Hank Kalet

Cleaning up elections locally

I’d like to see more towns attempt clean elections at the local level, but Lawrence’s experience shows it will not be easy.

As political as the climate is in Trenton, it can be worse at the local level because of the personal nature of local campaigns.
“Sadly, our request has been ignored,” said (Clean Elections committee co-chairman Doris) Weisberg, who is a Democrat and a former Township Council member. She is representing the Lawrence League of Women Voters on the Clean Elections Committee.

“We come here tonight to say we have found it impossible to work in a true academic manner as a study group and announce we are suspending our meetings until after the November general election. This was a unanimous decision by the committee,” she said.

Let’s hope they can get it back on track.

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

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A raging stew

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz’s first novel, is a powerful, funny, off-putting, crazy, cantankerous, sweet, sexy, violent, crazy bit of prose. It grabs you and refuses to let you go, jamming on politics and cultural stereotypes, ruminating on curses and craziness, asking questions about what it means to be a Dominican, an American. to live in diaspora and what the long-term impact of a brutal, violent dictatorship is on the people who live through it, their children and their children’s children.

It is a novel of many voices filtered through one (a la Faulkner), written in ghetto slang, Spanglish, Dominican Spanish, literary English and mixed throughout with the mythologies of science fiction, comic books, bits of history — a raging stew of a novel with a core so sweet, so tender and so painful it is hard to believe.

Read it and then read it again.

***

Here is a link to my story on Diaz in Time Off and here is a great interview with him from The Progressive magazine.

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

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The disappointing governor

Tom Moran, the state’s best political columnist, explains why so many of us who viewed the election of Jon Corzine to the governorship with hope have been so disappointed. Perhaps he should have let Senate President Richard Codey run and kept his seat in the U.S. Senate, where he had been making a name for himself as a rare voice of reason and liberalism.

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

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I vote for blue

Wally Edge raises an interesting question about the upcoming mid-term election:

If Democrats are successful in bucking the trend of mid-term elections going against the party that controls the governorship, as they were four years ago, it might be a signal of just how blue a state New Jersey has become — or evidence that Larry Bartals’ 2001 redistricting map was, as the GOP claims, truly one-sided.

He lists the last three decades of mid-term results, showing that the party that controlled the governorship has historically lost seats.

I have two issues with his analysis. First, the Florio mid-term and the first Byrne mid-term occurred at times when the electorate was teed off over new taxes. The backlash that created had a lot to do with those results.

My other issue is one of time: Going back 30-plus years is rather meaningless given the drastic demographic changes that have taken place.

I have another theory, however. The Florio mid-term was actually an aberration based on his unpopular tax plan, as was the election of Christie Whitman as governor (she eaked out a win over Floiro and then barely held on against Jim McGreevey — the two smallest margins of victory in memory). Whitman’s first win was a function of lingering anger over Florio, while her second win, I think, came courtesy of her incumbency and little else.

Using these suppositions — and that’s all they are — as a baseline, and adding the recent blue votes in presidential races (and the fact that there has not been a Republican U.S. senator from New Jersey since the Carter administration), one could make the argument that a different trend is in play: That the GOP is slowly disintegrating, consistently losing seats regardless of who is in the governor’s seat.

I’m no political scientist, but this is as plausible a description of the New Jersey political landscape as any other.

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

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Shifting sands in the Iraqi desert

The headline of this story in today’s New York Times pretty much sums up the debate that we will be having over the next week as we wait for Gen. David Petraeus to tell us next week taht that we can’t leave Iraq:

“Bush Shifts Terms for Measuring Progress in Iraq“

“Shifts terms.” Perhaps, moving the goal posts would be a better way of explaining the president’s approach:
With the Democratic-led Congress poised to measure progress in Iraq by focusing on the central government’s failure to perform, President Bush is proposing a new gauge, by focusing on new American alliances with the tribes and local groups that Washington once feared would tear the country apart.

As the piece points out — though, too subtly for my tastes — this is one in what has been a succession of changed bench marks and measuring sticks that the president has used to justify what has always been an unjustifiable policy.

The current approach, according to the paper, will be to focus on “ground-up relationships” with tribal and other local groups in an effort to extinguish the smoldering ash of Iraqi rebellion. Administration officials paint the new approach as an “augmentation” of earlier efforts and say it is part of a “dual strategy” in which the administration plans to work with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and local agents.

The current focus on the provinces, they say, reflects the fact that the White House overestimated what could be achieved by Mr. Maliki and his government, and underestimated the degree to which the local tribes developed a deep hatred for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is led by foreigners. The extent of its links to Osama bin Laden’s network is not clear.

“It’s not that they love us Americans,” said one senior administration official. “It’s that Al Qaeda was so heavy-handed, taking out Sunnis just because they were smoking a cigarette. In the end, that may be the best break we’ve gotten in a
while.”

While the focus on local leaders may seem a move in the right direction to some, it really is nothing more than a way to avoid doing what has to be done — which is to begin bringing American troops home and turn the mess over to the United Nations. Americans would likely have to work with U.N. troops under such a scenario, and we’d probably have to foot most of the bill, but then we created this mess in the first place.

Enough is enough. No matter how many times the president redefines the rules, the game is still the same. And so is the outcome. Bring ’em home.

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

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