In New Jersey the incumbent governor is leading, in part because a pervasive cynicism that he helped create has crippled his opponent’s ability to be believed. In Virginia, the campaign is clattering down the yellow brick road to Oz. In both states the campaigners seem to assume that the voters think like this: Because little good can be expected from government, we should just concentrate on getting governors who do not make us uncomfortable.
In 1989 Jim Florio, then in his eighth term in Congress, won New Jersey’s governorship, saying he saw no need for new taxes. Once in office he immediately claimed to see a $2.8 billion need, and inflicted such an increase. His popularity plunged below 20 percent and two years later the voters’ vengeance produced veto-proof Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. But the Republican Party became a victim of this vengeance, looking feckless when it could not bring itself to cut spending enough to permit repeal of most of Florio’s increases. In 1990 seething New Jerseyites had vented their fury about Florio against Sen. Bill Bradley, who seemed agnostic about the tax increases. He barely survived the challenge of an underfinanced novice, Christine Todd Whitman, whose 47 percent of the vote was higher than her name recognition on election eve. On the basis of that, this year she became Florio’s opponent, in which role she has resembled the old man of Thermopylae/who never did anything properly.
Opposing repeal of a particular tax deduction, she said, “Funny as it may seem, $500 is a lot of money to some people.” She did not vote in a local school election that ended in a tie. Explaining why she had not voted in 10 previous school elections. she said she should not be “telling them how to run those schools” because her children attend private schools. She let Florio get to the right of her on crime (toughness regarding drunk drivers and assault weapons) and welfare. Florio proposed to curtail welfare for unwed mothers who will not identify the fathers of their children. When Whitman denounced this as “right wing,” Florio must have swooned with gratitude.
These and numerous other Whitman pratfalls might not have mattered so much if she had been able to change the subject. But when she tried to do so with a well-crafted proposal for cutting taxes 30 percent. she ran smack into the crowning irony of this campaign: Partly because of Florio’s tax increase, public cynicism, which is at flood levels everywhere, has burst all the dikes in New Jersey. There people assume that all politicians’ promises are too perishable to merit noticing. Her tax plan has a serious intellectual pedigree and is comparable in scale to conservative budget proposals implemented by former governor Du Pont in Delaware and by Governors Engler of Michigan and Weld of Massachusetts, all Republicans. But by now New Jersey voters believe politicians are unbelievable, and they may feel more comfortable with Florio’s tiresome flaunting of his blue collar background than with someone who they think has perhaps been too comfortable.
Florio’s revival results partly from grudging appreciation of a politician who did something unpopular, and from the voters’ failure to connect what he did with the collapse of job creation in New Jersey, which in four years has lost 277,000 jobs while the nation has gained 3.2 million. But Florio also has benefited from the public’s disdain his behavior has deepened. The disdain causes ad hominem advertisements to displace debate.
In Virginia, Republican George Allen, a former state legislator and congressman (he lost his seat to redistricting), has come from 29 points behind to lead Mary Sue Terry, the attorney general. The issues of crime and spending matter: Allen talks of abolishing parole, and he makes much of the fact that during the last 12 years of Democratic governors Virginia’s spending has risen faster than federal spending and faster than the personal income of Virginians. But both the Terry and Allen campaigns are emphasizing the politics of personal discomfort.
Terry is unmarried, and one vociferous Allen supporter, the reckless Oliver North, himself a candidate next year for the U.S. Senate, intones that the governor’s mansion should be “where a man and his wife live with the laughter of their children.” Allen’s constant verbal and pictorial references to his family are like a steady diet of fudge: cloying.
Terry tries to portray Allen as an extremist because he is supported by Pat Robertson. Democrats note darkly that the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor is a fundamentalist who believes in home schooling, is pleased that his 18-year-old daughter has never had a date, and was the lawyer for a Tennessee family that objected to schools using, among other books, “The Wizard of Oz” because of its references to magic. A Democratic television commercial features a snippet from the movie and suggests that Republicans want to banish Dorothy. (When Calvin Coolidge shook hands with a woman, saving, “Hello, I’m lieutenant governor of Massachusetts,” the woman asked, “What do you do?” He replied, “I just did it.”)
The politics of guilt-by-association is risky for Terry. She is tainted by the spectacle of the state’s two leading Democrats, Sen. Chuck Robb and Gov. Douglas Wilder, who for years have been in an eye-gouging fight. Jeffersonian Virginians believe we should not have much government but it should have a modicum of dignity. Perhaps this, and the opportunity to increase the voters’ discomfort level concerning Terry, tempted Allen to engage in an undignified bit of sensitivity grandstanding. When, during a debate, Terry said her education program would help children “have a Chinaman’s chance at graduation,” Allen called this “inappropriate” and “offensive” and “insensitive.” Now that’s boring.
