Memo to Doug Forrester: If you want to beat gazillionaire Jon S. Corzine in the November gubernatorial elections, hire yourself a guy in a chicken suit to stand outside Corzine’s campaign headquarters with a funny sign.
Since you’re a multimillionaire yourself and can afford it, get a whole darned flock of giant chickens. Voters apparently respond to them.
At least that’s what Edison’s Jun Choi learned last week when he surprised nearly everyone in Middlesex County by tromping longtime Mayor George Spadoro to win the Democratic primary for mayor in that town.
Choi, who seemingly came out of nowhere to beat 12-year veteran Spadoro like a rented mule, had tried to run an issues-oriented campaign talking a lot about development, education and higher taxes. But the emotional highlight of his effort came a couple of weeks ago when Spadoro was ducking a debate and Choi had a buddy dress up in a chicken suit and stand outside city hall with a sign saying Spadoro was too chicken to face his opponent from behind a podium.
As lots of people around town — including Spadoro himself — told the Sentinel, one of Greater Media’s newspapers, you just have to laugh at a giant chicken.
And it looks like Edison voters carried some of that goodwill toward Choi to the polls, giving him a winning margin of more than 1,000 votes against a powerful and entrenched opponent who had become increasingly arrogant and inaccessible, except for that time he allegedly saved a dog from a fire and sent press releases to every news organization in the state bragging about it.
Now, it looks like Spadoro, come November, will have plenty of time to think about where he went wrong, and what happens to politicians who start thinking they don’t need to communicate with their constituents anymore.
To mutilate the poet John Donne:
“Never send to know for whom the chicken crows: Spadoro, it crows for thee.”
***
And speaking of sore losers …
Voters in the Republican primary election to see who’ll represent the 13th District in the New Jersey Assembly against the Democratic contenders this November gave longtime incumbent Joe Azzolina the boot and presented a decisive victory to Monmouth County Freeholder Amy Handlin and Assemblyman Sam Thompson.
The portents have been in the wind since the last election, when Azzolina came in dead last on his home ground of Middletown and barely held on to his seat, but apparently Azzolina and his team were among the few who could not accept a foregone conclusion.
Voters in the district, who’d had about
enough of Azzolina’s campaign antics — trashing members of his own party in the last election and forcing a divisive primary in this one, and using his influence as a politician and newspaper owner to push the Town Center, his family’s proposed mall — told him, “Thanks, but no thanks,” when it came to another term.
Of all the communities in the district, in fact, Azzolina only beat Handlin in three — Keansburg, Old Bridge and Union Beach. The two came to a virtual tie in Keyport, with Handlin winning by a single vote.
Handlin, meanwhile, won clear victories in Aberdeen, Hazlet, Holmdel, Matawan and Middletown.
Thompson, for his part, led the field.
Given Azzolina’s long-running support from voters in the 13th, you might have expected some graciousness in defeat, but that was too much for Joe.
On election night, when it became clear he’d lost, Azzolina told the Asbury Park Press he would not make a concession call to Handlin because “she put out a dirty [campaign] piece at the end.”
“I am not going to forget,” he told the reporter.
He was referring, in part I suspect, to information in this column the week before last that Handlin — in an effort to explain part of the animosity against her by the Courier, the Bayshore newspaper owned by Azzolina — revealed that its publisher, Jim Purcell, had applied for the position of director of public information in Monmouth County, and speculated that his personal vendetta stemmed from the fact that Handlin had torpedoed his job application.
According to Handlin, Purcell had even threatened that, unless he got the job, he’d make sure he got his “pound of flesh” from her in the campaign against his
incumbent boss.
Purcell denied that charge and defended his brand of journalism, but Joe still seems intent on evening the score.
Keep in mind that the “dirty campaign piece” Azzolina is so upset about came the very week that Purcell’s column in the Courier — one of several he wrote excoriating Handlin and promoting Azzolina — was headlined “Amy Handlin: Fraud reformer, insider and sellout.”
As it usually is when trying to translate the Courier’s twisted prose, it isn’t clear whether Purcell thought Handlin was a person trying to reform fraud in the state or a reformer who’s a fraud.
Still, it’s pretty clear that the publisher of the Courier, a publication that is Azzolina’s bought-and-paid-for mouthpiece, thought Handlin was basically political vermin.
Since it’s now water under the bridge, I won’t repeat any of the awful things Purcell had to say about Handlin over the course of months, but I do have a question.
If what appeared in Azzolina’s own newspaper disparaging Amy Handlin can’t be considered a “dirty campaign piece” or “dirty campaign pieces,” what can?
I’m not even going to get into the dirty tricks against Handlin and Thompson perpetrated by Union County political operative and newspaper publisher Jim Devine, whose deceptions and vitriol against Handlin were completely beyond the pale, even for New Jersey politics. Azzolina has not been tied directly to that nastiness, even though there are plenty of noses around the district that smell something fishy.
A variation on an old adage certainly applies in this instance, however: Dirty is as dirty does.
And even absent a guy in a chicken suit to remind them, voters apparently aren’t willing to forget that either.
Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers.