In politics, appearance is reality

I should have touched on this yesterday, but it slipped beneath the radar thanks to some computer issues.

Nevertheless, what we have here is a story that is both very New Jersey and very Washington GOP. U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, widely believed to be angling for the Republican nod for governor in 2009, is coming under fire for handing a rather lucrative contract to monitor a settlement with a company facing criminal charges over to his former boss, former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

With no public notice and no bidding, the company awarded Mr. Ashcroft an 18-month contract worth $28 million to $52 million.

That contract, which Justice Department officials in Washington learned about only several weeks ago, has prompted an internal inquiry into the department’s procedures for selecting outside monitors to police settlements with large companies.
The contract between Mr. Ashcroft’s consulting firm, the Ashcroft Group, and Zimmer Holdings, a medical supply company in Indiana, has also drawn the attention of Congressional investigators.

The New Jersey prosecutor, United States Attorney Christopher J. Christie, directed similar monitoring contracts last year to two other former Justice Department colleagues from the Bush administration, as well as to a former Republican state attorney general in New Jersey.

The appearance here, as Christie himself notes, is not exactly above board.

Christie has defended the contract and appointment, pointing to Ashcroft’s integrity and his experience running the Justice Department. He also said Zimmer Holdings never objected to the appointment or to Ashcroft’s contract.

“I know the way our process worked internally there was no coercion,” Christie said in an interview yesterday. “But I also understand in the aftermath there was the perception of coercion, and you have to deal with that perception.”

And the perception is out there. The liberal blog Blue Jersey has been critical of Christie on a number of levels since an alleged investigation of U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez was leaked to the press in the waning hours of the 2006 Senate race. PolitickerNJ has picked up on it, as well. And even Harper’s has something on it.

Perhaps, this is all appearance. But appearance is reality in politics. Chris Christie has been hailed buy many as the white knight on a white horse battling corruption. While that always seemed overblown, his reputation had always been rather clean.

The Ashcroft contract, however, makes the other criticisms seem more valid — and leave Christie looking like nothing more than your garden-variety New Jersey politician.

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

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Recommended reading: Economics

Some interesting reading from today’s newspapers and blogs:

Paul Krugman writes about how the presidential candidates are misleading voters on the European economy and what it means for our own economy.

William Greider offers some advice to presidential candidate Barack Obama — borrow from John Edwards’ pragmatic antirecession program — while also skewering the lazy Washington press corps.

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

E-mail me by clicking here.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Beekman Road: Turn, turn, turn

The South Brunswick Township Council is considering whether it should add an extra turning lane from Beekman Road onto Route 27. The idea, as I understand it (I wasn’t at Tuesday’s council meeting where it was discussed) would be to designate a left-turn lane and set aside a separate right-turn lane (an accommodation would need to be made for drivers going straight into the CVS).

On a theoretical plane, I probably could support something like this. But the failure of this intersection is more than theoretical. We were driving home tonight at about 7 p.m. and turned onto Beekman from Route 1 heading west. When we got to Beekman, we needed to make a left and sat through about a half dozen lights.

So, the turn lanes make sense.

But more needs to be done. One of the major problems at the intersections is that the cars coming out of the CVS and heading straight onto Beekman create havoc — creating a dangerous situation (it can be difficult to see the cars that are heading straight) and stopping those turning left from Beekman onto Route 27 and holding up the line of traffic.

A turning arrow is needed, at the very least, to better regulate traffic. Realigning the intersection to line it up with the Franklin section of Beekman would have been the best approach, but the construction of the Mobile station (now a Lukoil) has pretty much ended that possibility.

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

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Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.