The NA710N

Barack Obama really is a miracle-worker: he has managed to turn the armpit of America into its navel. All eyes were on New Jersey yesterday as Garden State voters got their first chance to vote out the worst governor of the past two decades and trade him in for either a Bush Administration lap dog or a doe-eyed idealist with no experience in government. The options, considering it was New Jersey, were better than ever.

From the media’s perspective, there is rarely a reason to take more than a peek at our state. New Jersey voters keep electing despicable characters whose careers inevitably end in such low places as disgraced exile, Trump Resorts, or the White House. The story rarely changes, and when it does, it never seems to take a turn for the better. Yesterday’s race did not seem to be heading in any more of a positive direction, but unlike most races since the Whitman governorship, it seemed to be the first in which the Republican Party of New Jersey had what appeared to be a heartbeat before the polls closed.

As a cynic, I predicted that Republican heartbeat to come out stillborn, not because the people of New Jersey would not prefer literally any person/place/inanimate object as governor than Tax Fiend Scrooge McDuck, but because I do not believe in the New Jersey electoral system. I have no qualms about stating outright that I do not believe the New Jersey electoral system is clean and represents the true will of its citizens. And no, I have never had too much of a problem with the fact that thousands of votes are regularly cast from Flower Hill Cemetery. I grew up in Hudson County, a place that rears politicians that make Rod Blagojevich look like Abraham Lincoln, and not just because of the Illinois connection. It may be difficult for a person who has never lived here to comprehend the precise depths into which this insidious culture has seeped. It is the burial place of choice for former NJ governor Brendan Byrne, “so I can remain active in politics.” Party or ideology or even candidates’ resumes do not define our politics: towns compete over the most embarrassing ethics scandals on the campaign trail. Is it bribery, extortion, or sexual harassment today?

The worst part of all this is that Hudson County residents are not phased by this but, rather, they take a certain pride in living in a regime that resembles something out of 1980s Latin America. It’s the kind of place where Jim McGreevey’s approval ratings went up when he admitted to paying his male lover a $100,000+ salary for a job he was not qualified for, and Jon Corzine’s went up when he shifted campaign gears from highlighting his interest in the wellbeing of New Jersey to his opinion that Chris Christie is fat. In this atmosphere, an election where only living individuals get one and only one vote is simply inconceivable. The shock of the night was not that Christie pulled out an election against one of America’s least popular incumbents; it was that said incumbent did not fraudulently keep his position.

Despite my disapproval of Christie’s shady attitude regarding tax increases and inhuman position on same-sex marriage, I can’t help but be pleasantly surprised by the fact that I was wrong about the Corzine camp’s seediness. I overestimated the power of the Democratic political machine, both local and federal. It is a dunce cap I will wear gladly and, at least, not alone. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece entitled “Chris Christie’s Next Case: ‘Who Stole My Election?’”, in which they state that among the flood of 180,000 absentee ballots the state electoral board experienced for this election, the number of questionable ballots could be enough to push Corzine over the edge. There were mixed reports as to the presence of ACORN in recruiting new voters via absentee ballot. When the state operates with a standard level of corruption background noise, rising above that volume to garner media attention the way these reports did raises a huge red flag. Perhaps the reports caught enough of the public’s eye to make the fraud impossible to execute without getting caught.

Thankfully for the Republicans, whether their victory suggests a streamlined voting process or merely that the Democrats chickened out from stealing the election, matters little. A party that was in complete shambles this time last year has risen like a phoenix from the cold, dead ashes of Sarah Palin’s political career through no real work of their own. Michael Steele will be happy with the results, but it would be disingenuous for him to take any credit for them. His poor handling of the situation in New York’s 23rd district sent yet another Democrat to Congress, and his two wins tonight were the Democrats’ races to lose. What this means for Republicans pales in comparison for what it means to the Democrats.

The race in Virginia never left the realm of predictability, and a Republican governorship down there will have little impact on the national morale of the Democratic Party, even if the seat they lost belonged previously to their party’s current chair. It is the race in New Jersey that has left the most egg on the face of the Obama administration, all because the President himself chose to make of it a milestone of his first year in office. He took time out of his schedule to campaign for Corzine at several highly publicized rallies. He starred in a Corzine campaign ad. He posed for photos. He left no stone unturned to make of the election the most important political event of the season that did not involved health care reform, perhaps to distract the spotlight from that legislative failure. Unfortunately for President Obama, he succeeded. Every major national news station spent last night hovering over the Garden State in anticipation of the election results, waiting to see how they could pin this to the health of the national party on the anniversary of Obama’s election. MSNBC tried unsuccessfully to shrug the loss off. Fox News gloated. There were too many people talking simultaneously on CNN to be able to tell what they thought about anything. Ultimately, though, the question was universal: what does the loss of an insanely wealthy Democratic incumbent like Corzine mean for the political capital of Barack Obama? The few who dared to answer the question did not have good news for the White House.

A year removed from the victory of the hyper-liberal Obama movement, America finds itself on the cusp of a conservative revolution based in traditional morality and a general backlash against the cult of personality surrounding the President. The loss in New Jersey was poised to be merely a referendum on one of the most unsuccessful administrations in New Jersey history, but President Obama gambled his reputation on a losing horse and, with it, further incensed a rising tide against him at a pivotal point in his administration’s tenure. What the administration will do to dig itself out of this hole remains to be seen, but at least for us Jersey residents, whether we supported Corzine, Christie, Daggett, or Stein, we can all count these elections a victory for our democracy, and a defeat for fraud and cynicism in dirtiest political state in America.

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