Posted on 03/21/2008 4:31:02 PM PDT by Clintonfatigued
Today is the first day of spring. And this spring offers a spectacle that I thought I'd never see in my entire life: Murray Sabrin has a chance to win an election.
I've been following Sabrin's career ever since he ran for governor in 1997. He was outspoken and principled, which of course made him persona non grata in either of the major parties. So he ran on the Libertarian Party ticket and managed to qualify for public funding and a spot on stage during debates with Republican incumbent Christie Whitman and Democratic challenger Jim McGreevey.
Sabrin stood up there and proposed doing what in retrospect even Gov. Jon Corzine now argues had to be done: cutting back the size of government to the size of revenues. That won him 5 percent of the vote. He gave the same spiel when he ran for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 2000 and got about the same results.
And I confess I didn't expect things to be any different when Sabrin announced he was entering the race this year for the GOP nomination to challenge U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg.
But then something happened.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.nj.com ...
You know what? It might be good politics to give Murray Sabrin a chance. The latest poll shows him holding Lautencadaver to under 50% and he’s the only feasible candidate left after Jersey Joe turned out to be Rhineland Joe. The current fiscal crisis has given libertarians newfound credibility, and Sabrin is in a position to capitalize on it.
If Ron Paul has any smarts, he’ll give Sabrin access to his fundraising network.
This is one of the sketchiest headlines in Mulshine’s career, I’m sure he feels plenty smug using the meter to make the pun.
Springtime for Hitler and Germany.
Springtime for Sabrin in (the) GOP.
Offensively anti-Semitic headline inference, to say the VERY least.
The headline may have been a reference to Joe Pennacchio.
I leafed through the purported Pennacchio “manifesto” (a loaded term to say the least) from 1991, and I don’t think that there’s anything there worthy of ascribing him as “Rhineland Joe.” The most controversial part, his (bone-headed) “solution” for the homelessness problem, was by no means the to intern the homelss in military bases like FDR did with Japanes-Americans in WWII as many has suggested, but merely to rehabilitate abandoned military bases to provide housing for those who were homeless, with those who were homeless for economic reasons (and not due to drugs or mental illness) being segregated from the others and given job training, while those who were drug addicts or mentally ill would receive treatment for their condition. I think the 1991 document’s “solution” is simplistic and would violate the civil rights of the homeless (the government can’t force them to accept any sort of housing unless they’re actually charged with and convicted of a crime, at which time they obviously could be sent to jail or be offered treatment and a half-way house instead), but it is absurd to compare it to Hitler’s policies or to call him “Rhineland Joe.” Even if Pennacchio still holds the most controversial of those views 17 years later (of which there is absolutely no evidence from his legislative record), I would be willing to wager that Murray Sabrin, who is the Ron Paul campaign chaiman for NJ and who Ron Paul has endorsed for the Senate, has some views that we would find more troubling than those in the 1991 “Joseph Penn” document.
Has the Pennacchio campaign responded to the release of the 1991 document?
I haven’t read anything about a response from the Pennacchio campaign, they seem to be rather quiet. Speaking of the homeless, that’s an issue that makes the liberals heads explode on my local urban forum discussion group. The liberals who live and work in downtown Nashville favor the most hardcore stance against the homeless (incarceration or trumping up charges to get them arrested, or forcing “solutions” upon them) and I’ve had to take up for their rights. They snap, “You don’t know what it’s like to deal with these people !” I respond, “Yeah, you mean like how you guys don’t know what it’s like to deal with illegals... At least the homeless are American citizens.” Such hypocrites.
Oh, come on. Do you think the writers and actors for the producers were anti-Semites, despite being overwhelmingly Jewish? Not to mention that the candidate, Murray Sabrin, is also Jewish.
Read post #3. Mel Brooks isn’t an anti-Semite, he was lampooning Hitler. I know Sabrin is Jewish, that’s why I accused the author of the slanderous Hitler-comparison inference with the title of the article by using the not so thinly veiled “The Producers” reference.
Wasn’t Murray’s campaign manager one Hal Turner? Having a bisexual neonazi/FBI informant as your ‘97 campaign manager does not bode well for Murray.
Yes, when Murray ran for governor.
Oh, brother. NJ’s GOP is sooooo f**ked.
Overall I see the same problem here that was present when Estabrook was in the race, and now it's been magnified with Zimmer running and Pennachio losing support: Pennacchio and Sabrin are likely to split the traditional pro-life, pro-family, anti-tax, smaller government conservative voters and RINO loser Dick Zimmer will be the nominee again. We've seen this scenario time and time again with the Bill Brady/Jim Oberweis split in Illinois giving Topinka the nomination and the Ed Bryrant/Van Hillary split in TN giving Corker the nomination.
Sabrin's solution the whole time has been to get Pennacchio to withdraw. If Pennacchio polls better with the average NJ voter, shouldn't Sabrin withdraw? This was the same arguement I made in Illinois when the Oberweis camp proclaimed they had more money and more name recongition than Brady, while ignoring the fact that Oberweis had far higher negatives and Illinois voters were sick of him.
There's really no good solution here, unless the GOP could dump all three of the current candidates are rally around a new, untainted candidate acceptable to all factions of the NJGOP, while Lautenberg is blooded up in the Dem primary and left helpless in November.
Actually, we are also the wealthiest state in the union in terms of median income, and are in the top five in terms of % of the population with a college degree (I believe were are number 2 behind Virginia, but I could be wrong).
The GOP has polled well in the white, white collar counties in north and northwest Jersey (Morris, Somerset, Warren, Sussex, and Hunterdon), as well as those portions of other counties with a similar demographic (NW Essex, northern Bergen, etc.). What has cost the GOP the state in recent presidential elections has been the blue collar white vote (especially in Middlesex and southern Bergen counties) and the white collar non-white ethnic vote (New Jersey has the most East Indians and Koreans per capita of any state in the union, and the wealthiest immigrant population in aggregate). There is weakness among suburban women, but it is not as extensive as weakness among the aforementioned groups (weakness among the blacks in the urban areas, and the Jewish population in Essex, Bergen, and Monmouth counties goes without saying).
In order for a candidate to win statewide in New Jersey, they need to win the party's white collar base in the NW part of the state and along the shore, while making inroads among white collar Asians and/or hispanics in the northern and central portions of the state, along with blue collar white voters in the counties facing Philadelphia, to say nothing of Middlesex and Union Counties. We have been getting killed among blue collar voters, especially in South Jersey (those counties within the Philadelphia media market) since 1992.
I should also mention that the assimilation of many, if not most of Italian Americans means that having a vowel at the end of one's name is not as important as it used to be. Most white collar Americans of Italian decent (as I am) don't place much importance around ethnicity. If anything, it would matter most among senior citizens, many of whom now live in retirement communities near the shore.
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