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.

Center-right? Right

New Jersey has a center-right electorate? That’s what Alan Steinberg thinks — despite electoral evidence going back almost two decades. Consider: Democrats have won three of the last five gubernatorial races, the last five presidential races in New Jersey by decent margins, the last 10 Senate races, own majorities in both houses of the state Legislature and eight of 13 seats in Congress.

The state is far from conservative, showing a decide tilt to blue candidates as its default position, except when special circumstances present themselves. The Florio backlash is the primary example of this, his tax hike resulting in the Democrats losing the Legislature and Christie Whitman nearly toppling U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley before she won the Statehouse.

The Menendez win in 2006 is instructive. He was losing in the polls throughout much of the year to state Sen. Tom Kean Jr., the son of the state’s most popular governor. The polls, however, showed a decent-size number of undecided voters, most of whom broke for Menendez despite the ethical cloud that had formed above his head. Part of the reason was the ugly campaign waged by Kean, which undercut what made him an attractive candidate in the first place — his likeability. That, combined with the electoral default, resulted in a near double-digit win for Mendendez.

Jon Corzine is in a similar position to Menendez, but also shares some of the huge obstacles that Florio faced in 1993. There is no doubt that taxes are a major concern for New Jersey voters — with most saying they are not prepared to back tax-hikers.

But it is early and it remains to be seen whether Christie can capitalize, whether he can convince voters that he can fix the state’s deep-rooted budgetary mess without asking voters for more money or cutting programs they’ve come to rely on.

But center-right? You’ve got to be kidding.

A constitutional disconnect

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m missing something, but am I the only one who sees a massive contradiction between what President Barack Obama said today at the Naval Academy and what he said I just don’t see how this statement — his commitment to the “enduring truth”: “The values and ideals in (the Constitution) are not simply words written into aging parchment, they are the bedrock of our liberty and our security.”

We uphold our fundamental principles and values not just because we choose to, but because we swear to; not because they feel good, but because they help keep us safe and keep us true to who we are.

And yet, he is planning to create a class “detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people.” This group of detainees, he said yesterday at the National Archives, “are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.”

I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture — like other prisoners of war — must be prevented from attacking us again. Having said that, we must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded.

Essentially, the president has bought into the underlying argument that has underpinned every bad decision we have made as a nation for the last eight years — that we are in a state of war, that terrorism, rather than being a law-enforcement or intelligence issue, is a military problem that demands military solutions. That has put us in the position of using our howitzers to kill a scorpion.

Yes, the Obama plan is better than the Bush plan. But just about anything would have been an improvement. It doesn’t mean that Obama has found a way of mixing pragmatism and principle.

As I said, same as the old boss.

Change, what change

More on this later, but President Obama appears intent on narrowing the range of debate on Gitmo and terror suspects by promising to create a detention system only moderately better than what Bush had put in place.

To paraphrase The Who: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

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Sent from my Verizon Wireless LGVX9900 device.

Let’s get small

We’re in Manteo, a lovely little town on Roanoke Island eating at the Magnolia Grille. Outside the restaurant, between the picnic tables is an Adirondac chair that, to echo Steve Martin, makes you feel small.

So, it’s broke: How would you fix it?

If my household budget was in as bad a shape as the state’s, I’d probably be filing for bankruptcy.

But the state can’t do that, so it has to find a way to balance it’s budget at a time when state revenues have cratered and few consituencies are willing to sacrifice their perks. The standard whipping boys in this debate, of course, are the state worker unions, who get generous benefits, but the reality is that all of us are beneficiaries of some piece of the state budgetary pie.

There are numerous small towns who use the state police as their police force without paying anything — basically, allowing them to not provide their own police while getting a subsidy from taxpayers in towns that have their own departments.

There are the open-space and farmland-preservation subsidies that go to primarily suburban towns to keep development in check.

There is money for the arts, for education, for recreation. A load of money is spent to help businesses, seniors, the working poor.

Basically, there are few people in the state who are not touched in some positive way by the state budget.

And there are few people in the state willing to give up even the smallest piece of their pie. At the same time, no one wants to pay more in taxes, meaning that we are asking the state to spend more money without paying into the kitty to ensure it has the money we want it to spend.

So, I can’t complain too loudly about the cuts to the tax rebate program, even though I am going to get hit by them. There are other options that could be considered, but most could not survive the political maelstrom that would inevitably follow.

My challenge to those who want to cut first and ask questions later is this: Make specific suggestions on cuts, explain why they are fairer or more logical and sell those specifics to the people of the state. Go ahead. I dare you.