Correction appended
Two years ago, at a Republican presidential primary debate in Boca Raton, Fla., I chased down state Rep. Marco Rubio to ask for his autograph. The debate had long since ended, the headliners (John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul) had disappeared into crowds of adoring fans, and as I stood in the lobby of the debate venue, I noticed Rubio leaving through a side door.
When I caught up with him and asked him to sign my debate program, he looked astonished. “Me?” he asked. “You want my autograph? I’m a nobody. Nobody knows who I am.” Naive 17-year-old that I was, I told him I thought he had great political promise. This elicited a smile and a polite but perfunctory handshake. “Take care,” he said as he walked away.
An election cycle later, as the Republican Party faces an internal struggle that threatens to tear it apart from the inside out, Marco Rubio the unknown state representative could very well be Florida’s next U.S. senator.
Rubio’s victory would hardly be the strangest news of 2010 — a year that claimed as political casualties Sen. Lisa Murkowski, part of a dynastic Alaska family; Sen. Bob Bennett, who represented Utah for nearly two decades in Congress before being defeated earlier this year in a primary challenge; and Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware, who until a week ago had never lost an election. Party leaders have been powerless to stop the nomination of anti-establishment candidates — like Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware — whose ideological rigidness may cost the GOP otherwise winnable elections.
Enter New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who in nine months in office has shown himself to be a shrewd and effective dealmaker and a real alternative to the populist, uncompromising Tea Party movement. Unlike other Republican governors, Christie accepted stimulus funding and refused to sue the federal government over the passage of President Barack Obama’s health care plan. In the short term, Democrats ought to be glad we’ve got Christie and not someone worse. And Republicans should take a leaf out of his book: Christie is a case study in how to effectively govern a thoroughly Democratic state as a Republican governor in a national political atmosphere unfriendly to moderate conservatives.
The key to Christie’s success in New Jersey, which Obama won by more than 10 percentage points in 2008, is the mandate voters gave him last fall to slash the state’s ballooning budget. This year, Trenton faced a $10 billion budget shortfall. The size of New Jersey government is absurd: According to The Economist, state spending grew by 50 percent from 2002 to 2008.
Raising taxes to close the gap was entirely out of the question: The Tax Foundation reported this year that New Jersey has the highest property taxes in the country. Cutting state spending was the correct way — and the only way — to balance the budget. And though it undeniably comes at a cost, Christie’s decision to take on New Jersey’s powerful public sector and teachers unions was admirable. Even by liberal standards, the state’s unions are disproportionately powerful. Vince Giordano, executive director of the New Jersey Education Association, receives an annual salary of $300,000, almost twice as much as Christie’s $175,000 annual salary as governor.
Most impressive was the bipartisan deal Christie reached with Democratic state lawmakers limiting local property tax increases. The deal caps property tax growth at 2 percent per year while still providing exemptions for employees’ health insurance and pension costs, debt payments, emergency response and rising school enrollment. It also views increases over a period of three years rather than one, so that if communities hike rates by less than 2 percent in a given year, they can exceed the limit the next, allowing for increased spending during tough economic times.
It’s unclear, though, how long Christie’s success will last. His tenure in office hasn’t been stumble-free: Last month, New Jersey badly bungled its application for federal Race to the Top education funding, losing out on $400 million it could’ve been allocated if state bureaucrats had remembered to include a basic statistic in their presentation to Department of Education officials. In July, he vetoed a funding bill for state family planning clinics that provide healthcare to uninsured women, despite an assurance in the bill that taxpayers’ money wouldn’t be used to perform abortions. State Democratic lawmakers have promised a fight.
And his take-no-prisoners style could easily backfire, particularly if he tries to take on more unassailable ground like the planned Hudson River commuter rail tunnel, which Democrats promise will ease the region’s famous congestion and create 6,000 construction jobs.
Chris Christie is hardly a Democrat. In any other economic climate, New Jerseyans would consider him an extreme Republican. Yet he’s made the tough decisions necessary to put New Jersey back on the path to fiscal solvency and has worked with a stubbornly Democratic legislature to find commonsense solutions to incredibly controversial problems. Republicans, take note.
That said, there remains one budding scandal that might threaten to sink his governorship: This summer, MTV renewed “Jersey Shore” for a third season.
Charlie Metzger is a Wilson School major from Palm Beach, Fla. He can be reached at cmetzger@princeton.edu.
Correction
This column originally stated that Vince Giordano, executive director of the New Jersey Education Association, was paid $550,000 last year. In fact, he was paid that amount for the 2007-08 fiscal year. That payment included $128,508 in benefits and deferred compensation. Giordano’s current annual salary is $300,000. The Daily Princetonian regrets the error.
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