Liberals Rooting For Kean To Defeat Menendez

Now even some liberals are coming out against New Jersey’s culture of political corruption and are rooting for Tom Kean to defeat Bob Menendez in the New Jersey U.S. Senate election.

I thought I might try to start a similar trend among liberals: We should root for Bob Menendez's defeat in the New Jersey Senate race so that it might serve as a wake-up call to the New Jersey Democratic party that it really needs to clean up its act.

Menendez, of course, is currently embroiled in an ethics scandal. The most recent shoe to drop came today, with this damning report in the Philadelphia Inquirer about longtime Menendez confidant Donald Scarinci putting the arm on a New Jersey psychiatrist to hire a Menendez crony or lose his fat government contract.

And Menendez is just the latest New Jersey Democrat to be plagued by questionable ethics. Before him there was Jim McGreevey. And Bob Torricelli. And John Lynch. And Ray Lesniak. The list goes on.

What's particularly maddening about the current situation--in which a seat that should be safely Democratic is now in play, thanks to Menendez's ethics problems--is that it was completely avoidable. In the summer of 2005, while Menendez was still in the U.S. House of Representatives, he was already under an ethics cloud. And yet, when it came time early this year for the newly elected governor Jon Corzine to pick someone to fill out the remainder of his term in the U.S. Senate and thus become the de facto Democratic nominee, Corzine still picked Menendez!

All of which makes me think that the powers that be in the New Jersey Democratic Party, including Corzine, just don't get it. And the only thing that might make them get it would be the remarkable feat of a Republican winning in a blue state in this most Democratic-friendly of election years. Save the New Jersey Democratic Party. Vote Kean.

As we’ve pointed out before, “Democrats have discovered that New Jersey voters will elect whoever they put on the ballot regardless of how sleazy and corrupt the nominee. The party bosses have good reason to believe this is the case given the track record of the state.” “New Jersey's Democrat Party leaders have created a culture of corruption in our state and they have been well rewarded for their achievement.”

It remains to seen if voters will once again reward Democrats and keep the culture of corruption New Jersey’s claim to fame.