William Cahill

Jon Corzine might need to fight to win a second term as Governor in America's most Democratic state, but today's Quinnipiac University poll offers no indication that he could lose a Democratic primary.  Among Democrats, Corzine has a 67%-21% favorable rating, and a 60%-31% job approval rating. (That's not much different from U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg, who won 60% of the vote against a credible primary challenger; Lautenberg has a 64%-10% favorable rating and a 65%-16% job approval rating among Democratic voter).   Democrats, by a 60%-25% margin, say he deserves to win re-election.

Would Ronald Reagan, the former movie actor who had been Governor of California for just two years, have beaten Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential election – if Republicans had nominated him?   The Reagan of the late 1960’s was perceived differently than he was when he was elected President in 1980 – he was viewed as Barry Goldwater’s guy, a conservative that was not necessarily in line with the Clifford Case wing of the New Jersey GOP.  In 1969, Reagan came to Millburn to headline a fundraiser for GOP gubernatorial candidate William Cahill on the same day the campaign announced key Democratic endorsements in Hudson County.  Cahill made only a brief appearance at the Reagan event, and headed instead for Democrats for Cahill events in North Bergen and Jersey.  The endorsements overshadowed Reagan’s visit.

In 1958, Democrat Alexander Feinberg and former GOP Assemblyman William Cahill faced off in the old first district for the seat of Republican Charles Wolverton, who was retiring after 32 years in Congress. A Democratic year nationally, Cahill held on for a 1,829 vote victory, 50%-49%. Had Cahill lost his congressional race, he probably would not have won election as Governor in 1969.  (Feinberg, a Cherry Hill Democrat, became friends with the Senate candidate that year, Harrison Williams.  More than two decades later, when Williams was indicted in the Abscam scandal, Feinberg was a co-defendant.)

The other race was a 1953 Special Election for the seat of Republican Clifford Case, who had resigned during his ninth year in office to become the president of The Fund for the Republic. (Case returned to politics one year later to win the U.S. Senate seat of retiring freshman GOP Senator Robert Hendrickson). Most observers at the time expected the Republican, Plainfield Mayor George Hetfield, to easily win Case's congressional seat. His Democratic opponent was a 33-year-old lawyer and World War II veteran who had already lost races for State Assembly in 1951 and Plainfield City Councilman in 1952, Harrison Williams.

Six of the last eight Governors of New Jersey launched their political careers by serving in the New Jersey State Assembly: William Cahill, Thomas Kean, James Florio, Donald DiFrancesco, James E. McGreevey, and Richard Codey. With that kind of historical precedent, is it possible that one of the 25 freshmen entering the Assembly on Tuesday could wind up living at Drumthwacket someday?

Republicans have held Jim Saxton’s House seat continuously since 1884, when George Hires, a GOP State Senator from Salem County, ousted one-term Democratic Congressman Thomas Ferrell by 1,742 votes.  Now, after four weeks of considerable drama and many surprises, the GOP candidate to hold this open seat against Democrat John Adler, the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, may be decided in a June Republican primary between Medford Deputy Mayor Christopher Myers, a Lockheed-Martin executive, and Ocean County Freeholder John Kelly. 

The public careers of Herbert Stern and Robert Del Tufo have long been intertwined, and the tension that currently exists between the two former United States Attorneys, now at opposite ends of the battle to fix the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, goes back almost thirty years. Stern is the U.S. Department of Justice's federal monitor overseeing the state-run school, and Del Tufo is the Chairman of the UMDNJ Board of Trustees.

Stern was a career prosecutor who went from law school to trying Homicide cases as an Assistant Manhattan District Attorney. (He was the DA sent to the scene when Civil Rights leader Malcolm X. Shabbaz was murdered.) He spent four years as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice's Organized Crime and Racketeering Section. When Frederick Lacey became the new U.S. Attorney for New Jersey in 1969, he hired Stern as Chief Assistant. The two met a year earlier during the prosecution of Peter Weber, the powerful head of the New Jersey Operating Engineers Union. Stern was the prosecutor and Lacey was the defense attorney; Stern won.

Stern was named U.S. Attorney in 1970, when Lacey became a Federal Judge. In 1974, Stern joined Lacey on the bench and was replaced by his deputy, Jonathan Goldstein, also a career prosecutor.

This trio of federal prosecutors won national attention for their war on political corruption and for their aggressive prosecution of organized crime figures. While nominally Republican (they were appointed by Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford at the suggestion of GOP U.S. Senator Clifford Case), they were viewed as fairly non-political. In fact, they took town several key members of Republican Governor William Cahill's administration; that scandal contributed toward Cahill's defeat in the 1973 GOP primary.

After Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election, Carter replaced Goldstein with Del Tufo, a Democrat who had served as an Assistant Morris County Prosecutor and as the Director of the state Division of Criminal Justice under Brendan Byrne's first Attorney General, William Hyland. During his three years as a federal prosecutor, the more partisan Del Tufo seemed to annoy Stern when he replaced many career federal prosecutors with lawyers that had political ties.

Stern spent thirteen years as a U.S. District Court Judge and was the presiding Judge at the U.S. Court for Berlin in 1979. Martin Sheen played Stern in the movie, Judgement in Berlin, based on his 1984 book. Del Tufo sought the Democratic nomination for Governor in 1985 -- he finished last in a field of five candidates. After the 1989 election, Governor Jim Florio appointed him to serve as state Attorney General.