Schundler's Salience
Finding compassionate commitment beyond the GOP
Harvard Political Review
Monday, April 1, 2002
By Christine Telyan
The good fight is the good life." Be it a rally, campaign speech, or intimate gathering, Bret Schundler is bound to utter these words. To some, they are a political catch-all, while for others, they represent the galvanizing sincerity of a local leader. Twice reelected mayor of Jersey City and the 2000 Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey, Bret Schundler's politically anomalous career speaks to the unusual depth of this rank-and-file outlier. Moral, articulate, and self-assured, Schundler lacks only the rubber stamp approval of the Republican Party. More likely to run for president than for Congress, Schundler is taking a step back from the bustle of campaigning to return to his public advocacy organization, Empower the People. There he will devote himself to policybuilding and issue awareness.
Schundler recently visited Harvard's Institute of Politics and sat for an interview with the HPR. Below, Schundler explains what he learned from a race that began with former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman's appointment to head the EPA and escalated into contention within the state Republican Party.
HPR: Do you see yourself on the libertarian side of the Republican Party?
Bret Schundler: For sure. In the American political spectrum, you have very few anarchists and communists. You have a number of people who are somewhat libertarian and a lot more who are democratic socialists. To me, to be a strict libertarian means that you believe government's only proper role is to defend the natural rights of the individual. Libertarianism is connected to the philosophy of the Founders, who believed that there is such a thing as nature, right and wrong, just and unjust, and natural rights.
The challenge the Founders fully appreciated is how to create a government that does good things without becoming a self-aggrandizing force in society. For Republicans, you do this through a whole series of mechanisms that create accountability to the people. A voucher is a paradigm of Republican policy. The way vouchers work is that you raise money so that you can have money for a low-income person to get an education. Politicians don't control that money; instead, it's put into the hands of the poor individual it was meant to help. In this way, government can constructively do more than simply secure natural rights, as long as it's kept directly under the control of the people.
HPR: In your recent bid for the governorship, the New Jersey state Republican party proved to be an obstacle to your candidacy. How did this impact on your campaign funding?
BS: The campaign was capped at the money we could raise under New Jersey election law. But the state party didn't raise much money. Acting Governor Donald DiFrancesco told the finance committee not to give to the state party and just to contribute to the Senate and Assembly campaign committees. As a result, those candidates had enough money for themselves, but I was hurt. The Republican candidates ran their individual races while I had to defend myself. The Democrats, on the other hand, ran a joint campaign, in which everybody was on the same page and the angle of every legislator was to demonize Schundler and convince constituents to vote Democrat.
HPR: So do you think the state Republican party was responsible for your defeat?
BS: No, I think that if we had done everything right, we probably still would have lost. The deciding factor was eight years of Republican leadership in which property taxes continued to rise and car insurance continued to go up. But I think we could have come a lot closer if Bob Franks had not come into the race and we had an early end to the primary.
Still, I made some tactical errors. One big mistake was in thinking you shouldn't count your chickens before they're hatched-I didn't even think about the general election until after the primary. We had said to ourselves that, if we win this thing, we'll use all the media attention that comes in the aftermath of the primary and get ourselves introduced to all the Democratic and independent voters. During the primary I relied chiefly on direct mail, and so I only reached out to targeted Republican voters.
In retrospect, that was a big mistake. When you have media, you want to use it to its fullest extent, and we didn't. We just answered reporters' questions when we should have been using that time to define what the campaign was going to be about. Then the press would have nothing else to print.
The second mistake was in reaching out to the Republican leadership because it associated me with everything people didn't like about the past eight years. It would have been better to use that moment of definition, the day after the primary, to hold a press conference and say, "The Republicans did a lot of fine things, but there are a lot of problems that they didn't address. These problems are not going to get solved in Trenton whether it's the Democrats in power or the Republicans, because politics get in the way down there. The only way to solve our issues is to move them out of Trenton and into the hands of the people. So tomorrow, our volunteer army is going to begin ringing doorbells in Democrat and independent neighborhoods. If television cameras want to join us, they're welcome. If the establishment wants to join us, they're welcome, too. But this is not a campaign about Trenton, it's not about professional politicians, it's about the people fighting for being able to get government that's accountable to them again."
That kind of a message would have been more successful in distancing me from the Republicans that disappointed their constituents. At that point, if DiFrancesco didn't get on board, it would be DiFrancesco rejecting Schundler because Schundler had already rejected DiFrancesco and Trenton politics.
HPR: You candidly spoke of some mistakes made over the course of the campaign. What is it that you most learned about being a candidate?
BS: I've learned that on statewide campaigns, you need a very blunt, simple message. The message of our campaign was a message of reform: we can do more by spending less, if we change the way we do things and create means of accountability. My problem was that I addressed how to do this. I talked about medical savings accounts and school choice. Now you can talk about that as a mayor when you're talking to people directly, and you can talk about that in a primary when you write to people who will read your material. You can't talk about that in a general election. My reform message was too complex.
Jesse Ventura, who won on the basic image of being a maverick, just made it clear that he wasn't going to play politics. I blew my one opportunity to define my platform in a way that could be clearly understood. If I had a bumper sticker that read, "Take the power back from the SOBs!" a lot of folks would have said, "Amen." McGreevey just pounded the fact that he was from the middle and I was from the right-Democrat message 101. But because that message was so simple, that's what the people remembered.
HPR: We know the enemies you faced during the campaign, but who were your biggest allies?
BS: The groups that were most committed to me were religious people. I had overwhelming numbers in the Orthodox Jewish community, the church-attending Catholic community, the evangelical community, and the Muslim community. Religious people feel that secular society is becoming antagonistic-not tolerant, but increasingly anti-religious. They need someone to protect them from encroachments on their beliefs. Madison wrote that the most significant safeguard for American religious liberty was religious pluralism. The Founders noticed the slight differences between their sects, and that was a wonderful thing, because they made a system that protected differences.
Small-business people were also strong supporters. Big-business people are not always free-marketers, because when you have a lot of power you are tempted to get the government to give you an advantage. Because small business doesn't have a lot of power, they think the best system is the one that's fair, finely attuned to the benefits of free markets.
HPR: Schundler, born to run?
BS: I do wonder whether it's possible in a state like New Jersey, even though I would say my politics would be very good for a presidential nomination. It's tougher holding my views in New Jersey, but I don't try to worry about it. Being elected mayor as a Republican in Jersey City was pretty unlikely. In that campaign, I figured that I would not win, but that I could get some ideas out as to how we can solve problems and would let the machine know that you can't abuse people without them at least squawking.
My sense is that the good life isn't necessarily about succeeding. The good life is about trying to be faithful to your call. And I think all of us are called to do justice. Not that all of us accept that responsibility, of course, but I think all of us are called to do it.
Consider the people who tried to abolish slavery, who fought their whole lives, and happened to die at 19 or 20. I would argue that they lived lives of meaning and value even though they weren't able to see that happy day when their dreams became realized. You never would have achieved freedom in 1863 if you did not have people who gave their lives for that cause. So to me the issue is not where you are going to end up or whether you are destined for it. Who knows. The issue is, try to do what you feel you're supposed to be doing, and try to get some sense of satisfaction from it.
Get A FREE Bumper Sticker!
Hudson County, New Jersey is a place of many firsts - including genocide and slavery.
Political corruption is a tradition here.
First in a series by Anthony Olszewski – Click HERE to find out more.
Special Improvement District - Downtown Revitalization - Business Improvement District
COMPUTERCRAFT
|
