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.

It’s about Corzine and Christie, not Obama

I’m getting tired of hearing that a Jon Corzine loss in the New Jersey governor’s race would be an indication of a loss of faith in Barack Obama.

You hear it on cable, in the blogs (especially the right-wing ones) and it pops up from time to time in print: The gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia are bellwethers and can be used effectively as standins for a rerun of the 2008 presidential race or as a preview of the 2010 congressional mid-terms.

In a state where no Republican has won a statewide race in more than a decade, Mr. Christie could be a “bellwether” for a GOP revival in 2010, according to Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who stumped with the candidate in the state last month.

Mr. Christie “plays across the state unlike any Republican” in the past several election cycles, Mr. Steele told a gathering of Republican faithful in Pitman, N.J.

“You must be the next governor from this state,” Mr. Steele said. “It is a bellwether in so many ways for the future of our party and the future of our nation.”

The reality is far more complex, at least here in New Jersey, and has little to do with the president’s popularity and everything to do with Jon Corzine’s — or his lack thereof.

Consider the poll numbers and the trends:

Notice anything? Chris Christie has maintained a rather consistent lead since at least April. And if you go back farther, you’ll see that the governor has managed to lead in only two polls all year: a Jan. 12-14 Monmouth/Gannett poll that had him up by 2 percentage points and a Jan. 2-7 Fairleigh Dickinson poll that had him up by 7. Once we hit February, it’s been all Christie.

At the same time, Obama continues to have approval ratings in the 50s (aside from a Rasmussen poll that puts him at 49 percent) nationally and much higher in New Jersey.

Corzine, on the other hand, has some pretty horrid approval numbers — in his case, it might be better to call them disapproval numbers: 37 percent positive and 52 percent negative among registered voters 34-58 among likely voters) in a Monmouth University poll released Sunday.

The evidence, it would seem, just doesn’t support the bellwether meme. But the bellwether meme has nothing to do with New Jersey; it is a national construct that makes good fodder for cable television, which has difficulty getting past their narrow focus on Washington.

The New Jersey governor’s race has played out and will continue to play out on state issues. In the end, it will not be a referendum on Obama, but a referendum on Jon Corzine. The Washington media and the cable TV cranks are just too removed from the ground to understand that.

Wither change?

I don’t want to use the word disappointment — and not just because it is still early in his presidency. I don’t want to use the word because it implies that the president somehow is letting down liberals. The reality is, of course, that he’s only doing what he told us he’d do — tack as much to the center as he could, while substituting bipartisanship for a principled commitment to a political philosophy.

So, as Ian Welsh says on Open Left, “no one” should have “expected anything else,” and those who continue to expect Obama to be a liberal lion, a la Ted Kennedy or Paul Wellstone are “the living definition of denial.”

He remains better than most of the alternatives, but he’s still not a lot different than the leaders who have come before him.

Permanent nod — elegy for Jim Carroll

There was always something regal and elegant about Jim Carroll, something that belied his drug-addicted youth, that seemed to set him apart from his time.

Carroll died Friday — a shock, really, given that he was just 60 and had produced some great recent writing.

I met him once, briefly, after a poetry reading he gave at Rutgers. I got there at the end and he signed the flier — a slip of paper I still have tucked away in a photo album with the other autographs I’d collected during my younger days.

I first read Carroll’s work in 1980, when I was at Penn. State. I was at sea, so to speak, lacking real direction but developing what might be described as a bohemian bent. I was into rock — mostly punk and what is now called classic rock — and was just discovering that literature, and poetry in particular, was something worth reading outside of class.

I gobbled up books — Kerouac and Ginsberg, Hemingway, a collection of postmodern Americans and Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries. The Diaries were an accidental find, a small pocket-sized book discovered in a bookstore as I rummaged the shelves. I’d been listening to Catholic Boy, Carroll’s first album almost continuously after first hearing its single (if you can call it that), “People Who Died,” on Vin Scelsa’s show on WNEW. The album was a revelation for me — poetic lyrics set atop those driving punk guitars — that led me toward Television, Patti Smith and many of the other New York bands of the 1970s (I’ve always been more of a New York punk than a London banger).

The book was raw and yet also art, a contrivance in the best sort of way. It was a young teen describing the darker side of New York City in the 1960s in a stylized voice that helped define a particular strain of writing that would follow.

I was taken by the book, as I said, and have been reading his poetry since then. I remainin awe of a poetic sensibility that was so fully developed at such a young age and that managed to grow and the spread into other art forms (I mentioned rock, but there also were the spoken word discs, the prose explorations and the diaries).

In the end, it is that divine scream of an album — Catholic Boy — that stands as his best work, and as the piece of his muse that helped ingite my own poetic explorations.

Thanks, Jim. Rest in Peace.

Runner’s diary, Friday

I tried something different today, to mix things up and try to jumpstart my running. I alternated between running and weight lifting — a mile run, followed by heavy leg work, followed by another mile and upper body lifting and ending with another mile. It was brutal, so it must have been a good idea.

Unfortunately, it was only the second gym appearance of the week because of some changes here (I am no longer the online editor, or not just the online editor; I now have responsibility again for the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press), some freelance work and a new teaching gig at Middlesex County College (more on that to follow).

I’m hoping to develop a rhythm to the week that will allow me at least three weekday workouts on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, and at least one other workout at some undetermined point.

Editorial: Expanding Afghan war will lead to quagmire

Is anyone surprised that the papers I edit — and that I write editorials for — came out against an Afghan troop expansion and called for an end to the war?