Hank Kalet

The Star-Ledger today slammed a pair of Democratic big shots for backing Gov. Chris Christie, even though he “routinely does violence to core principles of the Democratic Party.”

Christie favors the rich over the poor every time. He vetoed an income-tax hike on the top 1 percent and a modest increase in the minimum wage. He is an aggressive opponent of abortion rights who closed down six Planned Parenthood clinics.

He pooh-poohs climate change, withdrew from the regional treaty to cut emissions, and depleted the state’s clean energy funds by a staggering $1 billion. He removed the only African-American justice on the state Supreme Court for no good reason. He reduced aid to cities, forcing police layoffs that increased criminal violence. He is still trying to grab money set aside for affordable housing.

This list goes on, but you get the idea. Christie is a conservative fellow. And if he wins re-election, as seems likely, he’ll become a lot more conservative as the 2016 GOP presidential primaries approach. Count on that.

And yet, Democrats like Essex County Executive Joe DiVincenzo and Union City Mayor Brian Stack — and numerous others — still endorse him. The reason, the Ledger says,

is that guys like DiVincenzo and Stack don’t give a damn about grand causes. They think about state aid, and they think about hedging their bets. If Attila the Hun were favored to win in November, they might endorse him as well.

And if that means a single mom who can’t pay her rent because she works a lousy job for minimum wage must be thrown overboard, then that’s the way it goes.

The polite term for guys like these is “transactional politician.” They are guided by a simple calculation of benefits they provide against benefits they receive.

The impolite term for them is much shorter.

Ouch.

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New Jersey will hold two high-profile elections this year — one to fill the seat vacated by the death of longtime U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg in October and the other for governor. These elections are sucking the air out of the room, however, and obscuring what is really at stake this year: the composition of the state Legislature.

All 120 seats in the state Legislature are on the ballot in November and, while Democrats hold majorities in both houses, a Christie landslide combined with low turnout could put a serious dent in their majorities. That’s what some observers are saying, though even they are not completely convinced.

I’ve been skeptical of the coattail argument in the past, based on what I see as a lack of evidence. The two elections seen as backing up the coattail argument — Tom Kean’s 1985 re-election and Jim McGreevey’s 2001 win — have to be placed within the proper context. Kean’s win cane 28 years ago during a time when the state was more Republican and much more likely to see party shifts in the Legislature. The McGreevey win, which came with a big legislative win for the Democrats, was part of a larger shift away from the Republicans — the Democrats had picked up seats in each of the preceding elections.

My sense — buttressed by discussions with several academics who study New Jersey politics — has been that there are only a few seats in play. The redistricting plan put in place for the 2011 legislative races was designed to create a sense of continuity. Continuity, in this case, means status quo — i.e., incumbents win.

This calculus, however, is based on all things being normal, and 2013 is far from normal. With two general elections scheduled three weeks apart and a governor’s race that is all but a forgone conclusion, we likely are looking at lower-than-normal voter turnout, which could increase the number of seats in play.

Let’s dispense with the formalities here. The Democrats are going to win the Senate seat and the only drama is likely to occur in August during a four-way primary that pits Newark Mayor Cory Booker and his massive name recognition and war chest against two Congressmen who have strong progressive credentials — Frank Pallone and Rush Holt — and Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver. Even that drama seems a bit overplayed given the polling. The the Monmouth University poll says:

Among potential voters in the August Democratic primary – i.e. registered Democrats who regularly vote in general elections and say they may vote in the Senate primary – Booker holds a commanding lead over his challengers, garnering 63% support, compared to 10% for Holt, 8% for Pallone, and 6% for Oliver.

The Monmouth poll gives Booker a 16-point lead over Lonegan, who fairs well against the other three Democrats (a bit of a surprise), though that is probably because Lonegan has greater name recognition going into the race. My suspicion is that the 45 percent he polls against Pallone is his ceiling, given the extremities of his views. The numbers for Booker are even better in the Quinnipiac poll.

As for the governor’s race, the only question seems to be Christie’s margin of victory. He has maintained a 30 percentage point lead in successive polls, has garnered some high-level Democratic endorsements and has a massive war chest available. He has been targeting Buono with some nasty ads, as well, which are likely to make it impossible for her to build positive name recognition.

Again, the big-ticket races are obscuring the real stakes in the race — the ultimate make-up of the state Legislature. Democrats now hold a 24-16 advantage in the Senate and a 48-32 advantage in the Assembly. The composition of the Legislature, experts say, could depend upon turnout, which they say is likely to be suppressed by the special election. Monmouth said the November race is likely to draw about 45 percent of registered voters, down slightly from the normally anticipated 47 percent to 49 percent turnout normal for gubernatorial races.

The poll finds that Democrats are more likely to opt for voting in the October Senate race over November’s gubernatorial and legislative election. If forced to choose to vote in only one election, 73% of likely New Jersey voters say they would cast their ballot in the regular general election to 20% who prefer the special Senate election. Democrats (26%) are more likely than Republicans (14%) to choose the special election.

“Low turnout normally benefits a Republican, so the Democratic nominee will need a boost from supporters more interested in the Senate race to maintain the party’s normal edge in Garden State elections,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “This could also Monmouth University Polling Institute 6/13/13 translate to fewer Democratic voters in November, which will serve topump up Gov. Christie’s already daunting lead.”

“Democrats don’t like it because they expect it will lower turnout in the November 2013 election, leading to an even bigger win for Christie and the possibility of Republican legislative gains.”

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Two journals/zines have gone live with several of my poems.

The Shot Glass Review #10, an online journal of short poetry, has posted two of my poems — “Photo of the Haitian Quake” and the short prose poem “A Dream of Bees in Black and White.”

The Idiom, which is distributed free, has two older poems “Backstreet Scene” and “Sonnet of the Everyday,” which was part of a larger series of faux-sonnets. You can read them and download a PDF of the zine here.

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The United States government, in the guise of the National Security Agency, is collecting and mining
data from millions of American phone and internet users, under a secret court order. The revelations — broken first by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian (U.K.) — raise serious questions about whether our privacy means anything in the internet age and whether the open-ended war against terror is more damaging to our civil liberties than the potential of another attack.

And yet, we are focused on the man — and on leakers or whistleblowers more generally — who brought us the news and the man who leaked it to him, rather than on the news itself.

That is crazy. I understand the interest in Edward Snowden, and I can even understand some of the vitriol coming from supporters of the data-mining program. But this is beginning to obscure the real questions that need to be asked.

First, when did “if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to worry about” become the standard for justice in the United States? Amendments IV through VIII to the Constitution all deal in some way with protecting potential defendants against government overreach, something with which they were quite familiar. This is not to say that they would oppose the Obama administration’s data-mining program — speculating on something like this is a waste of time — but it does show a healthy skepticism of government power. Taken together, the rights enumerated amount put the onus on the government to provide more than a general rationale for action. In this case, I would argue that a data-mining program that collects information indiscriminately is too broad, because it potentially ensnares all Americans within a very broad net whether they are under suspicion of anything or not. The FISA courts have obviously disagreed.

Second, we need to have a very public debate over secrecy. We have made numerous concessions to the national security state in our history, most recently with the passage of the USA Patriot Act and the approval of a variety of what used to be extra-legal detention measures. And we have done so with little debate, usually out of fear. And while the fear may be justified — nearly 3,000 were killed on 9/11, the Japanese did attack the United States in 1941 — the actions we have taken when in the grip of fear have often had long-term deleterious effects or were just plain wrong.

One of the more troubling outcomes of both the cold war and the war on terror has been the tendency to place public policy decisions behind the cloak of secrecy. We live in a representative democracy, which requires transparency to function properly. That means we need information. That requirement, however, is at odds with the national security mindset — and that can be OK. There are pieces of information that cannot or should not be shared publicly — troop movements, the identity of intelligence operatives, details about who is being investigated (during the investigation) — but that does not mean that the broader outlines cannot be or should not be fair game for debate.

That seems to be the issue here. As Paul Waldman points out, no one has been able to make the case that allowing the American public to know of the existence of such a broad data-mining program like the one revealed this week puts anyone in harm or hinders the American intelligence community to combat terrorism. American “intelligence officials,” he writes, may be

saying that the terrorists had no idea that we might be tracking their communications. But that just doesn’t pass the smell test.

What the revelation does, however, is force questions of the program’s legitimacy into the open, where it can get the kind of full-throated debate that it deserves. And yes, I know the program is legal — it was authorized by the secret FISA courts, etc. — but that does not necessarily make it right, or even mean that it is a wise and efficient or effective use of resources. (What’s legal and what is morally or ethically right are not necessarily the same things.)

Let the president and the intelligence community defend the broad outlines of the program to Congress in an open, public forum. Let civil libertarians make their case. Let’s hear why — and to what extent — our civil liberties can be sacrificed and what it is we are getting in return.

Three, do we even have an expectation to privacy in the modern age, which features cameras on nearly every street and technologies that make data-mining, not only by governments but by corporations, possible? Some will argue that we have ceded our right to defend the notion of privacy, that we have made a tacit bargain, exchanging it for daily conveniences and everyday safety. And there may be some truth in this. We do live a surprising amount of our lives in the public sphere — far more than we ever have. At the same time, those individual choices should not be viewed as a definitive decision by us as a culture and it is unclear whether most of us truly understand the trade-offs we are making or the larger context in which we make them. Again, the accrual of small concessions — surveillance cameras at ATMs became cameras on street corners and later cameras that can record traffic infractions — needs to be discussed. Given the reaction every time Facebook updates its privacy rules, it seems pretty clear that Americans still value privacy, even if only in the abstract, and would welcome a broader discussion of what privacy is and what it means in the corporate and government arenas.

This is not, or should not be, a partisan issue. The expansion of presidential power, the growth of the national security state and erection of a permanent war machine have taken place under presidents of both parties dating back to World War II. And their growth has come at the expense of civil liberties, which have been undergoing a slow and steady erosion for too long.

I think it is pretty clear where I stand on these issues. What is less clear is where the American public stands and whether that even matters anymore.

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