It’s not so uncommon for two columnists to address the same issue on the same day. People tend to talk about a limited number of subjects at a time, after all, especially in political circles. But it’s not often you see a pair of columnists write not just about the same thing, with the same opinion of it, on the same day, but also both start their pieces by referring to an MTV reality television show.
Here’s William McGurn in The Wall Street Journal:
If you think that Snooki getting socked in the kisser during an episode of “Jersey Shore” epitomizes life in the Garden State, you haven’t been paying attention. The best reality show on television today isn’t running on MTV. It’s in Trenton, where Gov. Chris Christie is offering the voters a dose of Reagan Republicanism—with a Jersey twist.
And here’s Gene Healy in The Examiner:
My native New Jersey has long been a national punch line, a status recently reinforced by MTV’s hit show “Jersey Shore,” featuring Mike Sorrentino, the guido extraordinaire nicknamed for his impressive abs (they’re “a Situation,” apparently).
Recently, though, I’ve been holding my head high, thanks to Jersey’s new governor, Republican Chris Christie, a man who hasn’t seen his abs since the “Born to Run” tour — if ever. In the 2009 race, our last governor, Jon Corzine, ridiculed Christie’s weight, then left him with the gruesome political challenge of closing an $11 billion deficit, the largest gap per taxpayer in the U.S.
As Sorrentino put it in another context, “This situation is indescribable. You can’t even describe the situation that you’re about to get in.”
That’s not the only similarity between their columns. They both have the same view of Governor Christie’s tough talk. McGurn writes:
If he is to survive the headlines about budget cuts and pull New Jersey back to prosperity, Mr. Christie knows he needs to put the hard choices before the state’s citizens, and to speak to them as adults. He’s doing just that.
Healy writes:
Christie’s running a bold experiment: treating voters like adults, telling them what’s needed to get out of their predicament.
Two men writing the same day using an MTV reality series about young and all-too-stereotypical Jersey partiers to make a point about raising the tone of political debate—it’s quite a coincidence. That said, both do a service in letting the rest of the country know what Governor Christie is trying to accomplish. New Jersey is facing one of the country’s biggest fiscal messes, and he’s trying to clean it up with what McGurn calls Jersey-style Reaganism. McGurn’s piece has a nice collection of quotations from talks given by the governor explaining why he’s getting serious about what McGurn notes is “a $10.7 billion gap on a total state budget of $29.3 billion” by cutting back to “a smaller government that lives within its means.” To give one example, he responded this way to critics of his budget cuts:
The special interests have already begun to scream their favorite word—which, coincidentally, is my 9-year-old son’s favorite word when we are making him do something he knows is right but does not want to do—’unfair.’ … One state retiree, 49 years old, paid, over the course of his entire career, a total of $124,000 towards his retirement pension and health benefits. What will we pay him? $3.3 million in pension payments over his life, and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits—a total of $3.8 million on a $120,000 investment. Is that fair?
He’s not popular among the teachers’ unions—he wants instructors to accept a one-year wage freeze and complains that local governments and school boards are hiring at high levels while the private sector is shedding jobs during a recession. Healy refers to a memo sent by one union, but doesn’t say just what was in it:
Dear Lord this year you have taken away my favorite actor, Patrick Swayze, my favorite actress, Farrah Fawcett, my favorite singer, Michael Jackson, and my favorite salesman, Billy Mays. I just wanted to let you know that Chris Christie is my favorite governor.
Those are rather uncivil words to come from the people that teach New Jersey children. Governor Christie must be doing something right.
The current governor of New Jersey is neither a doctrinaire conservative or rhino liberal Republican. In some respects he is a moderate with certain conservative instincts. You are right about his budget cutting courage. The back story to his budget fight illuminates the queer dynamics of New Jersey’s political dynamics. For two generations the driving force in New Jersey has been a runaway Supreme Court. The Court forced the state to adopt an income tax, took over school funding along redistributionist lines and assumed overall control of all land use in order to force communities to accept diversity housing. They could do this because both legislative and executive branches found it convenient to pretend that they had no recourse, thus leaving all the really hard decisions to the leftists on the bench.
New Jersey is trending blue because it’s failing cities are kept afloat by a constant infusion of funding from the prosperous suburbs. The suburbs are themselves trending blue due to their ever increasing population of unionized teachers, government workers, foundation and other non-profit workers, and rootless corporate transfers. This is compounded by the exodus of traditional or just successful people out of the state, fleeing ever increasing taxation and government intrusion. The state is also subject to massive invasion of both legal and illegal immigration, transforming whole sections of the state into little Mexico’s or Calcutta’s.
Christie is Governor because this whole idiotic edifice collapsed. The state is broke and even citizens on the public teat are aroused. They know, as Tennessee Williams once wrote, “The Milk Train don’t Stop here no more.”
Can New Jersey solve its problems and remain liberal? Probably not. I along with the rest of my family left New Jersey for other states that are more, shall we say American. But it will be very interesting to see how Chris Christie fares in his attempt to govern the People’s Republic of New Jersey.
BTW, the bozos depicted on the shore program are from New York! They just act out their antics in NJ. New Jersey gets a bad rap because of the view from Route 95. But there are large areas of the state that could easily pass for rural New England or North Carolina. There are even some good trout waters, but I’m not telling where they are.