Broken Promises, Part II
Is Jon Corzine going to get away with breaking the central promise of his 2005 New Jersey gubernatorial campaign??
I remember how the MSM beat up on George Bush in 2001 for breaking his “promise” to regulate greenhouse gases. What the media called a Bush “promise” and “pledge” was a one line statement by Bush at some 2000 press conference. He never mentioned it anyplace else and greenhouse gases were never a main theme in the Bush campaign, but the Bush hating media never cut him any slack, calling him a liar and campaign promise breaker.
The difference here is that the “40 in 4″ pledge was a central theme of the Corzine campaign. He even attacked Doug Forresters “30 in 3″ plan as financially unsound while pushing his own plan as more achievable. The Corzine campaign promise was based on the higher property tax rebates in 2004. Instead, his proposed rebates are based on the lower 2005 rebate numbers. Now that it’s time to back up his talk, the governor is taking a pass.
With a straight face, Corzine said: “To those who thought my financial background would mean I had some magic bullet in my holster to balance the budget …” Hey, the electorate got that idea from you!. Corzine portrayed himself as some kind of super business guru, uniquely gifted to tackle New Jersey’s budgetary disaster. Apparently pushing paper around at Goldman Sachs and making millions during the go-go 1990’s stock market wasn’t exactly due to any special business and economic talent that Corzine possessed.
Will he get away with it?? The cynical me says he will, thanks to a largely sypathetic media that will mostly apologize for the governor, a New Jersey electorate that is basically uninformed and apathetic and a NJ republican party that is without fresh ideas and unable to compete financially with a democrat party flush with pay to play cash.