It seems that the only person who feared that Amiri Baraka might stir up controversy as New Jersey’s state poet laureate was Amiri Baraka himself.
Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) warned New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey that he would “catch hell,” for honoring Baraka with the title last July. The poet made good on his promise at the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival in Stanhope, N.J., on Sept. 19. Baraka read the now-notorious poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” in which he suggested that 4,000 Israelis stayed home from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 because they had advance warning of the attacks. The following lines were met with boos from the crowd:
“Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed.
Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the twin towers
To stay at home that day
Why did Sharon stay away.”
The controversial stanza — one out of over 60 — refers to the “Big Lie,” a conspiracy theory that has been embraced by many people in the Arab world. Besides being widely regarded as anti-Semitic, the theory is a logistical impossibility — 4,000 Israelis never worked at the World Trade Center in the first place.
Not surprisingly, Baraka’s poem has inspired outrage around the country. Days after Baraka read the poem at the Dodge Festival, the Jewish Standard, a weekly paper in northern New Jersey, denounced the poem in an editorial. The Anti-Defamation League quickly wrote a letter to Gov. McGreevey and compiled a list of Baraka’s previous anti-Semitic remarks on its Web site. Various newspapers across the country also condemned the poem, including Baraka’s hometown paper, the Newark Star Ledger, which challenged Baraka on his own terms:
“Of poets one hates to be critical
But not when they’re anti-Semitical
And that’s why Amiri
Of whom we’ve grown weary
Should quit, heeding pleas non-political.”
But the 67-year-old Baraka won’t quit, something he made clear at an Oct. 2 press conference at the Newark Public Library. “I will not apologize and I will not resign,” he said. Baraka has vigorously defended himself against accusations of anti-Semitism, calling such charges an “an insidious attempt to defame and slander me.”
In his speech, Baraka also explained that “the poem’s underlying theme focuses on how black Americans have suffered from domestic terrorism since being kidnapped into U.S. chattel slavery. The relevance of this to Bush’s call for a ‘war on terrorism’ is that black people feel we have always been victims of terror, governmental and general, so we cannot get as frenzied and hysterical as the people who [are] asking us to dismiss our history and contemporary reality to join them, in the name of a shallow ‘patriotism,’ in attacking the majority of people in the world, especially people of color and in the third world.”
According to New Jersey law, the governor can’t fire its poet laureate, a post that lasts two years and includes a $10,000 honorarium. Now McGreevey is pushing for legislation that will give him the power to do so.
It’s a murky situation, especially post-Sept. 11, with a possible attack on Iraq looming. As Shai Goldstein, executive director of the Anti-Defamation League of New Jersey told Salon, and as other journalists have suggested over the past year, anti-Semitism appears to be on the rise around the world. It’s no wonder that Gov. McGreevey, under much political pressure, would want to clean up the mess about the state bard as thoroughly as possible.
Two significant questions remain: Would firing Baraka amount to censorship? And why was the notorious incendiary poet and radical activist, who has faced charges of racism and anti-Semitism in the past, selected for the rather prim position of “laureate” in the first place?
Let’s start with the second question. Baraka’s poetry, plays and politics have often been inflammatory. Ishmael Reed, another prolific African-American writer who, despite having had some disagreements with Baraka in the past, is publishing the poet’s next book, explained, “That’s his school. Allen Ginsberg went on trial for ‘Howl.’ It’s a provocative movement. This is not the first time that Baraka’s been subjected to controversy. That’s part of that movement. Sometimes they go off the deep end. That’s theater. That’s art.”
But Baraka is more than just a provocateur, and his critics have valid reasons for calling his work anti-Semitic. In 1980, Baraka published the essay “Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite” in the Village Voice. It’s a long piece that starts with his childhood in Newark and chronicles his artistic growth in Greenwich Village, his prominent role in the Black Arts Movement and the writing of his most famous work, “The Dutchman,” in 1964. That play, an attack on white liberalism, was an Obie Award-winner.
At the time, Baraka was married to a Jewish woman named Hettie Cohen. But after Malcolm X’s assassination, Baraka embraced black nationalism. He divorced Cohen around this time, writing in the article that, “As a Black man married to a white woman, I began to feel estranged from her … How could someone be married to the enemy?” Baraka later moved back to Newark and adopted Marxism.
Although Baraka insists that it was a Village Voice editor, not Baraka, who came up with the title “Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite,” the essay does read like a confession, or at least like an explanation of Baraka’s controversial beliefs. He doesn’t deny that anti-Semitism factored into his political growth. While he stipulates that his dislike for Jews stems from his problem with whites in general, it’s obvious that he has a more complex problem with Jews.
“We also know that much of the vaunted Jewish support of Black civil rights organizations was in order to use them,” Baraka wrote. “Jews, finally, are white, and suffer from the same kind of white chauvinism that separates a great many whites from Black struggle.” Much of his problem with Jews seems to stem from resentment of their claims to the status of an oppressed people: “… these Jewish intellectuals have been able to pass over the into the Promised Land of American privilege.” He also addresses his rejection of Israel: “Zionism is a form of racism.”
Baraka comes clean in the end. “Anti-Semitism is as ugly an idea and as deadly as white racism and Zionism … As for my personal trek through the wasteland of anti-Semitism, it was momentary and never completely real.”
Still, a look at Baraka’s poetry — lines of which he cites in this essay — would suggest that his anti-Semitism was very real. In some, his hatred toward Jews is matched by his hatred toward other groups, such as Italians and the Irish. “I have written only one poem that has definite aspects of anti-Semitism … and I have repudiated it as thoroughly as I can,” he wrote. That poem, “For Tom Postell, Dead Black Poet” includes lines like the following: “I got the extermination blues, jewboys” and “so come for the rent, jewboys.”
It’s lines like these that have compelled such critics as Jerry Gafio Watts, a recent biographer of Baraka, and commentator Stanley Crouch to call attention to the anti-Semitism in Baraka’s work.
“The governor has it all wrong,” Crouch wrote in the Daily News. “Jones [Crouch insists on calling Baraka by his given name] should not be asked to resign. Those who appointed him should resign … if they have read his work over the last 35 years. It’s an incoherent mix of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, black nationalism, anarchy and ad hominem attacks relying on comic book and horror film characters and images that he has used over and over and over.”
Black conservative activist and anti-affirmative action crusader Ward Connerly went further, bluntly suggesting that the committee who selected Baraka were trying to be politically correct.
“It is inconceivable that a white, anti-Semitic bigot who produced ‘poetry’ like Mr. Baraka’s would ever get funding from the New Jersey Arts Council, let alone be appointed as the state’s poet laureate,” Connerly wrote in the Washington Times. “… Yet, because Mr. Baraka is seen as an ‘authentic’ black artistic voice, he gets a pass from the council on matters of decency and taste.”
It’s not only the New Jersey Arts Council who considers Baraka an important poet. Baraka is featured in the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature (of course, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, also anti-Semites, are included in other Norton anthologies). Last year, he was inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters, whose members include Stephen Sondheim, Jasper Johns and Mark Twain (members are selected by their peers). The list of notables who think of Baraka as, at the very least, an influential figure, is fairly long. For example, Stanford scholar Arnold Rampersad puts him in league with Frederick Douglass and Ralph Ellison as one of eight writers “who have significantly affected the course of African-American literary culture.”
And according to two of the four poets who nominated him — a committee organized by the New Jersey Arts Council — Baraka was as logical a choice as any.
“If you look at any of the critical material and standard anthologies, he is represented,” said James Haba, the director of the Dodge Festival and one of the poets who nominated Baraka. “He has the national and international reputation that will persist beyond this moment. He is a New Jersey native, he lived almost all his life in Newark. He also has a strong following in the black community.
“What are you going to do? This is a major literary figure who has been active in New Jersey life for almost four decades.”
Gerald Stern, the first poet laureate of New Jersey, who also nominated Baraka, agreed.
“If I were to sit down with other poets in my living room a lot of names would come up: Alicia Ostriker, Stephen Dunn, C.K. Williams and Amiri Baraka, just to name a few,” said Stern. “It’s not an abnormal choice. It’s a legitimate choice.”
Both poets had not read “Somebody Blew Up America.” Baraka wrote the poem in October of 2001 and while it was circulated on the Internet and throughout the world, the only media attention it received at the time was in an article in the Daily Princetonian, the Princeton University student newspaper.
Both Stern and Haba cited Baraka’s 1980 confession in the Village Voice as evidence that he has repented for his sins. Neither of the poets believe he should be fired.
“Did he write anti-Semitic things at one time? Yes. He did,” Stern explained. “He apologized profusely so I took him at his word. I know his poetry and plays well. But I didn’t sit down for hours and ask to see his latest poetry. Maybe we should have. We should have done a lot of things. There was a sense that he had mended his ways.”
Stern suggested that he might not have nominated Baraka had he read “Somebody Blew Up America”: “‘Israeli’ is a code word for ‘Jew’ and he knows that, too. He’s a brilliant man. And there’s a long history of black-Jewish animosity, as well as friendship.
“I am sensitive to what appears to be the anti-Semitic utterance which reflects that Jews knew in advance [about the Sept. 11 attacks]. I’m sensitive as a Jew. However, a man is allowed to be paranoid.”
What might be most disturbing about the episode, however, is that Baraka — who phrases all of his ideas in the form of questions in the poem — really does believe that 4,000 Israeli workers stayed away from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.
“Yes, I believed it,” Baraka told Salon. “I wouldn’t have written it if I didn’t believe it. They have no right to call me anti-Semitic. I can’t have a position about a foreign country? They’re trying to protect the image of Israel so Bush can make war.”
In fact, Baraka believes that other Western nations, such as France and Germany, also had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, although it is the U.S. and Israel that he specifically targets in the poem.
“They couldn’t ‘connect the dots’? The fact is that the U.S. and Israel know they will be exposed. I know it will be.”
Baraka also called attention to other parts of his poem — stanzas that express sympathy for the suffering of Jews:
“Who put the Jews in ovens,
and who helped them do it
Who said ‘America First’
and ok’d the yellow stars”
According to Goldstein of the Anti-Defamation League, one stanza does not help Baraka’s case.
“He claims to respect the victims of the Shoah,” Goldstein stated, “but his words are designed to perpetuate the murder of millions of Jews in Israel.”
But is it rash to shove Baraka out the door as if he’s some lone lunatic? Both Stern and Haba raised the logical point that surely, if Baraka believes this, he’s not the only one — and that’s a much bigger problem than one man and a poem.
“I’m sorry to say that he’s not the only one who believes that’s true,” Haba said. “I don’t believe it’s true. Are we going to find some way to talk with people who believe that? That’s a serious issue that we might be tending to.”
Deborah Jacobson, executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey, agrees. “We can’t continue to use our pain and fear to justify our disregard for freedom, justice and equality. When we allow for the disintegration of our core democratic beliefs, then we’re really giving in to the terrorists.”
Goldstein rejects the claim that Baraka’s First Amendment rights would be violated if he were fired. “He has the right to say anything he wants,” Goldstein said. “He does not have the right to be honored for his speech. Does the First Amendment protect your right to not be fired for something you said?”
Still, according to Robert Pinsky, former U.S. poet laureate and author of “Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry,” “Poet laureate is not a job or a role or a government position, it is an honorary term. It is a form of recognition, like the key to the city … ‘Poet laureate’ does not entitle one to anything or oblige one to anything. It is like being given a compliment. You can’t fire somebody from a compliment.
“The poet laureate of New Jersey has the same right as any other American to make a fool of himself. Compliments can be regretted, but not revoked.”
Well, it’s pretty obvious that the governor of New Jersey regrets the compliment he paid the artist Amiri Baraka. Baraka, however, doesn’t seem particularly concerned about how his politics might be affecting his art.
“Does anyone doubt that the ‘Cantos’ would be much better if [Ezra] Pound’s thinking were less cockeyed, provincial, demented, nasty?” said Pinsky. “Poets are people; their works are human works. We all likely know, or can easily imagine, people capable of saying stupid, vicious things who also sometimes say beautiful or wise things.
“If a poem or a person espouses a stupid or vicious proposition, that makes the poem or person worse, in my judgment … In other words, each of us, and each of our works, is to be judged on the merits. Moral viewpoint is among the merits, I think.”
Cory Booker’s failed 2002 campaign for mayor of Newark heralded a new type of black politician. Booker was an outsider with Ivy-league credentials who was trying to unseat a veteran urban politician who had made a name for himself during the civil rights movement. Like other “new black politicians,” Booker’s appeal granted him entry to the political world and helped him circumvent long-standing black democratic machines. But what does this process, which has been repeated everywhere from Washington to Alabama, tell us about our country’s changing attitude towards race — and politics?
In her new book, “The New Black Politician,” Andra Gillespie follows the career of Cory Booker, from his start as a lawyer and community organizer through his successful run for mayor and his reelection, in order to illustrate what separates the new generation of black politicians from other black leaders before them. These new black politicians seek to create the same multicultural coalition that propelled Barack Obama to the presidency, but many lose their black support and fade from the political scene.
Salon spoke with Gillespie about racial electability, Cory Booker’s senate prospects, and what black politicians have in common with Will Smith and Tyler Perry.
How have new black politicians used what you call “elite displacement” to win elected office?
It’s a theory that’s transferable to other minorities as well, be they racial or religious — basically, groups that have experienced stereotyping in the past and have been marginalized because of these stereotypes. Elite displacement is what happens when an older generation of politicians who have largely come to power despite the stereotypes levied at them have a new generation of leaders, who are more assimilated into mainstream culture and who don’t necessarily wear the same type of ethnic or racial veneer as their predecessors, now running against them — particularly in cities where the majority is from that same racial group. What I’m interested in is how these young politicians break through. They normally have not been socialized within the institutions in that community. They’re outsiders to that community, and they’re trying to figure out a way to break into politics when all the traditional paths to power have been shut off.
What elite displacement describes is the practice by which these young African-American politicians try to circumvent the black political establishment to reach office for the first time. What they take advantage of is their access to mainstream institutions and culture, and they use that as their calling card. They may not get the support of the older black congressman, the city council, or the local political bosses, but they have access to mainstream media and their friends who have money, and they use that to amass a resource that can overwhelm the existing structure of the black political community.
Part of the reason they get so much interest and their story is so compelling is because people think of these older black politicians in terms of stereotypes. They are viewed as corrupt, ineffective, criminal and incompetent — not quite up for technocratic leadership. And this younger group of politicians, because they bring the right qualifications and pedigree to the table, fit the bill. They fit the archetype of what white audiences want to see black leaders look like, which would be very well-spoken, not talking about race all the time, and having credentials from the right schools, and that gives them a certain cache which makes their story very compelling. It helps them get on television and helps them attract volunteers to come from outside the communities to help them out. In my book, I explore the consequences of this strategy. It’s very hard for young black politicians to develop a deep connection to their constituency. Does their strategy help them build a broader base of support? Does it help them win over some of their critics, who will still hold on to some positions of power? And what does this portend for long-term governance?
One of the things in African-American communities that should be noted is that there are tons of problems. African-American representation of those communities have not ameliorated those problems. In the 40 years of black government in Newark and similar cities, you still see high rates of unemployment, high dropout rates and very paltry health indicators. The idea that putting blacks in power will act as a panacea, will help blacks improve their physical and emotional health standing, is not really true. The subsequent question becomes: Are these new black leaders the magic bullet to gain on the progress of political equality that was achieved in the 1960s?
How are civil rights leaders — the politicians who emerged from the civil rights movements — limited in their ability to govern and seek higher office?
Part of this has to do with the moment that they were elected to office. They were elected because of demographic changes in the communities in which they lived. As early as the 1930s, there was a mass exodus of whites from the cities to the suburbs because of deindustrialization, but it was hastened by the riots in 1967. The white and black middle class left, leaving a city that was predominantly African-American. So the demographics of the city gave the opportunity for a black politician to win elected office. But there were other things that happened. Just because blacks were able to win positions in the city doesn’t necessarily mean that blacks in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s were going to be able to win statewide office. There’s no state in the United States that is majority African-American. It creates a very hostile environment for blacks to be able to run for higher office. On top of it, there is evidence to suggest that even when blacks have held positions of power or leadership, they haven’t always been taken seriously. Earlier generations couldn’t do what President Obama has done. You can look at members of Congress who couldn’t even get their hair cut in the capitol, couldn’t eat at the dining hall where all members of congress were allowed to eat. There was still a caste system that wouldn’t even let them dream of being president.
What is a “black political entrepreneur”? Which politicians embody this term?
A black political entrepreneur is a type of young black politician who is most likely to use elite displacement. They are the type of politician who is de-racialized and who doesn’t have demonstrable ties to the black political establishment. They would be the type of person who would not be a child of the civil rights movement and wouldn’t be the mentee of a civil rights politician. We’re not talking about Jesse Jackson Jr. or anyone who inherited their political role. A black political entrepreneur is different from other types of black politicians because they have very progressive political ambitions. They are clearly itching to run for higher office. You can look at them and say, “That’s a senator, or a governor, or maybe even another president.” Black political entrepreneurs are the ones who take the most risks when running for office. They usually try to challenge older black politicians for power when most others would argue that it’s ill-advised. If you contrast Cory Booker with former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford Jr. , for instance, Harold Ford Jr. inherited a congressional seat. Black political entrepreneurs challenge strong incumbents for power instead of waiting their turn.
You compare black political entrepreneurs to Will Smith and civil rights politicians to Tyler Perry.
I’m not talking about ambition. I’m talking about crossover appeal, the degree to which people are de-racialized, and where their power comes from. Will Smith built his acting career as someone who started off in hip-hop but never had a hard edge. He was, arguably, on the cornier end of the hip-hop spectrum. When he moved into Hollywood and became an A-list star, everyone knew he was African-American, but he wasn’t cast as a black actor. He was a comedic actor, an action hero. He was somebody who wasn’t threatening and whom everybody loved. And because of that, he was able to build this amazingly successful Hollywood career.
Tyler Perry, on the other hand, is somebody who, if you look at his net worth, has done better than Will Smith, but who has been unabashedly black in terms of self-presentation and the types of projects that he’s chosen. Today, people pay attention to him in Hollywood because he was the highest-grossing actor in Hollywood last year. But he’s made that money almost solely in the African-American community. He’s been able to be successful in this niche market, and people take him seriously because he’s made a lot of money, but he’s still on the margins. The fact that he’s based in Atlanta and that he’s regularly panned by movie critics proves he’s not fully mainstream. He needs to be contended and dealt with because you cannot deny his success. There are black people who have problems with how he presents his characters. People think Madea is a stereotype and that his television show is also a stereotype. Will Smith and Tyler Perry are very powerful in their own right, but they get their currency from very different sectors of the American public, and that helps to contribute to their persona.
You provide some examples in the book of where, while vigorously campaigning against the incumbent, new black politicians end up reinforcing some negative stereotypes.
If you look at how the story usually gets framed in the media when the black political entrepreneur runs against the black incumbent, it’s usually cast in stark terms. Good versus Evil. It also gets cast as the anachronistic civil rights warrior going against a fresh person who doesn’t wear race on their sleeve. Given some of the stereotypes that exist of blacks in terms of their intelligence and corruption — and sometimes admittedly, the connection of some of these incumbents to corruption and incompetency — it ends up reinforcing stereotypes of the average black leader. The stereotype is that they should not be trusted, that they can’t lead. New black politicians continually reinforce the stereotype because they keep talking about the incumbents in those terms.
The consequence of this is twofold. In these minority communities — places where the black political entrepreneur is usually not needed — you will see the black constituencies rally around the incumbent because they believe the attacker is racially motivated or that the fight has a classist tinge to it. They are very resistant to having their leaders attacked.
Usually the younger black politician has something very valuable to offer their community. But eventually this notion that “this person is so much better than other black leaders” ends up being constraining for the black political entrepreneur. He or she gets held to incredibly high expectations. It becomes about how fast they can commit to change. And it reinforces the idea of the black political entrepreneur as a “magical black person,” as a black superhero. And the black superhero is the foil to the black villain — instead of transcending stereotypes, we end up reinforcing them. I think the notion of the black political entrepreneur as a black superhero who is going to save inner-city communities from blight and destruction ends up reifying this notion that normal black people are too stupid to run their communities and hold office. This ends up hurting everybody. If the black political entrepreneur can’t turn a community around very quickly, then it ends up looking bad for him, and it ends up reinforcing the idea that black people cannot govern themselves.
Do you see a backlash against black political entrepreneurs happening? I think of Adrian Fenty losing his reelection race for Mayor of D.C.
Absolutely. What’s really interesting about de-racialization theory, which underlies a lot of my work, is the strategy of black politicians reaching out beyond the black community to try to create a multiracial electoral coalition. People have always been concerned about the multiracial coalition falling apart because you can’t help but avoid race. We saw that happen with David Dinkins in New York City. Dealing with the Crown Heights riots and the Big Apple boycott, we see what would be a traditionally democratic voting bloc fall apart over race. One of the underlying assumptions of de-racialization is that black voters support black politicians. That’s a little harder to untangle when you have black-on-black elections where blacks are running against one another. And the assumption is that the two black candidates split the black vote, and the de-racialized new politician makes it up with the non-black vote.
What we’ve seen with Booker’s first mayoral race and Adrian Fenty’s loss is that you can lose enough of the black vote to lose an election. It’s a question of what the sweet spot is. Black political entrepreneurs should be comfortable not winning over some blacks. It’s just a question of how many black votes you lose. In Adrian Fenty’s case, he lost too much of the African-American vote. It then becomes a question of why. It wasn’t because of his technocratic leadership, because by all accounts he was a great leader. He left D.C. in better shape in 2010 than when he received it in 2006. He underestimated the extent to which style would be important and the extent to which people had a problem with Michelle Rhee. Style becomes really important. People don’t think that it should be important, but it is.
Black political entrepreneurs have national political ambitions. You can afford to lose some of the black vote, but if you alienate too much of it, you can lose a statewide election, which is what happened when Artur Davis ran for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Alabama in 2010. Black political entrepreneurs, at the end of the day, are still very very dependent on black votes. You can’t alienate the black voters, even when you disagree with them, and you can’t come off as disrespecting them or condescending to them. Especially if they would have been sympathetic and voted for you, if only you hadn’t disrespected them.
It strikes me that these politicians are setting themselves up for disappointment by promising so much change and progress during their campaigns.
I don’t know if you’re setting yourself up for failure, but I would warn black political entrepreneurs to tone down on the messianic rhetoric and to try to separate themselves from it, because it puts undue pressure on them. One of the things that I wanted to do in the conclusion of the book is to address the aspiring Cory Booker’s out there. I want them to understand that there are consequences, both positive and negative, for every type of political decision one makes. I’m not here to tell anybody, “No.” If you’re running against somebody who you truly think is incompetent, then you should point that out. But you should definitely be more circumspect in how you criticize them, and you should do it in the most respectful way. Booker learned that between his two campaigns. They toned down the stupid rhetoric a lot between the elections because they realized how much it harmed them.
Another thing I would tell budding Cory Bookers is to really assess the resources they have at their disposal. There are people who want to be black political entrepreneurs but who don’t really have access to the Stanford and Yale and Oxford alumni directories the way Booker does. They might not have friends in high places. They might not have the same fundraising capacity. It might not make sense to use the elite displacement election strategy if you don’t have the resources. Booker could overcome a lot of the negative externalities that come with elite displacement because he had this very, very deep base in mainstream culture. If other people don’t have that, because they didn’t go to Yale or Harvard, then you might want to cultivate a different sort of persona.
Where does Cory Booker go from here?
This is my observation: At one point, it looked like people were toying around with the idea of running him for governor. But, based on the decision last year to create the Federal PAC, I surmise that now they’re looking more at Frank Lautenberg’s senate seat. I think that’s a great idea. I think Booker would be a great senator. He could have the potential, with some longevity, to have a huge impact on the Senate. He could be Ted Kennedy-esque. As long as New Jersey residents are comfortable with both of their senators not being white (and hopefully no one brings that up or reminds them of it), then that’s actually really cool. If Cory were sitting with me right now and asked me, “Andra, what should I do?” I would tell him to go run for the Senate, without hesitation.
One of the top Democrats in New Jersey tells Salon that the Trenton world is suddenly treating a presidential candidacy by Gov. Chris Christie as a real possibility.
“It’s more serious now,” Richard Codey, who served as acting governor from 2004 to 2006, said in a phone interview Thursday afternoon. “Definitely. No question about it.”
A story in Thursday’s New York Post — written by Josh Margolin, a former Star-Ledger political reporter who is well-connected to Christie World — claims that urgent pleas from Republican luminaries have helped convince him to rethink his long-standing opposition to running.
Among New Jersey politicos, Codey said, the sense is that “it’s more likely that he’d run today as opposed to two weeks ago. When you’ve got Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush and all those Republican bigwigs calling you, saying you’ve got to do it for the party, you’ve got to do it for the country — it’s intoxicating. A lot of people would get drunk off that.”
“I think as each day goes by and more and more people ask him to do it, the more flattered he is … and it makes him more likely to do it than not, in my opinion,” Codey said.
Earlier this week, Christie claimed in a speech at the Reagan library that his state has become a national model of bipartisan productivity on his watch. “Our bipartisan accomplishments in New Jersey have helped to set a tone that has taken hold across many other states,” he said. “This is the only effective way to lead in America during these times.”
Codey laughed at this, noting that the votes that have allowed Christie to push much of his agenda — including a controversial overhaul of the state’s public employee pension system — through a Democratic Legislature came from loyalists of a pair of regional party bosses with their own parochial and personal interests.
“It’s not bipartisan,” he said. “He’s made deals with two party bosses who deliver their employees’ votes. That’s not bipartisanship.”
If anything, Codey said, Christie’s governorship has polarized the state, with some voters rallying around his pugnacious, in-your-face style and others fiercely resenting it. “We see with white males over 50, he’s cleaning our clocks — no question about it. But females? No, not at all.”
A poll released by Fairleigh Dickinson University this week showed men approving of Christie’s job performance by a 2-to-1 margin, with the governor barely breaking even among women. Overall, Christie’s approval rating stands at 54 percent, a marked uptick from earlier in the summer — and an obvious result, Codey said, of the fact that Christie “was on TV every 10 seconds” during Hurricane Irene.
If Christie were to win the Republican nomination, “it would be a battle for him to win New Jersey. We’re still a blue state,” said Codey. And among minority voters, “you’d see a turnout like you’ve never seen for Obama — it would be both a pro-Obama vote and an anti-Christie vote.”
Christie’s shaky home-state standing could complicate any decision on a presidential bid. To win the governorship in 2009, Christie strained to project a moderate-to-conservative image, something that could come back to haunt him in a national GOP race. But any pandering to national GOP audiences could send his New Jersey numbers plummeting, and make it even more difficult for him to come back to the state after a presidential loss and run for reelection in 2013.
“He’s moved to the right, without question,” Codey said. “The question is if he’s moved far enough right to satisfy those people in South Carolina, Mississippi and other states that are very far right. And I think that remains to be seen.”
And, he noted, there’s a flip side to Christie’s feisty style: “He’s got very, very thin skin” — something that could get him in serious trouble on the national stage. “I mean, just one time during a debate if he goes off and says the wrong thing — and he’s certainly capable of that — he could be down the tubes.”
Codey, 64, has himself been talked up as a potential Christie challenger in ’13. Seven years ago, he was the little-known president of the state Senate when Gov. Jim McGreevey abruptly resigned because of a bizarre gay sex scandal. Codey was next in line for the governorship, and racked up sky-high popularity during his 15-month run. But his party’s bosses, with whom he’s long had acrimonious relationships, united behind Jon Corzine and effectively blocked Codey from seeking a full term.
Still, he remains quite popular; the new FDU polls shows him in a dead heat with Newark Mayor Cory Booker for the ’13 Democratic nomination, with every other prospective candidate far behind. He said he’s focusing on his own reelection to the state Senate this fall — redistricting tossed him into a new, more Republican-friendly district — and that he wants “to see how this whole thing plays out with [Christie], and then make up my mind.”
While he wouldn’t vote for Christie for president, Codey said he wouldn’t necessarily be upset if he ran and won. Why?
“Because then we’d get a new governor.”
In late June, the Tina Fey sightings began along the Jersey Shore, and emails started rolling in.
“She’s here for the week — I hear she’s nice to her hosts!” “She’s entertaining a big group at the Blue Pig Tavern. They’re laughing a lot.” “I saw her walking on the beach this morning. She’s even more beautiful in person.”
This was Fey’s second straight year vacationing in Cape May, a shore town at the southern tip of New Jersey. By all citizen-paparazzi accounts, she and her family had a wonderful time. Of course, this is also the woman who had a wonderful time spoofing MTV’s “Jersey Shore” on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” her pregnant belly stuffed into some sort of animal-print mini, the month before her actual Jersey Shore retreat.
Love and mockery just go hand in hand in New Jersey, the state that just might be the best proof of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s timeless line that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
As “Jersey Shore” returns for a fourth season tonight, the Garden State is braced to become a pop-culture punch line again. (Even the comedians who live here treat us as a joke; I’m looking at you, Montclair’s own Stephen Colbert.) But America laughs at the spray-tanned douchebags and trolls of “Jersey Shore,” then showers HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” based on another Jersey Shore town, with praise and 18 Emmy nominations. It’s home to “Jerseylicious” and “The Sopranos,” and considers both Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen as poets of the people. We elect Jim McGreevey (“I am a gay American”) governor, but also Chris Christie (an American blowhard), and watch as the Boss tells the First Fan to stop using his songs as campaign fodder.
It’s a state with a split personality that stretches from one side of the turnpike to the other, and with a collective chip on its shoulder that comes from having our cultural products passionately admired and hilariously derided at the same time. The walls between high and low culture have been demolished — everywhere except New Jersey. We’re all of it, at once.
“Everyone from New Jersey isn’t ‘The Sopranos’ or the cast of ‘Jersey Shore’ in the same way that everyone from Queens isn’t Archie Bunker and everyone from L.A. isn’t a lifeguard on ‘Baywatch,’” says Fountains of Wayne bassist Adam Schlesinger, who grew up in Montclair. The band, whose new album “Sky Full of Holes” was released this week, is named after a now-closed lawn furniture store in Wayne, N.J. “It’s just an easy stereotype, and a fairly entertaining one, too, I guess. It’s harder to make a hit TV show about ‘many great minds and talents.’”
Of course, we’re not all like the drunks, the table flippers, the GLTs who populate MTV’s vision of the state. Do those “characters” on reality television exist in New Jersey? Well, yes, on the same level that reality television is actually real.
New Jersey is simply a cultural breeding ground. We’re this way by default, since the suburbs of two major cities reside within our boundaries and there are a lot of people here. Thomas Edison, James Fenimore Cooper, Stephen Crane are New Jersey exports, as are Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson and Anne Hathaway. Newark’s the hapless Nets but also Philip Roth. And, oh, the music: Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughn, Whitney Houston, George Clinton, Jon Bon Jovi, the Misfits, the Feelies, Yo La Tengo, the Jonas Brothers, the Sugar Hill Gang, Ice-T. All products of New Jersey.
On the other side, you have the New Jersey as others see it through their blinders. Our proximity to the New York media world has made it easy to launch reality shows with small budgets within our borders. It’s a lot cheaper to put your camera crews in Seaside Heights and focus on the more colorful members of our flock than it is to travel to, say, Tampa, where, as I learned attending college, the spray tan/fake tit culture thrives year-round.
“I’m sure Indiana’s a colorful, complicated place, too — but how would the rest of us know if nobody ever talks about it?” says Tom Perrotta, the best-selling author of “Election,” “Little Children” and the forthcoming “The Leftovers” — and a New Jersey native.
Being picked on by New Yorkers (who point to us as the feared “other” to justify why they’re spending $2,500 a month to live in a closet) has solidified our “Jersey Strong” attitude, though. No character embodied that as much as Tony Soprano. New Jersey is a little like him. Everyone wants to hate Tony, but they want to be his best friend and/or sleep with him, too.
“When I got out [to Hollywood] in the ’70s, they made fun of me. They threw back at me every single joke Johnny Carson ever told about New Jersey,” says Michael Uslan, producer of every Batman movie since 1989. He grew up near Asbury Park and his new memoir, “The Boy Who Loved Batman,” is in part a love letter to the state. “But things changed. After ‘The Sopranos’ came on, there was a new respect. I think they were afraid of me. I probably had the only car when I drove onto the lot of the studio where the guys were afraid to check my trunk.”
So could it be that while we’re hunkering down to weather the reality TV shitstorm, the state’s odd cultural duality has also created a strange short of cachet?
“I guess it had some kind of stigma to say you were from New Jersey, but it seems like now it’s almost … reverse cool,” says Schlesinger. “It’s been the subject of so many different kinds of movies, TV shows, songs that people seem to have a broader sense of it or something now. And sometimes it feels like everyone I meet everywhere is actually from New Jersey anyway.”
So fine. Reality TV is a salve for tough times. Let Jersey be your balm. Mock our “real” housewives, boo the women of “Jerseylicious.” Tune into the new season of “Jersey Shore.” Laugh if it makes you feel better. But keep this in mind: Saxophonist Clarence Clemons is a driving reason why Bruce Springsteen didn’t languish on Thunder Road. Instead, he became the Boss and Clarence became the Big Man. They met in at Asbury Park — on the real Jersey Shore. “Jungleland” is the greatest saxophone solo you will find in rock music. On the cover of “Born to Run,” Bruce is leaning on Clemons’ back.
Who’s leaning on who right now? Ben Franklin, yes, he of the famous turnpike rest area, once called New Jersey a keg tapped on both ends. Right now, it might seem like America’s kicking that keg. Just remember that you’re guzzling from it, too.
Cory Booker (Credit: AP/Julio Cortez) 
Chris Christie and Mitt Romney (Credit: Reuters/Brine Snyder) 
FILE - In this Sept. 27, 2011 file photo, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie speaks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. Chris Christie insists he's not running for president, but he flies around the country giving speeches and raising Republican money with a sly smile. Donald Trump might run as an independent. And Sarah Palin gets air time by hinting she'll announce some decision soon. Welcome to the Big Tease, driven by a combination of publicity, old-fashioned ego and possible presidential ambitions down the road. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)(Credit: AP) 
Deena and Snooki from "Jersey Shore" 
Gov. Chris Christie addresses reporters on the appointment of Superior Court Judge Sohail Mohammed 
