Near Death Politics

Is this the best thing that ever happened to Governor Corzine?

Or, like all politicians in fully-functioning politicking mode, is he just so good at bullshit that he can translate a near-death experience into a focused executive agenda without meaning it?

I don't know, but I love good rhetoric.

From The New York Times:
(Article 1 of 2)
April 15, 2007
Corzine Crash Comes at Crucial Time for N.J.
By MICHAEL COOPER
Members of the staff of Gov. Jon S. Corzine say it could take a week to 10 days before he is well enough to resume his duties as the governor of New Jersey. His doctor said it could be “days or weeks.” Six months may pass before he can get around by himself.

No matter how long the recuperation period, the incapacitating injuries that Mr. Corzine suffered Thursday evening when his Chevrolet Suburban crashed on the Garden State Parkway not far from Atlantic City come at an important moment in both state government and in the life of his young administration, politicians and analysts said. If his convalescence proves a lengthy one, they said, the crash could define his first term and lead the state into murky political waters.

“From every point of view, this is not a fortuitous time for him or for the state,” Thomas H. Kean, a former governor of New Jersey, said of the accident.

This morning, Mr. Corzine underwent his second surgery since the accident at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, N.J. Today’s surgery was to clean out a leg wound, and he is scheduled to have a similar surgery on Monday. His doctors said he would remain on a ventilator at least until then.

Dr. Steven E. Ross, head of the trauma division, said Mr. Corzine is “on enough medication to assure that he is comfortable and probably to assure that he won’t remember much of what is going on at this point.”

The crash comes as Mr. Corzine, 60, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who has pledged to use his business acumen to shore up New Jersey’s shaky finances, was heading into his second budget battle with the State Legislature.

Last year’s epic budget battle was a test of stamina and brinkmanship. Mr. Corzine slept on a cot in his office for three consecutive nights and shut down state government to win an agreement from lawmakers to raise the state sales tax.

This year, the governor may have to negotiate the budget from a bed or a wheelchair. And while the next budget most likely will not be as contentious as the last — it is an election year for lawmakers, and Mr. Corzine’s proposal contained fewer politically difficult measures — many challenging issues lie ahead.

Among them is the state’s crushing debt load. Many homeowners continue to complain about high property taxes, though they were granted some relief in last year’s budget package. And for years the state has invested too little money in its pension system, casting doubt on whether it can meet its obligation to retirees.

The financial outlook is so bleak that Mr. Corzine has proposed selling off state assets like the New Jersey Turnpike and the parkway on which he was injured.

Mr. Corzine’s injuries could sideline him at a delicate time in his second year in office, when he is still trying to gain favor with voters and make inroads with Trenton’s political establishment. He has also been asked to answer questions about his gifts to a former companion who is also the president of a powerful state employees union.

“It comes at a point where he’s about to make the most critical decisions of his governorship,” said Peter J. Woolley, a political scientist who is executive director of the Public Mind poll of Fairleigh Dickinson University. “Are his injuries going to be so extensive that it’s going to deter him physically and mentally from pushing his own agenda to fix the financial woes, or will he recover enough with enough determination and still enough political latitude that he’ll be able to be effective?”

When the president of the State Senate, Richard J. Codey, became the acting governor this week for the third time —he took over after Gov. James E. McGreevey resigned amid scandal in 2004 — he pledged to work to carry out the Corzine administration’s agenda. “It’s their administration, and not mine,” he said.

Tom Shea, Mr. Corzine’s chief of staff, said on Friday that it was unclear exactly when Mr. Corzine will be able to resume his duties.

“We won’t know that until we know really what the governor’s prognosis for recovery is going to be,” he said. “You know, he certainly needs the ability to concentrate and focus and communicate in order to effectively carry out the duties of his office. And I think only time will tell how long that takes for us for him to be able to do that again.”

But if Mr. Corzine’s convalescence takes longer than expected, or if he should suffer setbacks that keep him from governing as the July 1 start of the fiscal year nears, the state could find itself in a peculiar situation: Mr. Codey, a fellow Democrat who has had political tensions with Mr. Corzine in recent years, would have to represent both the administration and the Senate in budget negotiations.

“It’s an outrageous conflict of interest,” said Mr. Kean, a Republican.

New Jersey voters agreed in 2005 to create the position of a lieutenant governor who would serve if a governor steps down or cannot serve, but the position will not be created until 2009.
The accident comes a little more than a year after Mr. Corzine took office with the résumé of an outsider. As a former business executive and as a United States senator for five years, he has never had to forge the kind of direct, close connection with voters that people like to have with their governors.

As a politician, Mr. Corzine can come across as a bit aloof, analysts said. He never toiled in the vineyards of local politics. He is not a natural glad-hander, or a stirring speaker, and he cuts an unconventional figure on the political scene with his scholarly-looking gray beard and trademark blue sweater vest.

As former Gov. Brendan Byrne said: “Governor Corzine is respected, I think, in virtually all quarters. He’s not the warm and fuzzy type Codey is. But I think he is well respected and listened to.”

A February poll from Quinnipiac University suggested that voters are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but not with a lot of enthusiasm. Voters approved of his performance by 50 to 34 percent, his highest ratings yet, but only 20 percent said that things have gotten better under his watch, while 15 percent have said the opposite.

And while several political analysts said that Mr. Corzine had been working to forge closer connections with voters — by going to town meetings, dinners, and fund-raisers for local officeholders — injuries that limit his mobility could hinder those efforts. And they could also limit his ability to campaign for his allies in the Legislature, who face re-election this year.
But some political analysts said that his accident and injuries would most likely engender sympathy for him as well. And they noted that the next election for governor is more than two years away.

Of more pressing concern, analysts said, are the grave problems facing the state.

The second year is critical in any governor’s four-year term, political scientists said. The first year is often spent assembling an administration and learning how state government works. By the third and fourth years, political capital has a habit of eroding, and a re-election campaign can distract politicians from governing. So the second year is prime time for attempting ambitious, politically risky measures.

“I think this comes at a particularly unfortunate time,” said Ross K. Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University. “The problems with the state pension fund were only just revealed, and he had resolved to see that it was set right. And he was in a unique position to try to find some way out of this problem for a state that was already bogged down in serious debt, and his background in finance made him uniquely suited to do it.”

The pension fund’s problems are staggering in scope. The state failed for years to make the required annual contributions to the pension fund, and used questionable accounting methods to hide the true condition of the funds. And just as a few late credit card payments can cause an individual’s debt to balloon, the missing pension contributions have made the state’s pension shortfall soar.

Mr. Corzine tried to break with the past, ordering up the first significant pension contributions in a decade. But because of the years of neglect, even that has not been able to keep up with the required amounts. That is one of the reasons he has been weighing the sale of state assets.
Joseph R. Marbach, the acting dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Seton Hall, said a lengthy convalescence could place Mr. Corzine’s proposals to sell assets like the toll roads and the lottery on the back burner. “That may be taken off the table entirely, while the state applies a Band-Aid approach,” he said.

Eric Shuffler, who was a top aide to Governors Codey and McGreevey, and who has written speeches for Mr. Corzine, said he expected Mr. Corzine to be able to resume his duties soon. “I think the biggest thing for the governor is that there is so much he wants to do, and so much he is trying to do, and this is a loss of time for an agenda that is quite ambitious,” he said.

Professor Baker, of Rutgers University, noted how strange it was that Mr. Corzine was critically injured while on his way to broker a meeting between the Rutgers women’s basketball team and Don Imus, the talk-show host who was fired for making racist and sexist comments about them.
“It would be treated as bad fiction if this had appeared between two covers,” he said.

David Chen and Mary Williams Walsh contributed reporting.

(Article 2 of 2)
May 7, 2007
N.J. Governor Ready to Resume Duties
By DAVID W. CHEN
PRINCETON, N.J., May 7 — Saying that his prolonged absence from a job that he loves was driving him “stir crazy,” Jon S. Corzine resumed his official duties as Governor of New Jersey this morning, three and a half weeks after sustaining serious injuries in a car accident.

“I’d go stir crazy if I was not doing this,” Mr. Corzine said at a news conference at the governor’s official mansion here, known as Drumthwacket.

And though he was in excruciating pain at the time of the accident and now faces months of intense physical therapy, Mr. Corzine said, he never for a second considered leaving his office, which he spent $45 million to win in 2005.

“I had not thought about resigning, if that’s what you’re saying,” he said in response to one reporter’s question. “I love what I do. It’s because I love it, I want to get back at it. It gives me strength.”

Mr. Corzine spoke for 30 minutes at the news conference, an unusually long session for him. He cautioned that he would be working on a limited schedule, putting in eight or nine hours a day rather than his former 14 to 16 hours.

Indeed, he said that he would remain at Drumthwacket for the time being, and that cabinet members and other officials would visit him, rather than commuting to his office in the state capital.

And he said that he would perform few of the ceremonial duties normally required of the office, and instead focus on policy issues, like a state budget that must be settled by July 1, the issue of health care and the idea of leasing state assets such as the New Jersey Turnpike to generate tens of billions of dollars in new revenue.

Still, with one of his doctors — Dr. Steven E. Ross, head of the trauma division at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, where Mr. Corzine was hospitalized — standing in the background at the news conference, Mr. Corzine demonstrated just how much he has recovered physically from the accident.

He used forearm crutches to negotiate a total of six steps from the front entrance of the mansion to its circular driveway, where he spoke to reporters. He was helped into a chair by his son, Jeffrey, but he sat unattended for the entire news conference, with a leather stool in front of him to support his broken left leg.

Mr. Corzine was critically injured on April 12 in an accident on the Garden State Parkway near Atlantic City. He was a passenger in a state sport-utility vehicle that was clocked at 91 miles an hour, or 26 miles an hour over the speed limit, when it collided with a pickup truck and hit a guard rail.

At the time of the crash, Mr. Corzine was not wearing a seat belt, in violation of state law. The impact tossed him from the front seat to the back, and broke his left leg, his sternum, a clavicle, a lower vertebra and 11 ribs. Doctors who treated him said he lost about half his blood.

The governor endured three operations at Cooper University Hospital, and relied on a ventilator to help him breathe for more than week.

Against a backdrop of widespread criticism from residents over his failure to wear a seat belt, Mr. Corzine voluntarily paid a $46 fine and costs related to the infraction.

The State Senate president, Richard J. Codey, served as acting governor during Mr. Corzine’s convalescence. But Mr. Corzine took his old job back at 9 a.m. today, starting off with a senior staff meeting at the mansion before the news conference.