Governor Jon Corzine has never lacked confidence. After making his name and fortune on Wall Street by taking Goldman Sachs, once one of the world's oldest and richest private investment partnerships onto the open market, Corzine boldly entered New Jersey politics not by paying his dues on party committees or in the State Assembly but by sinking about $62 million* of his own money into a race for a seat in the United States Senate in 2000. He spent $33 million in the primary alone beating back former failed Governor and South Jersey crook Jim Florio.
He won, but it wasn't enough. A year before his Senate term was complete, Corzine hijacked the Democratic Party's nomination for governor from Richard Codey, the popular State Senate president who took over when the disgraced Jim McGreevey resigned in August 2004.
Corzine got the governor's nod the way he got into the Senate race: by telling party leaders they had a simple choice. They could back him, a rich man who could pay his own way, or they could back their own hack and go around the state begging for money. It's no wonder Corzine became such a confident operator. He might not be the best retail politician, but he knew he was buttering his own bread and so his position was safe, at least within the Democratic party.
But yesterday, a short three months away from facing voters in a referendum on his administration, Governor Corzine did not look so good. He looked a little pale. He looked a little shellshocked.
It was bound to be so. Earlier in the day, the F.B.I. swept through his home county and arrested dozens of public officials, including the mayor of his hometown, Hoboken.
Worse, the feds roughed up someone in whom Corzine had trusted a lot: Joe Doria, the former mayor of Bayonne and Corzine's director of the state Department of Community Affairs. Although Doria avoided arrest, F.B.I. agents raided his home and his Trenton office.
This explains why Corzine was so shattered at his press conference. The purpose of it was to tell the world he had asked Doria to resign, and that Doria had complied.
The Department of Community Affairs is easily the most important part of the state government. New Jersey is a state of municipalities; 566 of them to be exact, each one believing it is the wellspring of sovereignty on its land. The tradition of "home rule" in Jersey is deep and abiding. The Department of Community Affairs is the fruit of the bargain between the conflicting prerogatives of the state government and the myriad of municipalities.
The department is responsible for ensuring that local ordinances do not conflict with state law; in return, it is responsible for doling out billions in state aid to the hundreds of local governments. The state aid is essential to many of the towns' budgets. As such, it receives a rather large and tasty pie to divide, and the fact that the U.S. government saw fit to raid the offices of the man ultimately responsible for the division is a problem Corzine's wealth cannot avoid. It is unclear exactly what Doria is suspected of, but it cannot be good.
Doria represents everything that has been wrong with Corzine's tenure. Four years ago, the governor ran on the clever slogan, "Unbought and unbossed!" A more accurate rendering would be, "Unbought and unbossed; I bought off the bosses!"
Corzine is too rich to need envelopes of cash. If he desires the uncommon feeling of power derived from handling such envelopes, he can nearly cash out some of his vast holdings.
But as a politician, Corzine took the easy way out. His main appeal to the party establishment, since he first ran for Senate, was that he could finance his own campaigns. In this way he was able to avoid the ugly taint of pay-to-play arrangements that made former Governor McGreevey's administration more of a commodities exchange for government contracts than an actual government.
But a strength can be a weakness. By sidestepping the ugly realities of New Jersey politics, Corzine quietly came to terms with them. Since he never had to make the decision himself whether he would sell out to a developer waving cash in his face, it seems it became easier for Corzine to avoid judging the matter altogether. And so, though it's true he's unbought and unbossed, many of the men and women he came to terms with in the state Democratic party were not. Such is Joe Doria.
* Number updated. I wrote $50 million; it was much more. [7-27]
D.C.
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