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Last Updated November 30, 2005
Update: November 30, 2005 Jon Corzine, former chairman of Goldman Sachs, was elected senator from New Jersey in 2000 after waging the most expensive Senate campaign in American history. Corzine grew up on a family farm in Downstate Illinois, far from New Jersey; he went to college at the University of Illinois, business school at the University of Chicago and served six years in the Marine Corps Reserve. In 1975 he joined Goldman Sachs in New York; his entry-level position included fetching coffee for his superiors. Corzine was a successful bond trader and a protégé of Robert Rubin, who became Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration. In 1980 Corzine was made a general partner and in 1994 he became co-chairman and CEO. In May 1999 Goldman Sachs went public, and the $3.66 billion initial offering netted Corzine more than $300 million; he retired in 1999 after a management shakeup. Aside from contributing to Democratic (and some Republican) candidates, he was not involved in politics, indeed did not vote in primary elections from 1988 to 1998 or in the 1991, 1995 and 1998 general elections; in 1997 he co-chaired a presidential commission on increasing investment in technology, infrastructure and schools. In early 1999, a Senate race was probably the farthest thing from Corzine's mind. Then, in February 1999, Senator Frank Lautenberg announced he would not run again in 2000 (Lautenberg later returned to win election to Senator Bob Torricelli's seat in 2002, and is now Corzine's junior colleague). Plunging immediately into the race was former Governor Jim Florio, still unpopular for the $2.8 billion tax increase he secured in 1990. In April Governor Christine Todd Whitman, presumably the strongest possible Republican candidate, announced she was running. Many Democratic insiders, including Torricelli, feared that Whitman would win the seat, and scurried around to find other contenders. They found Corzine, with $300 million and without a job. He started running, going around the state to meet leaders of the county Democratic organizations, who are considered vital in the primary, and, it was revealed much later, contributing generously to them and to community organizations. He quickly cornered organization support outside Florio's home area in South Jersey and, like most local Democratic insiders, endorsed Al Gore over New Jersey's Bill Bradley. Meanwhile, Corzine's great wealth and his willingness to spend it cleared the field; Whitman withdrew in September 1999. Corzine's money talked even while most New Jersey voters had never heard of him. Still, Florio campaigned aggressively. He attacked Corzine's inexperience and spotty voting record. Even so, New Jersey Democratic leaders dreaded that Florio would lose to even the little-known candidates running for the Republican nomination. In March, three months before the primary, Corzine went up with TV ads in the New York and Philadelphia markets. He set forth his liberal stands on issues--for a universal health care system, for government payment of tuition to college or vocational or technical school for students with at least a B average, for gun control, for abortion rights. Corzine's investment--he spent $35 million up to the June primary--paid off. He won a 58%-42% victory. After the primary, Corzine cut back on spending--for a while. The Republican primary, with a pathetically low turnout, was won by 7th District Congressman Bob Franks--amazingly, a member of the same church as Corzine. Corzine's ads talked about his big-government positions in appealing terms, but he made a political neophyte's mistakes and that got him bad publicity. In early September he told the Sierra Club he had voted for an open space referendum in 1998; but in 1998 he had not voted at all. Still stuck below 50% in the polls, he started running negative ads against Franks two weeks later. He had been refusing to make his income tax returns public, on the ground they violated a confidentiality agreement with Goldman Sachs. Then in mid-September he released records showing that in 1996-99 he made $145 million, paid $43 million in taxes and gave $25 million to charity. But when reporters started investigating which charities, they found that he had stepped up giving to New Jersey groups in 1999, and that he gave hundreds of thousands to groups whose leaders and sponsors later endorsed him. He gave $30,000 to a dinner honoring Lautenberg, who later endorsed him; he gave $50,000 to Operation Rainbow/PUSH, and Jesse Jackson endorsed him the night before the primary; he gave $25,000 to St. Matthew's A.M.E. Church in Orange and was endorsed by the Black Ministers Alliance of New Jersey. When he was asked whether he had contributed to any of the churches, he said no; it turned out his family foundation made the contribution. Franks, like Florio, argued that Corzine was trying to buy a Senate seat and attacked him for failing to disclose the tax returns and for backing "universal" government programs that were unrealistic and too costly. When Corzine's numbers stalled because of his mistakes, Franks held onto his money and spent $2.5 million in the last two and a half weeks, when he also benefited from endorsements by The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Corzine spent $7.4 million on turnout efforts including, embarrassingly, busing in residents of Philadelphia homeless shelters and halfway houses to work on his campaign. In the end Corzine spent more than $63 million, the all-time record. He won 50%-47%, with big margins in central cities--the turnout effort delivered. But that trailed the generic vote in increasingly Democratic New Jersey. In the Senate Corzine has had a very liberal voting record; he has consistently argued that Democrats, having earned credibility on macroeconomic issues in the 1990s, should take forthright liberal stands. He continued to support universal health care, called for a national moratorium on the death penalty and a national ban of racial profiling; he voted against the Iraq war resolution in October 2002. He voted against the 2001 Bush tax cuts and in August 2002 said Congress should "rescind or freeze" them; in January 2003 he led Democrats in opposing that year's Bush tax cut, arguing that by siphoning off dividends it might reduce investment and called for a $300 rebate instead. On Social Security he was one of the Democrats' leading critics of individual investment accounts. But he got the most attention on the issue of corporate accountability raised by the collapse of Enron in December 2001. Majority Leader Tom Daschle made a point of having Corzine at his side when speaking on the issue, and it is obviously a subject on which he has special expertise. Corzine argued that Enron and other scandals indicated the need for more regulation. On the Banking Committee, he worked with Chairman Paul Sarbanes on his corporate accountability bill, and bemoaned that it seemed stalled in June 2002. But then the WorldCom scandal came along, and the bill, slightly amended, became the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. He has argued that financial services regulation should be concentrated in the Federal Reserve and the SEC, not the Comptroller of the Currency or the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, and said that the current system provides no consolidated view of regulation of derivatives markets. In January 2004 he criticized the practices, exposed by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, of mutual funds and proposed a study of whether they should be regulated. Corzine has pushed for liberal legislation on many fronts, not always with success in a Republican Senate. He and colleague Frank Lautenberg voted against the Medicare/prescription drug bill in November 2003, though it was backed by some New Jersey pharmaceutical firms. He fought successfully in November 2003 to delay for a year the Education Department's reductions in deductions for state taxes when calculating Pell grants; this would hurt most in high-income states like New Jersey. He sponsored an amendment to the bill protecting gun manufacturers from lawsuits which would allow law enforcement officers to sue gun manufacturers and dealers. With Russ Feingold, he sponsored a ban on racial profiling, which would follow Justice Department guidelines and provide for civil enforcements and private lawsuits. He has worked for several years to raise the maximum penalty for willful work safety violations that result in an employee's death from six months to 10 years. He wants to increase the guaranty in VA home mortgage loans from $60,000 to $83,000, 25% of the Freddie Mac conforming limit; this would allow veterans to buy homes worth up to $333,000, which are pretty numerous in New Jersey. In July 2004 he and Sam Brownback sponsored a resolution declaring the Sudanese government's actions in Darfur a "genocide" and calling on other nations to join the United States and try to stop it. September 11 hit New Jersey especially hard--Corzine noted that 10 people from Summit, his hometown, died at the World Trade Center--and Corzine's major initiative in response was a chemical security bill that would require businesses that house chemicals to conduct vulnerability assessments and consider safer security technology. He sought to attach it to the homeland security bill in fall 2002, but others argued that it would put undue burdens on stores selling fertilizer and pesticide. In 2003 the Environment Committee passed an alternative requiring chemical companies to submit security plans to DHS for approval; chemical companies argued that Corzine's version would amount to government micromanagement. He was a co-sponsor of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, which became law in November 2002. Corzine is a stronger partisan than many senators who have spent all their adult lives in politics, and from 1999 has thrown himself, and his money, into building the Democratic party in New Jersey and in the nation as a whole. In 2003 he liberally supported county Democratic organizations, which helped Democrats win majorities in both houses of the legislature. Throughout the 2002 cycle he let it be known that he would like to become DSCC chairman after the election. He showed his skills at handling difficult political situations in the imbroglio over whether Bob Torricelli should drop out of the 2002 Senate race. He had backed Torricelli all along, but helped to negotiate Torricelli's departure and the selection of Frank Lautenberg to replace him. In December 2002 Tom Daschle chose Corzine to head the DSCC. Corzine did an excellent job of raising money in 2004, and during some periods the DSCC outraised its Republican counterpart, something few expected after the McCain-Feingold law outlawed soft money contributions. He helped to recruit candidates who could run far ahead of the party's presidential nominee in Alaska, Colorado and Oklahoma, and he recruited and discouraged primary competition for first class candidates in four of the five southern states where Democrats were retiring. "When you have primaries, you leave bloodied souls coming out of them." Through much of the spring and summer, Corzine said that Democrats had a better than 50% chance of gaining seats. Instead, they lost all five southern states and Daschle, despite late infusions of money, lost in South Dakota, for a net loss of four seats. This must surely have been a disappointment to Corzine, but he had another political preoccupation: running for governor of New Jersey. Democrats in the state had become used to dropping candidates who seemed unable to win, as they had done to Torricelli in October 2004. In summer 2004, when McGreevey's job ratings were low, there was talk of replacing him with another candidate. When asked if he was interested, Corzine said, "Why would I work so hard to take back the majority in the Senate if I were leaving? It just doesn't actually fit with common sense." But he also said he missed being in an executive position. At the Democratic National Convention Corzine, not McGreevey, was head of the delegation. Then, on August 12, McGreevey announced that he had had an extramarital affair with a man and would resign effective November 15. Under New Jersey law, if he should resign before September 3 there would be a special election on November 2, and the rules would enable state party organizations to exercise significant influence in picking a favored candidate. Camden County Democratic Chairman George Norcross and Middlesex County Democratic Chairman John Lynch, both staunch supporters of McGreevey and Corzine (he had given $4 million to county organizations) and adversaries of state Senate President Richard Codey, who would become acting governor on McGreevey's resignation, urged McGreevey to resign before the deadline. They didn't want Codey to be governor for 14 months, as he would be if McGreevey resigned in November, and possibly for five or nine years, if he won the job in his own right. Corzine made it clear he would run for governor if McGreevey resigned before the deadline, and no one in either party seemed to have the name identification and the fundraising ability to beat him in November. On August 18 McGreevey and Corzine spoke on the phone and, as Corzine put it, "The governor made it clear in our conversation his absolute intent to serve until November 15, 2004. I accept that decision as final." "If I really want to get things done, I need to be in the majority," Corzine has said. On election night 2004 it was clear he would not be in the majority in the Senate for at least two years and quite possibly much longer. The ability of a New Jersey governor to get things done is not in doubt: he or she is the strongest governor in the nation, the only statewide official who appoints all others, including the attorney general and the 21 county district attorneys. On November 4 Corzine held a meetings of political advisers and supporters--the beginning of his governor campaign, it seems. The one obstacle was Richard Codey. After he took office November 16 (McGreevey insisted on remaining governor for all 24 hours of November 15), Codey started to make appearances around the state and seemed to cast off his reluctance to run for the job in 2005. Meanwhile, 1st District Congressman Rob Andrews, who narrowly lost the 1997 gubernatorial primary to McGreevey, indicated that he might be interested in running for governor too; with his base in South Jersey, he looked like a formidable contender. On December 2, Corzine announced he was running. He said his wealth insured that he would be "unbought and unbossed." Codey made moves to demonstrate his own support but Corzine, Norcross and Lynch had lined up support from dozens of Democrats--Congressmen Robert Menendez and Frank Pallone (both interested in the appointment to the Senate Corzine would make if elected governor), Speaker Albio Sires and many others whom Corzine had supported generously over the years. All were aware that, if elected governor, Corzine would name his own successor as senator. On January 31 Codey announced he was not running and backed Corzine. Under New Jersey law, Codey as acting governor remained president of the Senate and would remain in the Senate, presumably as president, after the November 2005 election. In June 2005 Corzine won the June primary with no serious opposition, and in a Democratic state would seem to be the favorite. But George W. Bush's 46% in New Jersey in 2004 suggests the state is a little less Democratic than it used to be, and Corzine won the 2000 Senate race by only 50%-47% after spending $63 million. The Republican nominee was Douglas Forrester, who lost to Lautenberg in the 2002 Senate race and spent $10 million out of pocket to win the party nomination for governor. He seemed likely to attack Corzine for his ties to Democratic bosses (Corzine donated to charity $88,000 he received from leading McGreevey fundraiser Charles Kushner after Kushner pleaded guilty to bribery) and to argue that he would raise taxes. Who will be the new senator if Corzine becomes governor in January 2006? It will be his choice. In early 2005, those interested included six of the state's seven Democratic congressmen, in numeric order, Rob Andrews, Frank Pallone, Bill Pascrell, Steve Rothman, Rush Holt (whose father was elected senator from West Virginia at age 29 in 1934) and Bob Menendez. Another option for Corzine might be to appoint a "stop-gap" senator--who would not seek reelection and thus enable Corzine to avoid alienating the many interested candidates and their regional supporters. The Republican frontrunner in mid-2005 was state Senator Tom Kean Jr., whose father was elected governor in 1981 and 1985.
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