PACKET EDITORIAL, Sept. 12
By: Packet Editorial
Sleeping with the air conditioning off and the windows open isn’t the only sure sign that fall has arrived in the Princeton area.
There are real signs of life on the shady side of Nassau Street. Freshmen arrived last week, classes start this week, the fall sports season is well under way and the long lines are back at Hoagie Haven, the Carousel, Small World and other off-campus hot spots.
At Princeton High School, students are roaming around unfamiliar hallways, looking for renumbered classrooms, trying to figure out how they all managed to fit for so many years into that old outsized structure on Moore Street. In Montgomery and West Windsor-Plainsboro, the roads are jam-packed in the morning and afternoon with a steady stream of school buses but still not enough to keep angry parents from calling or showing up at the central office to complain about the ones that ran late, or never showed up.
With summer vacations over, the university back in full swing and various street and road construction projects far from finished, traffic all across the area has slowed to an all-too-familiar crawl and finding a parking spot in downtown Princeton is once again an adventure that requires just the right blend of unbridled tenacity and unlimited patience.
The new TV season is getting started and, with it, the advertising campaigns for what is shaping up, even by New Jersey standards, as a particularly nasty U.S. Senate race. Democrat Robert Menendez and Republican Thomas Kean Jr. may both be respectable, qualified, competent candidates to represent the Garden State in Washington but for the next two months, we’ll be deluged with information, much of it manufactured and misleading, that will have the predictable effect of convincing large numbers of us not to vote for either of them.
Closer to home, the rhetoric is starting to heat up in Montgomery, where the Republicans, hoping to pick up a seat on the Township Committee, are blaming the 4-1 Democratic majority for runaway spending and high property taxes. The Democrats, hoping President Bush’s unpopularity will trickle all the way down to the local level, will be working hard to tighten their hold on the governing body to 5-0.
In West Windsor, where the form of government is nonpartisan and elections are normally held in May, a special election this November appears likely to generate a spirited campaign. Barbara Pfeifer, who was appointed to the council in the spring and is supported by Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh, will face at least one challenger, William Anklowitz, who also sought that appointment, and now appears poised to mobilize his supporters (and the mayor’s detractors) for a full-fledged fall campaign.
Princeton Borough, Princeton Township and Plainsboro will evidently be spared this rite of autumn, as no Republicans filed to run for any of the offices up for grabs in November. But in tiny Rocky Hill, no fewer than four candidates three of whom now serve on the Borough Council are running for mayor, and at least three hopefuls (and possibly more; the deadline for getting on the general election ballot hasn’t yet passed) are vying for two seats on the council. It won’t be long before signs of the season start sprouting on lawns all over Rocky Hill expressing a sentiment other than opposition to Wawa.
So, as we head into mid-September, those lazy, hazy, hot and humid summer days are gone replaced by a renewal of activity in the region and a welcome chill in the air. Over the next couple of months, however, look for the political climate to turn unpleasantly icy.

