As I write this, the general election in New Jersey is six days away and the winner in the highly contentious 12th Legislative District Senate race between incumbent Democrat Ellen Karcher and Republican challenger and current Assemblywoman Jennifer Beck has not been decided.
This was a high-priority race for the state Democrats trying to hold on to their majority in the Senate. As a result, it had the dubious distinction of having more money thrown at it than almost any other legislative race in the state’s history.
According to an article in The New York Times last week, the state Senate Democratic Majority, which raises funds for party candidates, had handed Karcher $1.7 million and the state Democratic Party sent her another $223,155. Of that nearly $2 million war chest, she spent the lion’s share of it on radio and television ads attacking Beck.
For her part, Beck raised between $295,000 and $341,969, depending on which article that came out in two different daily newspapers on the same day you accept. She’s spent most of her money on radio and television ads attacking Karcher.
If you watched any of those ads – and you would have had a difficult time escaping them – you might not know where either candidate stands on issues like property tax reform (the No. 1 priority for most voters), but you’d likely know that Karcher gets a tax break on some property where she sells the occasional Christmas tree, and Beck had her driver’s license suspended at least three times in the 1990s for dumb oversights like failing to appear in court to answer a minor traffic ticket.
Does that mean Beck would not have made a good senator?
I don’t know, but I think the fact that Beck got absolutely no laws passed in her first term in the Assembly is a better indicator of how effective she would be in the Senate (although some, like me, have suggested with tongue in cheek that a lawmaker who makes no law is, by definition, the perfect legislator).
Does Karcher’s acceptance of the farmland tax credit mean she’s too unethical to be re-elected to her position in the Senate (she still pays the full-boat property tax burden on her home, to the tune of about $25,000 a year)?
I don’t know, but I think the fact that she’s taken so much money from people and organizations that will obviously expect something in return is a better indicator of whose interests will be her priority as a senator. Her priority won’t be serving the interests of poor, working-class stiffs who desperately need property tax reform, and you can quote me on that. It’ll be her bosses in the party, who bankrolled her campaign. She’ll jump whichever way they tell her to jump. If you want to be represented by someone who votes her own mind, kind of a rebel, you won’t be happy with Ellen Karcher because she owes too much to too many to do any serious boat rocking.
Frankly, I’m disappointed in both of them, and I sure don’t blame voters in their district who say they ought to be ashamed of themselves for dragging the campaign to such a bitter and superficial level at a time when there are so many important problems to be solved.
I don’t expect this kind of campaigning to change any time soon, however, because negative advertising obviously works. If it didn’t, we’d never see an ad on television like that parking ticket monstrosity. We’d see ads where candidates tried to define themselves on the issues, that didn’t treat us like we’re a bunch of buffoons who aren’t smart enough to understand the differences between Republican and Democratic platforms.
So, in the final analysis, we only have ourselves to blame.
Until the day that voters stand up and demand that candidates campaign on the issues; until the day we say that unless the candidates eschew negative attack advertising, we’ll write in a vote for Daffy Duck as protest; until the day we vow to shun any candidate who drags the campaign into the mud with the other grubby pigs, things ain’t gonna change in the least.
Thomas Jefferson once said that people get the government they deserve, and it’s one of the few statements that great man made with which I’ve got a beef. I think the voters of this state deserve more from their candidates than superficial, negative campaigns. I think we deserve more from those people once they’re elected to office than inaction, ineffectiveness and toeing the party line.
We just need to stand up and demand what we deserve. And if they won’t meet our demands, we need to throw the bums out and find us a new bunch who will. • • • Say what you want about Marlboro Mayor Robert Kleinberg, who likes being in the spotlight more than Paris Hilton, but the lawsuit he filed on behalf of the township in U.S. District Court against corrupt former officials and developers to recoup what their cumulative misbehaviors cost the town is one of the most interesting developments in ages. We had a story about the suit in the Oct. 31 edition of Greater Media’s publication the News Transcript, and it makes good reading. I suggest you check it out (www.gmnews.com).
I don’t know if Kleinberg and the township have any chance of winning, or recovering one thin dime, but you have to give them credit for moxy.
Kleinberg’s detractors naturally say the whole thing was a political stunt to help him win re-election against Democratic newcomer Jon Hornick, and they might have been right to an extent. But even so, there’s a part of me who thinks it’s time we started trying to make some of the corrupt politicians and hangers on around here pay for their transgressions beyond the penalties the courts hand out.
These crooks made decisions that were to their own financial benefit, decisions that will have a negative impact on the township for generations. I think it’s only fitting that people like Kleinberg and the township do everything in their power to make the crooks’ lives miserable as well.
No matter the outcome of the court case, I think we ought to give the Marlboro folks a high-five for filing it. They might be tilting at windmills, but at least they’re armed, mounted and on the field.
Gregory Bean is executive editor of
Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach
him at [email protected].