NJSpotlight Reviews the Year in Politics

[Editor's note: The following was written by NJTV's Chief Political Correspondent, Michael Aron, for NJSpotlight.com]

2011 was the year the Big Guy talked about taking on "Big Things," the Democrats in Trenton tried to serve as his foil without ripping themselves apart, and the politically minded in New Jersey continued to be entertained by the fights, the foibles, the substance, and the personalities.

In January, New Jersey got a new congressman, Jon Runyan. It wasn't the first time a giant ex-professional athlete went down to Washington, D.C., to represent us in Congress. I'm thinking of Bill Bradley, who went straight to the U.S. Senate in the election of 1978 and spent eighteen years there. One wonders whether Runyan will have that kind of staying power. Or that level of impact.

Three months later, John Adler, who lost his seat to Runyan, died of a heart infection acquired during emergency heart surgery. He was 51, and it was one of the saddest early passings the state's political community had seen in many years. The funeral, in Cherry Hill, was a somber affair. Two qualities threaded through the many tributes and remembrances: John's wit and his smarts. You couldn't help but wonder whether the loss of the seat he appeared to love had taken a toll beyond the usual.

January was also the month that Gov. Chris Christie declared in his first State of the State Address that "the New Jersey comeback has begun." He might as well have added, "Well, of course it has, now that I'm here." What can be said of our high-octane governor that hasn't been said already?

I've covered nine New Jersey governors, not counting John Bennett. This one is nimble, quick on his feet, quick with a quip, sharp-edged, and well-versed. He seems to devour material whether it comes from a briefing book, a discussion, or the many newspapers and broadcasts he appears to include in his daily fare. He is a showman and an agile politician. He can be eloquent, charming, funny. He can also be nasty, vindictive, stubborn.

2011 was the year that the rest of the United States discovered what those of us who cover him in New Jersey have gradually learned between 2001 and 2010: this guy is a piece of work!

The pension and benefits reform bill he pushed through and signed in June was the crowning New Jersey political achievement of the year. I say that because of its scope, the degree of difficulty, and the continuing fallout. Christie couldn't have done it without Steve Sweeney and Sheila Oliver, the Senate president and Assembly speaker, both Democrats.

Sweeney was philosophically on board from the start. In fact, Sweeney could argue (and did) that he was the progenitor of pension reform going back to 2006. Oliver was a different story. She played footsie with the bill. Her members seemed to have deeper ties to the public employee unions than the senators do, and so she proceeded cautiously. She said she had real problems with the idea of ending collective bargaining over the terms of employee health benefits, so the governor and Sweeney agreed to let that sunset after four years --essentially giving the unions back that power in 2014 -- and that roped her in.

What we don't know is the degree to which the legislative leaders' patrons -- George Norcross in the case of Sweeney and the combo of Joe DiVincenzo and Steve Adubato Sr. in the case of Oliver -- were influencing the process. An eleventh hour attempt to slip into the bill an in-state hospital provision that would have required public employees who live in New Jersey to seek their hospital treatment in state if they wanted maximum reimbursement appeared designed to bolster Cooper Medical Center in Camden even more than it's been bolstered already by Norcross's taking over as chairman of the board. But it died as soon as people grasped that getting to Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania or Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York might be a lot harder for New Jersey cops, firemen, teachers, and the rest.

2011 was the year that we openly started questioning whether the troika of Christie-Norcross-DiVincenzo was really running the state. And if so, whether that's healthy. When it came out that Joe D was collecting a pension on top his salary for, in part, doing the same job, Christie's tepid criticism underscored a penchant for selective outrage he has exhibited before.

Jay Webber stepped down as Republican state chairman in mid-winter. He was replaced by Sam Raia, who has yet to give an interview, as far as I can tell. Webber said he stepped down to focus on his law practice and the legislative reapportionment battle coming up in the spring. You had to wonder if someone in the governor's camp successfully argued that Webber was getting too much attention as a mouthpiece for Christie or said something that displeased the governor. But in the absence of evidence, the rule of thumb is to take what a man says at face value.

At budget time, the governor shocked us all by red-lining out of the budget $139 million in municipal aid plus state aid to about twenty do-good programs, like New Jersey After 3, AIDS drug distribution, general assistance welfare, tuition grants for low-income college kids, and the Wynona Lipman Child Advocacy Center. As we were absorbing the news of the cuts, Christie left on a two-week Western swing that took him to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, among other places. It was part vacation, part political trip. The Sunday after he left, the Star-Ledger ran the infamous interview with Sweeney in which the Senate President fumed at the Governor and called him a "prick". I'd never seen that word in 30 years of covering New Jersey politics. I've heard it in the Statehouse probably hundreds of times but had never seen it in print. And yet, the two men work together. That was a head-scratcher for a few weeks. Was Sweeney's anger genuine? Was it fake, to appease the unions he had just alienated in the pension fight? It seemed real to me.

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