influential mayors, he pointed out, I had one of the highest approval ratings—I'd won my last reelection with 69 percent of the vote. He couldn't think of a better campaigner in the senate. “There's no guarantee you'll do well,” he said. “She's still pretty popular. But you know we can line up a sufficient number of counties to take the primary, unite the party, and run against her.”

Ray agreed. So did Jack, who was furious at Whitman. He let loose a
diatribe about how she wasn't fighting the nursing home industry, had even eliminated the Office of Public Advocate in a cost-saving move, removing the only interface most New Jerseyans had with their government. Even if she couldn't be beat, he liked the idea of taking her on.

“That's ludicrous,” I said. The Democrats were still in disarray after the Florio debacle. Even if I had any name recognition, which I didn't, I doubted they'd be able to back me in any effective way. There was sure to be a bitter primary, and I didn't relish the prospects of doing battle with other Democrats only to be trounced by Whitman. She was smart and telegenic; people were already talking about her as part of a potential Republican dream ticket with Colin Powell. And however dispirited New Jerseyans may have been, they weren't blaming the governor, at least according to polls. Whitman's favorability scores were still relatively high. Besides that, no mayor had ever been elected governor before, much less one from a politically inconsequential town like Woodbridge.

Paul heard me out. “What do you think your chances of being elected are?” he asked when I finally shut up.

I flipped over the placemat and drew a decision tree, handicapping the odds at each stage, from gaining the bosses' support to raising money to getting endorsements.

“Fifteen percent,” I said.

“Now what do you think your chances of being elected governor are if you don't run?” He had a point.

In Paul's view, I would come out smelling good even if I lost. Acquitting myself well in a primary battle would put me in a good position with the party leaders and improve my standing statewide. “And you'd be able to talk about issues that mean something to you. You're always complaining about the mayor's job being all about potholes.”

Subconsciously I scribbled on the placemat two words:
auto insurance.

 

BESIDES JACK, RAY, AND PAUL, I PUT TOGETHER A SMALL GROUP OF
advisers to look into the possibility: Gary Taffet, Mac McCormac, Kevin McCabe, and Joe Vitale, the Woodbridge Democratic Chair.

State campaign finance laws prevented Whitman from raising money for reelection until January, but we knew she already had a number of $500-a-plate fundraisers in the pipeline. Besides that, she had at her disposal a vast personal fortune, much of it inherited from her father, the financier and Republican stalwart Webster Todd. My bank accounts held less than $2,000.

I'd done fundraising before, several times, but raising money for a governor's race would be a different ballgame altogether, and another step deeper into the minefields of pay-to-play. Governors have less control over contracts than mayors or legislators, but they control the budgeting process, another key area of concern for contractors. So now the potential donors I was meeting with were hoping I'd put $2 billion aside for road construction; once the money was allocated, they'd go to the local level to secure the contracts to spend that money. I also had to start courting—and being courted by—a whole new class of interested contributors: major developers, industry lobbying groups, and the lawyers and contractors in their orbit. I held sympathetic meetings with groups representing small mom-and-pop pharmacists and groups representing the big chains; gave equal reassurances to the trial lawyers and the defense bar; listened empathetically as the Cemetery Association criticized the Funeral Directors, and vice versa—without ever revealing my personal sympathies. And I accepted donations from them all. Each, in some way, had major business with the state of New Jersey. The decisions I would make as governor would affect them all. I could only console myself that I was breaking no law in accepting their financial support, and trust that I and my staff would never allow the quid pro quo transactions to cross the lines of propriety.

We knew we were going to need a lot of money. By Jack's estimate, the primary alone would cost more than $3 million. One reason is that our state has none of its own broadcast media markets: To reach New Jersey voters with television ads, you've got to buy time on the expensive stations in New York or Philadelphia, buys that reach a lot of people who'll never get to vote for you. And TV is the only efficient way to get your name known in New Jersey. The newspapers in the state—the
Newark Star-Ledger
and the Gannett chain of small dailies, for instance—don't reach the whole state. Press conferences in the southern part of the state don't even get covered up north.

We hired a consultant, some high-flier from DC. She talked a big game about cultivating funders, but when she got down to brass tacks we started to worry. “First thing you do,” she said brightly, “is go through all your Rolodexes. Start with your relatives.”

Everybody howled. “Uncle Peter's a cop,” I said. “Uncle Herb is a crane operator in the union. What about Aunt Peggy? She gave me ten bucks for my first Holy Communion.”

Meanwhile, the
Star-Ledger
was running front-page pictures of Whitman, showing up in beaded gowns at exclusive events. My dad, who hadn't yet signed on to the idea of a campaign, was concerned. “Where are you going with this? You're facing Douglas MacArthur and you've got a pea shooter.”

The more I looked at Whitman's term as governor, though, the more convinced I was that we had an obligation to run against her. Her deep tax cuts had proved a major burden to the poor and working class, and a boon to the rich. Meanwhile, Whitman's government kept growing, despite her claim to being a small-government Republican. Even her own party leaders were furious when her budget grew past Florio's, and the size of the state workforce ballooned to almost 70,000 employees under her watch, with three times as many workers making over $70,000.

When a deficit began looming, Whitman responded with a reverse Robin Hood scheme, including a decision to raid the pension funds for state employees. This was absurd. New Jersey already had the lowest state pension payments in the country—1 percent of the salaries of covered employees versus a national average of 8 percent, according to one university report. Whitman argued that the booming stock market had overfunded the pension system, allowing the state to substantially reduce its contribution. The combined reductions came to about $3 billion, roughly the same amount she cut from the income tax.

In order to ensure big tax savings for the rich, Whitman was gambling with the future of our workers. Even Bob Littell, the Republican chairman of the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee, called the governor's actions “fiscally immoral.”

Even when she tried belt-tightening, her solutions were indefensible. Besides scrubbing the Office of the Public Advocate, Whitman abolished the
Higher Education Department—but the combined savings was only $6 million a year, and the move sent a terrible message of disregard to our young and old alike. She seemed to have no sympathy for the poor and working-class. She slashed the budget of our Division of Youth and Family Services, responsible for the well-being of our most vulnerable children, those in foster care. And she shaved state contributions to our public colleges system, where most underprivileged kids enroll, while simultaneously pushing up tuition fees there by 35 percent during her tenure. She was beginning to be greeted with hecklers at every commencement speech she gave.

“Maybe all we can do is aggravate her,” Jack said. “But shouldn't we
at least
aggravate her?” It wasn't only troublemaking that Jack had in mind. He thought a principled Democratic campaign was the best way to bring the party back from the Florio Aftermath, as he called it.

We made an appointment with Steve DeMicco and Brad Lawrence of the political consulting firm Message & Media to explore the possibility. They agreed that Woodbridge's economic success story would play well in a campaign. But would it translate to all corners of the state? To find out, they asked the top pollster in the field, Doug Schoen, to measure my name recognition—still nonexistent—and the resonance of my positions. It turned out that the concerns I'd noticed in Woodbridge were shared across the state, especially about auto insurance.

“Whitman's seen as somewhat out of touch,” Schoen reported back. “People still like her, but they aren't happy with the way New Jersey's heading. They see the social net disappearing, the budget growing out of control, and auto insurance—that's your big issue. People are pinned against a wall by their damned insurance payments.”

 

I TALKED A LOT ABOUT THESE DEVELOPMENTS WITH KARI ON THE
phone. She always listened graciously, but distractedly. I could tell she was glad to be away from it all. On the personal side, I was no longer begging her to come home to me, only to hold off divorce proceedings until I decided whether or not to run. There wasn't much to be worked out; neither of us was making significant money, and she wasn't asking for alimony, only child
support, so we easily agreed to a nominal amount. Whenever I had a chance to visit Vancouver I always bought things for Morag and Kari both. I wanted to make sure they were comfortable; that was always my aim.

So I was stunned one night when I got back to the Woodbridge condo and found a process server with a thick envelope from Kari's Canadian attorney. I knew immediately what it was. My hands trembled uncontrollably as I read through the motion. It was humiliating—something I'm sure the lawyer cooked up, the way lawyers do, trying to get a better deal. I was being accused of terrible things, the worst being that I had used Morag as a prop for my own political aims. “It appears to me that he is not concerned with Morag's best interests, but in only presenting a facade of a united family…in order to enhance his political career.” The words devastated me.

I sat down at the kitchen counter in my empty house and fell completely apart. I had been hanging onto a hope that we could still work through our differences. Now I was forced to face the truth, which was that I had destroyed my marriage and sacrificed my family. I had never failed at anything in my life, except love, and I couldn't find a way to accept this failure.