It didn't work. This week "the Whitman administration" including Verniero gets an up arrow for doing what no other governor or attorney general has done...confirmed and quantified the racial profiling problem on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Aside from doing the right thing, Verniero's extensive report on racial profiling is a big political victory for both the attorney general and the governor. Democrats will undoubtedly continue to try to exploit racial profiling for political points, but the Rev. Reginald Jackson, head of the Black Ministers Council of New Jersey, has made it clear that he will play no part in that.On this issue and several others, Jackson, who endorsed Whitman's re-election in 1997, has obviously learned that he gets no better deal from Democrats than from Republicans.

Jackson gets a huge up arrow too for continuing to move forward to eradicate racism in the State Police despite the political difficulties. The vigilant north Jersey minister said last week that he and the Ministers Council feel completely "vindicated" by Verniero's report. He pointed out that the pressure they brought to bear on the administration had also resulted in the firing of Superintendent Carl Williams and the state's withdrawal from the Gloucester County appeal, which Verniero announced when he released his report.

Jackson is keenly aware that he and his group will be forced to closely monitor the
remedial plan against racial profiling long after the political battles are over and the television cameras are gone. But, he's clearly ready for the long haul.

One way Jackson is keeping the pressure on is to push the Legislative leadership. Throughout the week, Jackson chastised State Sen. President Don DiFrancesco, R-Scotch Plains, for failing to speak out on racial profiling. DiFrancesco never really responded, but the arrow pointers decided the Senate President deserved an up arrow anyway because he put his money where his mouth is in order to stop the port from moving to Baltimore.

Everybody knows that New Jersey can kiss the flush economy goodbye if business loses the ability to ship out of Elizabeth. So can New York. But that fact seems lost on New York's bone-headed governor who has been snipping at Whitman about money for port improvements. Whitman has been playing hardball, but DiFrancesco is reportedly having better luck reasoning with George Pataki. DiFrancesco used his own PAC money to run ads on radio stations on the New York and New Jersey border urging Pataki to stop and think.

Bill Bradley gets an up arrow too for continuing to gain on Vice President Al Gore in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Fed Chairman Paul Volker endorsed Bradley last week, blasting a hole in the Wall Street support that Democrats have enjoyed under Clinton.

But if Bradley wins the nomination and goes on to defeat George W. Bush, what does that do to Bob Torricelli's presidential chances in 2008? Yep, 2008. Torricelli told the New York Times last week that is the year he's thinking for running for president. We're glad the Torch has laid his cards on the table, but we wonder what this admission will do to his strategy of making sure at least half the party leaders in New Jersey think he's really running for governor. The Torch gets a sideways arrow because he promised us he'd announce his presidential plans in The Trentonian.

Finally, too late for an arrow, but a round of applause goes to Rep. Chris Smith, R-
Hamilton, who got the Congressional Award from the New Jersey Conference of Mayors on Friday for his work with kids. Smith is a dynamo in Washington but has been often ostracized here at home for his outspoken position against abortion. The award is a proof that nice guys don't always finish last.

April 18, 1999
Gov. Christie Whitman -
Mayor Doug Palmer -
State Sen. Don DiFrancesco -
State Sen. Ray Lesniak -
Dick Zimmer -

Gov. Christie Whitman should be sitting on top of the world. She signed a billion dollar property tax rebate bill this week making sure that checks with her name on them will be in the hands of voters this fall...just before the Assembly elections. The Democrats continue to flounder in the face of her imposing candidacy for the U.S. Senate and for the first time since she's been governor, the Republican leaders in the Legislature are actually behaving like they are on her side.

But Whitman is taking far more hits than she needs to because of her appointment of Attorney General Peter Verniero to the Supreme Court. The governor has allowed herself to be sucked into defending Verniero when she should be ignoring Senate Democrats whose attacks on Verniero are politically predictable.

Last week Democrats baited Whitman with some negative leaks from the lawyers committee that was reviewing Verniero. The governor blasted off some strong words about character assassination and now it looks like she's fighting with the entire New Jersey Bar Association. We've got no doubt that the governor can win a fight with a bus load of lawyers, but why waste her time. Sideways arrow.

Senate President Don DiFrancesco, R-Scotch Plains, who will ultimately make sure that Verniero's appointment gets through the Senate, gets the unqualified up arrow Whitman should have gotten for the property tax rebate. Nothing cements voter loyalty like money. DiFrancesco, who is almost never pulled off balance no matter what antics the Democrats try, also scored last week by being re-discovered by the media as the guy who will be governor if Whitman goes to the Senate. DiFrancesco even made the "Hot" list in this week's Politifax, taking the spot away from the Chief Arrow Pointer and other reporters who've recently been monopolizing the headlines in New Jersey's only electronic newsletter.

Trenton Mayor Doug Palmer gets a gold-plated up arrow for proposing to make it illegal for cops and firemen to buy their promotions by paying off guys ahead of them to retire. This ugly practice involves thousands of dollars and is an obvious breach of ethics and professionalism even if some judge says its legal. Palmer's been criticized for keeping the pressure on Trenton's cops, but these slimy little payoffs make it clear that many of Trenton's finest need some coaching on the judgment calls.

Meanwhile, Democrats continue to make us wonder how a party with so many big shots can have so few leaders. No one person is to blame for the continuing fiasco in the race for the Democratic senate nomination, but we're going to give State Sen. Ray Lesniak, D-Elizabeth, the down arrow because he should have seen it coming.

While former governor Jim Florio continues his march from his south Jersey base toward the Senate nomination, Lesniak and the North Jersey crowd have come up with no alternative except the rich guy, Jon Corzine. Corzine's record as the head at Goldman-Sachs violates almost every value Democrats are supposed to stand for. He's bad on the labor, bad on the environment, big on debt and he doesn't vote much.

You can understand why other folks who want to make sure that Florio doesn't take the Democrats down the same old road again are mad that the party bosses don't seem to be paying attention to potential candidates like Rep. Frank Pallone, D-Middlesex and Michael Murphy who always vote and have good records on labor, environment and debt.

Senator Bob Torricelli and his Jersey fundraisers on the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee are also to blame for recruiting a big check writer who made a half billion dollars on Wall Street to run for the Senate and believing they can pass him off to voters as a regular guy. The party bosses say they are afraid that Florio will remind voters of the old days of Democratic tax and spend policies. But how do they think Corzine (who doesn't remember whether he voted or not) will strike voters? Believe it or not, half a billion dollars is a lot of money to some people.

Finally, a down arrow for Richard Zimmer, who announced this week that he'll be running for his old congressional seat which Hopewell Democrat Rush Holt won last November. Zimmer got all the right endorsements for his candidacy, but he gets a down arrow because Mike Pappas, who took the seat after Zimmer left to run for the Senate, immediately announced he will be in the race too. This weakens what will be a tough Republican challenge against Holt who has become the darling of the Democrats both in New Jersey and in Washington. Sometimes primaries can't be avoided, but this one might have been if all the GOP players had gotten together and hammered out a deal. We don't think Zimmer tried hard enough to make that happen, and as a result, he starts off behind.

Sun., April 11, 1999
Gov. Christie Whitman -
Rep. Frank Pallone -
Jon Corzine -
Attorney General Peter Verniero -
Hamilton Mayor Jack Rafferty -

We know the fact that Christie Whitman has earned another up arrow this week is bound to fuel the Democratic outcry that the governor doesn't have to work as hard as everybody else to earn the coveted upward pointers. But critics must be aware that the arrow-pointers grade on the curve. Whitman is not required to compete against some idealized standard of political excellence that might be in place in states where everything is not controlled by party bosses.

Whitman only has to come out on top using New Jersey rules, and it's clear that she's done it again this week. Just look at this simple party-to-party comparison. When Whitman finally announced she'd make the run for U.S. Senate on Thursday she had already cleared the primary opposition from the field with a few phone calls.

No powerful Republicans pushed her out of the race because there was fear that New Jersey voters might not respond to a woman. Compare that to the Democrats, who lost their best candidate for the Senate, Rep. Bob Menendez, D-Hudson, because some party bosses didn't think Garden State voters were ready for a Hispanic.

You also didn't find any powerful Republican out there looking for a richer candidate to put up their own money for a campaign so they wouldn't have to work so hard fund-raising. Whitman's rich but she never puts much of her own cash into her races. She expects her party to come across with the dough and they do. On the other side, Democrats are seriously looking at Jon S. Corzine, the chairman of Goldman-Sachs and a potential sugar daddy, to run for the nomination so they won't have to pick up his tab.

Then there's the likability factor. Whitman's not a warm and effusive person and lots of the GOP power players don't care for her personal style. But reports from Republican boss meetings indicate that nobody has discussed Whitman's "likability" in regard to the Senate race. She's the best candidate, so she's in. Who cares if the bosses like her.

Meanwhile, Democratic power bosses say they are hesitant to go with Rep. Frank Pallone, D-Ocean, the second best Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, because some report that the chemistry just isn't there when they talk with him.

Chemistry?

So let's do the math. Whitman's got the Republican nomination sewed up 18 months from the general election and all the party's fund-raisers are ready to make sure she has all the money she needs to win. On the Democratic side, they've got zip.

For the record, Corzine gets a down arrow and a strong reprimand from those of us at Arrow Central who are all strong defenders of participatory democracy. Reports released this week found that Corzine has only voted in three general elections since 1988 and he's never voted in a Democratic party primary. Corzine's defenders say he's been busy for the last ten years, but that's why we have absentee ballots.

The exposure of Corzine's shoddy voting record is a big boost for Pallone and it also earns him an up arrow. The Ocean County congressman is looking more and more like the only alternative to Jim Florio.

Hamilton Mayor Jack Rafferty gets an up arrow too for 30 years of stunningly good politics in Mercer County. Rafferty changed the GOP image in this part of the state, giving it a more blue color and ethnically diverse point of view. Through three decades of both fat and lean times, Rafferty has always managed to keep most voters happy. One sign of a masterful politician is that even his enemies like him and Rafferty is a masterful politician.

Attorney General Peter Verniero is in just the opposite situation. Many of his political allies don't like him and that feeds the natural Democratic opposition to his appointment to the Supreme Court. He could have avoided all of this if he had not pushed Whitman to appoint him to the high court right now. If Verniero had thrown himself into the racial profiling investigation and State Police reform and logged some more time as Attorney General, at the next opening of the Supreme Court, he'd have been confirmed in half an hour. Instead, he's had another bad week and gets another down arrow.

Poll earns Christie up arrow

Gov. Christie Whitman -
Jim Florio -
Bill Bradley -
Trenton Mayor Doug Palmer -
State Sen. Joe Kyrillos -

Gov. Christie Whitman says she pays little attention to the polls, but the arrow-pointers carefully scrutinize every little cross tab because they are a window into the soul of the New Jersey voter. We weren't surprised when Quinnipiac College released survey results last week which showed that 50 percent of all Garden Staters think Whitman is a better governor than Jim Florio was. That number alone was enough to earn her an up arrow. It should also stop a lot of cocktail party debates cold.

Only 18 percent think Florio did a better job.

The poll also showed that Whitman would whip Florio if he is the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate next year.

Florio didn't let his gloomy poll showing back him down from his mission to pursue the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat. Far from it. After a big "Welcome Back Jim" party in Bellmawr featuring State Party Chairman Tom Giblin, Florio got two major Democratic fund-raising guns on his team -- Clive Cummins and Al DeCotiis. He also is continuing to warn county leaders that if they don't support him, he'll put up slates of rival candidates to disrupt their party lines.

The arrow-pointers absolutely approve of hardball politics and the scrappy South Jersey boxer may end up being the Democratic nominee. But he didn't have a good week and amid all this bravado could be a simple case of denial. He gets a down arrow.

Trenton Mayor Doug Palmer gets a down arrow, too, for an unforced error resulting in a sloppy turnover in his push to get the top cop job out of the hands of civil service. Palmer thought he'd put the referendum for the change on the ballot in November, but he forgot to tell the City Council. The group took it upon themselves to put it up for a vote this spring when it will be much tougher to pass.

Palmer's idea has a lot of merit. We hope he didn't blow it.

Another thing the Quinnipiac College poll showed was that while folks like Whitman, they love Bill Bradley. The survey found that the former Princeton hoopster and New York Knicks star easily slam dunks everybody else who's running for president. New Jersey voters like Bradley better than the popular Texas Governor George W. Bush and Elizabeth Dole, Bob Dole's wife. Bradley beats Bush by 18 percentage points and Dole by 31 percentage points.

The poll showed that Bush would beat Vice President Al Gore by 7 points, so we assume that Bradley could have beaten him too if the pollsters had matched them up. We know the odds are against our former senator, but those kind of numbers earn him an up arrow.

State Sen. Joe Kyrillos, R-Middletown, also gets an up arrow for taking a stand in favor of forcing towns and school boards to hand over public documents. After some New Jersey newspapers systematically got proof that municipalities don't always hand over public documents to citizens who ask for them, Kyrillos told us he was on the side of the people. "I believe things that are public should be public," Kyrillos said, specifying that citizens have a right to look at everything, including the salaries and contracts of public officials.

There aren't enough arrows to go around for Tom Byrne, the former State Democratic chairman and son of Brendan, who has raised a quarter million dollars in his race for the U.S. Senate this week while everybody else is still trying to figure out how to stop Florio. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-Ocean, is also looking better all the time to many North Jersey Democrats who are on the "Anybody but Florio" mission.

Finally, for those of you who wondered if the new "Doonesbury" comic strip character named Toricelli is related to our junior senator, the answer is no. We asked cartoonist Garry Trudeau and he denied that "The Torch" was his cartoon inspiration.