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TagsBY BOB MCHUGH
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOMCOM
COMMENTARY
Forget swine flu. New Jersey has cooties.
Remember in grade school when you'd walk a mile about of your way to avoid touching a girl or a nerdy guy?
They had the notorious and highly infectious cooties!
Well, these days, when it comes to the body politic, the Garden State has cooties bad.
Just about every member of the Legislature has them. New members get a key to the washroom, a handcuff key and a cootie-catcher.
Jersey City may as well be called Cootie City, because they outnumber residents – especially elected ones – ten to one. Assemblyman L. Harvey Smith (D-Hudson) has cootie bites all over himself as he tries to hold on to office in the face of federal charges he took bribes totaling $15,000 when running unsuccessfully for mayor earlier this year.Enough cooties have infected rural Waretown to munch away a dwarf pine in 10 minutes. They got former GOP Assemblyman Dan van Pelt, R-Ocean, who made the locals so itchy when the feds charged him with corruption that they've already taken his picture off the wall in the 9th District Legislative Office.
Sen. Jim Whelan, D-Atlantic, never got bitten by one, even in three terms as mayor of Atlantic City, where there are more cooties than salt water taffy. Senate President Dick Codey, D-Essex, doesn't have them, but with the company he has to keep the guy must buy repellant in bulk.
Among past Legislative greats, former state Sen. Bill Gormley, R-Atlantic, never caught them; his friend and rival, Sen. John Lynch, D-Middlesex, sure did.
Gov. Corzine, sadly, has them. The former Goldman Sacks tycoon has the money to buy an ocean of calamine lotion, but he just can't steer clear of the infected among his Democratic Party.
Following the front-page arrests last month of Smith, van Pelt and 42 other NJ politicos on corruption charges, the governor finds himself in a cootie swarm. Even a beer with President Obama won't help. (The president, by the way, doesn't have cooties – yet.)
Carla Katz, former union boss and gubernatorial girlfriend, has them big time. She's thinking about running for mayor of Hoboken, where cootie caught up with the incumbent. They won't even have to disinfect the office.
Chris Christie is cootie-free. In fact, that's the main thing the Republican former prosecutor has going for himself in his quest to unseat Corzine for governor in November. If Christie can keep the cooties off his back for four-plus years, he could be a truly historic governor.
Jim McGreevy did everything but make cooties the state bird. Christie Whitman didn't have them; Jim Florio, despite his best precautions, did. Tom Kean never heard the word and Brendan Byrne learned to step on them when he was a prosecutor and judge.
Sen. Frank Lautenburg, D-NJ, is amazingly cootie-free, though he often wades through swampy breeding grounds. Lautenburg's longtime advisor, Jim McQueeny, is a political Orkin man.
As for Lautenburg's colleague, Sen. Bob Menendez? LaCootierachas.
Cooties killed poor Jack Shaw, one-time big-time Democratic political consultant found dead at home recently after being caught in the corruption dragnet.
Are Republicans immune? Hardly. Once up-and-coming Essex County executive Jim Treffinger was infected, and had to leave town to take the cure. (Note: Cooties died of boredom as they tried to infect Doug Forrester, who won a GOP US Senate primary after the FBI sprayed for cooties in Treffinger's office.)
So, what's an elected official to do? Simple: use common sense and observe precautions. Don't talk into a plant or light fixture. Don't touch wads of cash. If some guy named, "Dwek," comes to your office with a deal too good to be true, he's got cooties.