Menendez, who has had a number of brushes with the law, is yet to stand trial. And he maintains that he is innocent. He recently announced he will not run for reelection this year as a Democrat, but he has left open the possibility that he might do so as an independent.
In the meantime, something remarkable is happening in New Jersey politics. The brazenness of what the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is accused of doing — the mounting charges against him include extortion, acting as an illegal foreign agent on behalf of Egypt and obstruction of justice — might actually be opening the door to reforming the broader political culture of a state that is one of the last bastions of old-style machine politics.
Sleaze is something of an inevitable by-product of the system run by local bosses of both parties. In nearly all of New Jersey’s 21 counties, these bosses have a unique power to give their favored candidates the ballot’s most prominent spot, known as the “county line.” The other contenders’ names are spread out over different columns and are harder to find.
So potent an advantage is being “on the line” that U.S. House and Senate candidates who have that favored position tend to average 38 percentage points better in primary elections than their opponents, according to Rutgers University professor Julia Sass Rubin, who has studied 20 years of data. And so entrenched is the system that there hasn’t been a truly competitive statewide Democratic primary for more than two decades.
After Menendez was indicted, Democratic county chairs — many of whom do business or have jobs with the state — did as expected and began flocking to the candidacy of the governor’s wife, Tammy Murphy.
But this time, something different happened. Someone decided to raise a stink.
That someone was Andy Kim, a scrappy Democratic congressman who in 2018 narrowly unseated a GOP incumbent in a GOP-leaning district in the Philadelphia suburbs.
A Rhodes scholar who served in the State Department and on the National Security Council during the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, he came to national attention in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, when an Associated Press photo of him went viral. It showed Kim on his hands and knees in the Rotunda, bagging up trash that the rioting supporters of President Donald Trump had left behind.
Kim was one of the first public officials to call for Menendez’s resignation and declared his own candidacy for the seat shortly after the indictments against the senator were unsealed. He was running, he said, as “a decent human being.”
Kim sued to dismantle the “county line” system and began challenging Murphy at local Democratic conventions — with surprising success, thanks to grass-roots supporters who were as fed up as he was. In February, he won the Democratic endorsement on Murphy’s home turf, Monmouth County, by nearly 20 points.
“I think that was an inflection point for a lot of the state to recognize, oh, wait, this is a real competition,” Kim told my Post colleague Paul Kane.
Then came another unexpected turn. New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin announced on March 17 that he considered the state’s ballot system unconstitutional and would not defend it in court.
Yet another shoe dropped the following day, when Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, who is a leading contender for governor, switched his support from Murphy to Kim. “It’s no secret I’ve been disappointed with the campaign and how it has been conducted,” Fulop said of Murphy’s bid. “It’s clear to me that I was wrong with my early support and endorsement of Tammy Murphy for Senate.”
On Sunday, Murphy announced she would suspend her candidacy rather than go negative and wage what would have been a “very divisive and negative campaign.”
“With Donald Trump on the ballot and so much at stake for our nation, I will not in good conscience waste resources tearing down a fellow Democrat,” she added.
Now, it appears Kim has a clear shot at the Democratic nomination, which means he would be the one who would benefit from the line system. But he is pressing ahead with his effort to end it.
“This is not a system I want to participate in,” he said during an online news conference after Murphy dropped out. “I think it’s unfair.”
Kim has thrown a grenade into the gears of New Jersey’s political machine. But the irony is, it probably couldn’t have happened if Menendez hadn’t pulled the pin.
Credit: Source link
