A sordid saga returns

Could the saga of Jim McGreevey get any more sordid?

The former governor, whose administration was mired in a cesspool of corruption and deceit, allegedly has an affair with a man who is then appointed to a high-profile state job. Word apparently gets out — along with word of a sexual harassment suit — and the governor resigns, coming out of the closet in the process.

That was two years ago. Publication of the ex-governor’s book, however, allows him to make a very public return, riding in as the misunderstood homosexual. He appears on Oprah and other shows, and his book does well initially.

Now Golan Cipel, the man he was linked to, has appeared on Larry King Live and offered additional tawdry details, dredging the saga back into the public eye, to be rehashed.

Except that in rehashing this mess, we are forgetting what was most significant about his resignation in the first place. It wasn’t his coming out, but his decision to resign as the walls were coming down on his ethically challenged administration.

Here is a column I wrote in 2004:

Governor has only himself to blame (Dispatches, Aug. 19, 2004)

Gov. James McGreevey stunned the state and the nation last week when he announced that he was stepping down as governor of New Jersey.

The reason was that the governor admitted to being “a gay American” and to having an affair with another man.

It was a stunning and effective speech, probably the best of Mr. McGreevey’s long career in politics, and it elicited a surprising level of sympathy from people across the country. After all, the governor’s sexual identity should not disqualify him from office, nor should his unfortunate decision to stray from his wife. Those are private matters — or at least they should be.

But the governor’s speech ignored some basic realities of his short tenure in office — namely that the stench of cronyism and corruption has been threatening to sweep him out of office for months.

Gov. McGreevey had come to Trenton with one basic goal. He planned to change the culture of the state capital, to alter the way that New Jersey did its business. He was to be a reform governor, had pledged to end sweetheart deals and restore a sense of ethics to the Statehouse.

Instead, his tenure has been marked by a series of scandals, political timidity and bad decisions. His biggest fund-raiser, Charles Kushner, has been the target of a federal probe and was arrested on charges that he attempted to use prostitutes to blackmail witnesses. Another top fund-raiser, David D’Amiano, was indicted in July on extortion charges. In addition, state Commerce Secretary William Watley resigned earlier this year “amid conflict-of-interest questions and a state criminal investigation into spending at his agency,” according to The Star-Ledger.

His first choice for state police superintendent, Joseph Santiago, resigned after he allegedly was found to have interfered with an investigation of his background. The governor withdrew the nomination of state Supreme Court nominee Zulima Farber after it as revealed that she drove to her background interview with a suspended license and was the subject of a bench warrant for unpaid traffic tickets. And two administration aides were accused of trading billboard approvals for campaign donations.

Dave Boyer, in The Philadelphia Inquirer, summed up the ethical lapses this way on Friday:

“After 10 months in office, he had to explain why he’d taken 272 trips in state police helicopters, including 14 that were not for official business,” he wrote. “Then, of course, there was his taxpayer-funded trip to Ireland, which the state Democratic Party paid for later. McGreevey got entangled in so many ethical dilemmas that he finally threw himself on the mercy of an ethicist/advisor appointed to watch over him.”

The governor managed, over the 32 months that he has been in office, to have inadvertently angered a long list of people and interest groups through his timid approach to the state budget. In his first budget, faced with a gaping $5 billion hole, he refused to act boldly — he opted not to raise state income taxes, instead raising a host of fees and smaller taxes, and attempted to avoid significant spending cuts. This created a screaming mess in Trenton and strained relations with supposed political allies.

More recently, he undercut support for what should have been a hugely popular plan to protect the Highlands watershed by pushing a plan through the state Legislature allowing expedited permitting for developers — which angered environmentalists who rightly see it as encouraging more rapid development in the southern part of the state.

Because of all of this, his popularity rating has hovered in the low 30s for much of his tenure in office and there have been rumblings for months that his own party would dump him next year and ask U.S. Sen. Jon Corzine to run for governor instead.

But it was the ethical morass that helped drag the governor down and taints what should have been a courageous action on his part. The governor’s announcement on Aug. 12 was widely viewed by political observers with the state’s major dailies and television stations as an attempt to get ahead of a sexual harassment suit expected to be filed in Trenton late last week by the man with whom he was alleged to have had the affair.

The man, Israeli national Golan Cipel, had been hired by the governor and paid $110,000 by the state to consult on homeland security issues. But as an Israeli national, he couldn’t get security clearance and eventually left state government, taking a job with a firm connected to the governor.

The issue here is not just the alleged harassment — it’s probably best to let the court sort that out. What is troubling is that the hiring of Mr. Cipel seemed to be part of a larger pattern of patronage and nepotism that plagued this administration.

Gov. McGreevey deserves a lot of credit for having the guts to come out the way he did. Rather than lying to save his political skin, hoping to ride out the bad press, he made a public mea culpa, admitted the affair and proudly announced his homosexuality. That takes a lot of courage.

But we should not feel sorry for the governor. He brought much of his troubles on himself.

This is how I will remember the McGreevey years.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet