You know just how far state Sen. Barbara Buono (D-Middlesex) has to go in her gubernatorial run against Chris Christie when the guy who runs the prestigious Quinnipiac University Polling Institute asks, “Who is that woman?”
As of March 29, Buono was the only candidate to throw her hat into the ring to run against the popular governor in the June 4 primary elections, although there may be more by the time this sees print. And all of them will have the same elephantine problem — running against a governor who enjoys an approval rating that hovers between 70 and 74 percent. According to a Quinnipiac poll, 79 percent of voters don’t know enough about Buono to have an opinion about her, while at least 29 percent of voters in her own party say they support Christie. If a vote for our next governor were held today, those polls say Christie would lead by 60 percent to Buono’s paltry 25 percent of people who identified which candidate they prefer.
Which was what led Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, in an interview last week with The Star-Ledger, to ask the question posed at the start of this column. “Everybody knows Christie and hardly anyone knows Sen. Barbara Buono, even though she’s running an energetic, endorsement-rich campaign,” he said.
Here in Middlesex County, we’ve known Buono for a long time. She served in the General Assembly from 1994 to 2002, and moved to the state Senate in 2002. She’s won all of her elections by handy margins, especially in her Senate races, where she beat her Republican opponents like rented mules.
So with her history of winning every race she’s run since 1994, you have to ask yourself why she’d volunteer to be the Democrats’ sacrificial lamb against Christie in 2013. Despite some impressive endorsements, she’s way behind Christie when it comes to the money she’d need to establish that name recognition (he has about $5 million in the bank at this point, and she has about $1 million, thanks to state matching funds, which Christie declined), and few people give her a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.
So, if she’s not a masochist or suffering delusions of grandeur, what’s the deal? My guess is that she’s playing the long game. Running, and even losing to Christie in 2013, would at least introduce her to voters at the statewide level, which will come in handy if she decides to enter the Democratic primary in four years when Christie limits out.
Seventy-nine percent of voters may not know enough about Buono to have an opinion about her at this moment, but stay tuned. She won’t win in 2013, but she’ll be back.
Don’t know if you caught it, but last week a study published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia ranked New Jersey 48th out of 50 states when it comes to personal freedom — beating out only New York (where Mayor Mike Bloomberg likely tipped the scale) and California. When I first heard about the study, I thought, “Yeah, that’s about right.” New Jersey, after all, is the state where you can be arrested for carrying a Swiss Army knife, and every week there’s a new law designed to keep us from hurting ourselves, or each other. You can’t keep up with them, so many of us have to live by the rule of thumb that says, “If it’s fun, it’s either regulated or illegal, so be careful.”
But upon a bit of investigation, it turns out that our state’s low personal-freedom ranking might be a bad thing, or a good thing, depending on your perspective. High taxes limit personal freedom, and the fact that New Jersey imposes the highest property and state taxes in the nation contributed to its low ranking. I think we’d all agree that our astronomically high taxes are a bad thing. We’d also probably agree that our share of the state’s debt — about 21.1 percent of income — and the fact that our state pays way more to the federal government than it gets back in grants and subsidies are bad things that limit our personal freedom to keep more of the money we earn for ourselves.
But the study also said that New Jersey’s gun laws — the most restrictive in the nation, but supported by most of the state’s residents — contributed to its low showing, as did its prohibition of talking on a cell phone and texting while driving; its random sobriety checkpoints; and its relatively restrictive marijuana laws. And those, depending on your perspective, are either bad things or good things.
The state with the most personal freedom? North Dakota — where everyone talks like Lawrence Welk, but can apparently do whatever they darned well please.
File this one under “Frightening Information”: According to a study by University of California/San Francisco urologist Herman Singh Bagga, about 17,616 men wound up in emergency rooms between 2002 and 2010 because they caught their manly parts in their zippers. According to Bagga, this is the single most common cause of injury to this particular appendage (accidents with appliances rank near the top), and it can be serious, leading, he said, to intense pain, infections and (cringe!) surgical interventions. “It can completely ruin your night,” he said.
Bagga said he wanted to conduct the study because, while there is a “developing body” of literature on how to free trapped appendages using everything from screw drivers to wire cutters (I’m not making this up!), many emergency room physicians don’t expect this particular injury, and don’t familiarize themselves in proper zipper-accident procedure. Helpful hint: Be gentle and don’t struggle. “Nobody ever looked at it,” he said, apparently not intending a double entendre. “Our goal was to highlight the real incidence.”
I’m sure our New Jersey Assembly members and senators will be trying to think up new legislation to protect us men from this zipper menace as soon as they hear about this troubling study, but I’ve got a common-sense solution that ought to solve the problem entirely: button-fly jeans. Also, according to Bagga, wearing underwear helps.
Gregory Bean can be reached via email at [email protected].