During the gubernatorial primary season back in 2009 I speculated on the possibility that the Democrat Party in New Jersey would throw incumbent candidate Jon Corzine overboard and bet the ranch on Newark Mayor Cory Booker. I carefully vetted Booker and what I uncovered made my hair stand on end: here was a young, vibrant, clean-living, extremely articulate African-American political executive whose personal and political resumes could have been written by Horatio Alger (peruse his Wiki biography for a sample of what I found).
Of course, he was relatively new to the job, having been elected mayor in 2006. In the six years that have passed since he was elected, a lot of political water has run under the bridge of his administration: his budgets are balanced, he kept his promise not to raise taxes for two years, the crime rate is way down and city services have been streamlined and improved. He instituted an open-office policy that enables any citizen to meet with him directly and he routinely communicates with a huge Twitter following: during a blizzard in late December of 2010 a resident Tweeted for help shoveling her driveway and Booker did it himself.
But it gets better:
Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark carried a woman out of a burning house and was treated for smoke inhalation on Thursday night.
Mr. Booker arrived to his home in the Upper Clinton Hill neighborhood to find a neighbor’s house on fire, said Anne Torres, a spokeswoman. The Fire Department had not yet arrived, she said, and Mr. Booker went inside with two members of his security detail and rescued one woman. The mayor was treated at a hospital and released at 11:30 p.m. “Everyone is O.K.,” Ms. Torres wrote in an e-mail.
Mr. Booker, in fact, was well enough to post a Twitter message. “Thanks 2 all who are concerned,” he wrote after 10 p.m. “Just suffering smoke inhalation. We got the woman out of the house. We are both off to hospital. I will b ok.”
Think about that for a moment: the frickin MAYOR enters a burning building and saves a woman’s life. SAVES HER LIFE.
Bill Gates couldn’t afford the positive publicity and good will this act of heroism will generate. Politically speaking, Cory Booker just tapped the largest oil reserve on the planet. Jed Clampett should have had this kind of luck. Unfortunately for taxpayers and those who believe in the free market and the rule of constitutional law, Cory Booker is a liberal statist.
So what does this mean for New Jersey? It means, dear people, that Booker is a shoe-in for the Democrat gubernatorial nomination in 2013. But how will he fare in November? Surely the extremely popular Chris Christie will defeat him – even if by the narrowest of margins, right?
Not necessarily. For all his bluster and braggadoccio, Governor Zeppelin’s only real political power lies in his veto pen: thanks to recent redistricting, the Democrat Party will continue to dominate both houses of the state legislature for the foreseeable future, which is why any elections for the state Assembly or Senate are a worthless joke. There are very few Reagan conservatives in the ranks of the GOP and the conservative movement itself is on life-support, thanks largely to Steve Lonegan’s unsuccessful attempt in 2011 to hijack the Tea Party movement – which itself is became fractured and divided, thanks largely the efforts of Doherty thugs Rob Eichmann and Bill Winkler to destroy the Bayshore Tea Party group.
True to the moniker I bestowed upon him, one-time conservative poster boy Mike “The West Point Weasel” Doherty snubbed David Larsen – one of the few remaining high-profile Movement Conservatives presently running for office – to become a campaign operative for incumbent Establishment RINO Rep. Leonard Lance, who Larsen is challenging for the 7th District congressional seat.
After Obama is re-elected this coming November, expect to see a massive exodus of productive citizens, families and businesses (i.e., Republican voters) from the Garden State. The loss of jobs and reduction in tax revenues will trigger another round of property tax increases after Gov. Christie vetoes a legislative attempt to increase income or sales taxes. Deficits will continue to climb as the economy in New Jersey begins to decline, triggering more flight from suburbia: eventually, only the very rich or the very poor will be able to afford to live here – the former on their gated properties and the latter in the urban centers.
In light of this possible outcome, I predict that Chris Christie will see the writing on the wall and wisely decide not seek re-election (perhaps President Obama, in a gesture of gracious bipartisanship, will off Der Blimpmeister a plum position in his administration – possibly something like Fast-Food Czar). Predictably enough, the GOP Establishment will throw its support behind a moderate squish with major political connections – someone like Joe Kyrillos – who, by the way, will lose to Robert Menendez in the contest for the latter’s U.S. Senate seat this November - or, possibly, Tom Kean, Jr.
Any Movement Conservative with the testicular fortitude to step forward and throw his hat into the ring for the gubernatorial primary will be set upon by Eichmann, Winkler at the website (Pseudo) Conservative New Jersey and promptly “Bader-ized.” Not that it will matter: by that time, there won’t be enough conservative voters remaining to carry his candidacy past the primary.
If he is nominated by the Donks – and they would be absolute idiots not to do so – Cory Booker will trounce his RINO opponent in the November 2013 general election. As he begins his term as the first African-American governor of New Jersey, he will oversee the decline and collapse of the Garden State even as America’s first African-American president, Barack Hussein Obama (by then in the second year of his second term) will be overseeing the decline and collapse of the United States.
Welcome to your future, New Jersey.
