The Battle of Trenton

...With two months remaining, the question now is whether Schundler—trailing McGreevey by almost 20 points—can engineer another dramatic turnaround...

...The Franks campaign began to unravel when Schundler faced down a sputtering Franks in a debate on Sean Hannity's drive-time local radio program over Franks's claim that Schundler had raised property taxes in Jersey City by 79 percent...

...This situation gives an unusually prominent position to talk radio and print media—and among print media particularly to the New York Times, which is at least as influential as leading New Jersey papers such as the Bergen Record and Newark Star-Ledger...

...His early political speeches went on longer than a Bill Clinton State of the Union address, but they have shortened with each passing year...

...For the same reason, TV advertising is an expensive matter in New Jersey...

...McGreevey, respected by state Democrats for the race he ran in 1997, was expected to be the Democratic nominee...

...But Whitman was rewarded for her early support of George W. Bush with an appointment to head the Environmental Protection Agency, and her departure made DiFrancesco the acting governor...

...He has a record of appealing to minority voters—in his 1997 reelection, Schundler won 70 percent of the Hispanic vote—and to Democrats...

...Franks was a Trenton clubhouse product, like DiFrancesco...

...A stretch...

...On April 25, barely six weeks before the scheduled primary date, DiFrancesco threw in the towel...

...Since DiFrancesco's withdrawal, Halbfin-ger and the Times have turned their attention to setting the election agenda in articles with objective headlines such as "In Schundler, a Rallying Cry for the Right...

...Robert Torricelli entered the race...

...On September 6, faced with the prospect of a major adverse campaign issue for McGreevey, the legislature put the arena plan on hold...

...The Schundler camp has an interesting model: California 1966...

...Schundler, 42, is the youngest son of a New Jersey family of nine, a Harvard graduate with a picture-postcard family, and an articulate, telegenic spokesman for the full range of conservative causes...

...The second was the revelation that the state senator who chaired McGreevey's campaign had gotten nearly a million dollars in legal fees from Woodbridge during McGreevey's tenure as mayor...

...The seemingly innumerable Parkway tollbooths are a patronage trough, collecting a minute 35-cent toll at high cost and infuriating drivers...

...He gave up within weeks...

...The proposed arena would replace the current Meadowlands indoor sports facility, one of whose two main tenants is the New Jersey Nets, a basketball team controlled by the New York Yankees—hardly a charity case needing public funding...

...Once DiFrancesco appeared on the radar of the New York print media, scandals spewed forth like a gusher of toxic waste...

...The hope is that McGreevey, having committed himself to a front-runner's strategy based on low-profile issues and protecting his lead, will find it difficult to switch to an issue-oriented race if Schundler starts to close the gap between them...

...DiFrancesco is the archetypal insider from the bipartisan Trenton legislative clubhouse, at home with deals and patronage and opposed to anything that might rock the boat, such as a Schundler-sponsored educational choice plan that would have benefited poor children in Jersey City's abysmal public schools...

...This outpouring peaked with the revelation that DiFrancesco had been the subject of repeated, bipartisan charges of legal ethics violations when he moonlighted as his township's attorney at the same time he was Senate president...

...Whitman by then may have become the New York Timers favorite Republican—an extreme abortion rights advocate who moved steadily leftward after pushing the tax cuts that got her elected through the legislature—but her electoral base had soured on her...

...Schundler thereby has set himself himself against another Trenton-backed patronage boondoggle—one can envision real-life Tony Sopranos high-fiving each other at the contracting opportunities—and against tax subsidies for wealthy sports team owners...

...His chief issues are uncontroversial micro-subjects such as the reform of administrative law courts...

...It is much harder to make such a claim about his two victories in subsequent regular elections in 1993 and 1997, when he won 69 percent and 59 percent of the vote...

...Schundler's first victory in 1992, in a special election with 19 candidates, could be written off as a fluke in which voters did not realize they were casting a ballot for a Republican...

...Perhaps...

...BY JAMES HIGGINS In the good old days of American conservatism, young Reaganites imagined there would one day be a sort of apostolic succession from Ronald Reagan to Jack Kemp...

...The seat was expected to be an open one, with Whitman forced by term limits to leave office...

...Positioning himself as a reform mayor and centrist, McGreevey is running on such Clintonian bromides as "Recognize and respect New Jersey's diversity as a strength," and "Commit to ending racial profiling...

...He managed this in the Republican primary by advocating an abolition of tolls on the Garden State Parkway, a stand that might by itself have won him the nomination...

...The only VHF station in the state, Channel 9 in Secaucus, focuses on the New York market...

...The same polls that show McGreevey well ahead show that Schundler is still unknown to many voters...

...Instead, it sank DiFrancesco's career and served to remind voters both how smelly the Trenton establishment is and how little scrutiny legislators are subject to as they spend billions of taxpayer dollars...

...That would do serious damage to Democratic electoral arithmetic, since Jersey City is the second-largest city in the state, and normally one of the most Democratic...

...Nonetheless, Halbfinger has churned out more than a dozen articles using the words "Schundler," "abortion," and "gun" in just the last three months...

...In both cases Republican voters, over the objections of their party leaders, nominated candidates deemed too extreme to appeal to a sophisticated electorate, candidates who had little interest in the state capital status quo and a lot of interest in talking directly to voters of all political and personal hues...

...Halbfinger and the Times, well aware that New Jersey is a "blue" state that trended Democratic in the 1990s and went 56-40 for Al Gore last fall, have been unyielding in their efforts to focus voter attention on Schundler's support for Second Amendment rights and his opposition to abortion...

...She beat McGreevey by 26,000 votes in a year generally favorable to incumbents, while winning 100,000 fewer votes than in 1993...

...It turned out that Franks's calculation used as its base a year in which Schundler sold off delinquent tax obligations and gave Jersey City taxpayers a five-month tax holiday...

...The course of the New Jersey governor's race already rivals a Robert Ludlum novel for bizarre plot twists...

...McGreevey was clever enough to hammer at Whitman over high auto insurance rates—a perennial winner for challengers and headache for incumbents...

...This focus would be less curious if either candidate were emphasizing these issues...

...The two might as well have come from different planets...

...McGreevey faced no serious challengers for the Democratic nomination...

...And McGreevey is just beginning to receive the press scrutiny accorded a serious contender—which never happened when he ran in 1997...

...Now, a decade later, Schundler faces an uphill race for the governorship of New Jersey that will settle the question of whether his brilliant future lies ahead of or behind him...

...His campaign heavily emphasizes the words "work," "respect," and "values," and mentions the middle-class careers of McGreevey's parents and grandparents—cop, nurse, Marine Corps drill instructor—almost as often as the campaign mentions the candidate himself...

...But all of Schundler's previous races have been, too...

...When Kemp's star faded and Bret Schundler was elected mayor of Jersey City—a bright spot for conservatives in 1993, that bleak first year of the Clintons—some of those same hopes came to rest on the tax-cutting 34-year-old Wall Streeter, who like Reagan and Kemp had managed the trick of appealing to urban Democrats...

...Cockeyed optimism...

...Whether that presages a victory for McGreevey this year is no sure thing, since the 1997 race was run more as a referendum on Whitman than anything else...

...The trick for him will be to come somewhere near his mayoral vote totals in Jersey City...

...It showed...

...New Jersey politics is uniquely volatile because state politics receives almost no TV news coverage...

...Having achieved a 40-point reversal in the primary polls in less than eight weeks, the Schundler camp now believe that they can catch up with McGreevey by introducing Schundler to voters as a Trenton outsider, whose issues are big and popular: Besides the end of Parkway tolls and the Newark Arena, Schundler advocates teacher tenure reform, school choice, lower property taxes, and inflation-indexing of the state income tax...

...Pre-Schundler, Jersey City had a long, often embarrassing, and always Democratic political history, including decades of domination by Democratic thug Frank "I am the law" Hague...

...In the general election, he has come out against the legislature's looming approval, without a referendum, of a taxpayer-guaranteed sports arena in Newark...

...As Steve Forbes describes it, in Jersey City before Schundler "the newspapers had a stock headline: 'Mayor Indicted.' " Hague got away with it, but three other Schundler predecessors were term-limited by the criminal justice system...

...Lacking a positive agenda, Franks launched a series of ludicrous ads against Schundler, accusing him of being a crazed tax increaser and of raiding a children's scholarship charity to pay for campaign ads...

...There was one problem with this scheme: Franks...

...Neither is...

...And he had also won enormous goodwill by almost besting Jon Corzine, the ex-Goldman Sachs exec and epitome of what the French call La Gauche Caviar, who spent an amazing $63 million of of his own money— $42 per vote—to win his Senate seat...

...He ultimately had his sights set on Torricelli, who is widely disliked, facing a criminal investigation for alleged corruption, and up for reelection in 2002...

...To his credit, Franks endorsed Schundler without delay...

...As Labor Day approached, two public embarrassments hit the McGreevey campaign...

...Although the Republican gubernatorial primary this year was hotly contested, not until an hour after the polls closed did any TV station in the New York City market say a word about the primary...

...But Christie Whitman closed as large a deficit in less time in 1993 by calling for tax cuts...

...In a further show of evenhandedness and good sportsmanship, Republicans in the New Jersey legislature pushed the GOP primary back three weeks to give Franks time to organize and raise funds...

...The latter revelation is ominous for McGreevey because it undermines his efforts to portray himself as a reform mayor rather than as another clubhouse product...

...The attendant stature and publicity should have been a huge advantage...

...Schundler, for his part, has to hope that his talent for combining populist outrage with small-government issues will strike a chord with voters...

...Franks hadn't given much thought to Schundler or to becoming governor...

...Senate candidate and former congressman, Bob Franks, to run...

...McGreevey's real claim to the Democratic nomination is that he came within one percentage point of upsetting former governor Christine Todd Whitman in her 1997 reelection bid...

...An industrious press secretary for McGreevey would have to work hard to stay that diligently on message...

...Similarly, sound investigative reporting by David Halbfinger of the New York Times did much to finish off DiFrancesco...

...any candidate running statewide must buy time on stations that reach millions of viewers who don't vote in New Jersey...

...Torricelli might have been a formidable challenger, but the same flamboyant campaign finance practices that may win Tor-ricelli a federal indictment won him an ice-water welcome into the race...

...Schundler and New Jersey Senate president Don "Donnie" DiFrancesco expected to run against each other in the Republican primary...

...In that sense McGreevey has not really been tested in a tough statewide contest...

...Probably...

...At that point the Trenton establishment really went to work...

...The first was the disclosure that he had misled voters about where he went to college (leaving Middlesex County College, Catholic University, and Rutgers off his resume, to give the impression he spent four years at tonier Columbia...

...Schundler's opponent this year is Jim McGreevey, a former state legislator who is now mayor of Woodbridge, a city of some 95,000 residents three turnpike exits south of Jersey City...

...The bitter and tainted DiFrancesco still has not endorsed his party's nominee, though his refusal to endorse may well help Schundler more than an endorsement...

...James Higgins is a partner in a private equity Grm based in New York and is an adjunct Mow at the Claremont Institute...

...Then, in July 2000, Sen...

...Jersey City is a multiethnic melting pot, with only 6 percent registered Republicans...

...All of it backfired, and Franks's initial 26-point lead in the polls turned into a 14-point defeat in the June 26 primary...

...Rather than graciously acknowledging Schundler as the last man standing, they recruited their 2000 U.S...

...But it was, in effect, a one-candidate race...

...Schundler has not always been a perfect candidate...