Smiling Through the Storm (Dumbocrat pol tagged most corrupt doesn't care)

PHOTO Laura Pedrick for The New York Times Senator Wayne R. Bryant has been in the State Legislature for 22 years.

Camden--WAYNE R. BRYANT, a longtime Democratic state senator, has been getting the sort of attention that most politicians would be happy to do without.

The Courier-Post, a local newspaper widely read in his Camden-area district, recently called him the "king of double dipping," and an influential Web site, politicsnj.com, has taken to introducing articles about him with the words "oink, oink."

Meanwhile, Mr. Bryant has been singled out in news media accounts statewide as one of the chief stumbling blocks in the failed attempt earlier this month to pass a state law placing limits on the awarding of public contracts to political donors.

Perhaps most remarkable about this storm of criticism, though, is how little Mr. Bryant seems to care. His reaction to the mention of one graphic representation of him on the Web brought a broad smile.

"The pig?" Mr. Bryant said in an interview in his office here. "Yeah I've seen it. What am I supposed to do about that?"

After 22 years in the Legislature, Mr. Bryant has become one of the most influential Democrats in Trenton and one of the most powerful elected African-American officials in New Jersey history. He is currently deputy majority leader in the Senate and holds the key chairmanship of the Budget and Appropriations Committee.

In his South Jersey district, where he regularly wins by margins upward of 30 percent, Mr. Bryant is known for the amount of state and federal resources he has been able to bring in; he authored the law in 2002 that created a $175 million state aid package for Camden's redevelopment.

At the same time, he has compiled an impressive record on complex issues like welfare reform, engineering welfare-to-work legislation in the early 1990's that presaged a similar effort on the national level by President Clinton.

But people outside Mr. Bryant's district who know anything about his work in Trenton may recognize his name for other reasons. They may, for example, have read that Mr. Bryant makes more than $160,000 a year, supplementing his $49,000 paycheck with consultancies and other outside work in the public sector. Or about a $2.3 million funding increase he helped secure for the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Camden soon after the school agreed to hire him as a consultant. Or about the instances in which Mr. Bryant's Cherry Hill law firm, Zeller and Bryant, received contracts related to his work in the Legislature - most recently a $270,000 deal with Camden to help with land acquisition, paid for out of aid money that Mr. Bryant had lobbied for. Or about the amount of money, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, that Mr. Bryant's close relatives make working in the public sector.

With an increased focus on ethics among public officials - especially in the wake of the McGreevey administration - it is not surprising that the professional affairs of New Jersey's elected officials should come under increased scrutiny. Indeed, the stepped-up coverage of those issues in the news media has made it clear that arrangements like Mr. Bryant's are not unusual among New Jersey's elected officials.

But there are a number of other factors that have helped place Mr. Bryant on a pedestal of his own. One is the recent investigative series by The Courier-Post and other Gannett papers in South Jersey that has effectively put an unwavering spotlight on Mr. Bryant's affairs. (The Asbury Park Press, a sister newspaper, brought a similar level of scrutiny to one other politician, John O. Bennett, a former Senate president; Mr. Bennett, a Republican, was voted out of office at the next election in 2003.)

Mr. Bryant hasn't helped quell the controversies by cutting himself off from the local news media. Derek Osenenko, executive editor of The Courier-Post, said the paper always sought to balance its reporting with responses from Mr. Bryant, but that he rarely cooperated. "It's been very difficult to get him to speak to us," he said. "So certainly our relationship is contentious."

Mr. Bryant's response? "They're going to write what they write anyway, so why should I bother?"

Also working against Mr. Bryant is that, at least on the surface, with his meticulously well-tailored pinstriped suits, gleaming pinkie ring and unapologetic mingling of his public and professional careers, Mr. Bryant is an easy target, ripe for caricature as an unreformed urban power broker. Some critics have admitted as much, with a recent opinion piece in the local Gannett newspapers by Carl Golden, a former Whitman administration press secretary, saying that Mr. Bryant "typifies the worst stereotype of big-city machine politics in New Jersey."

But Mr. Bryant is not easy to pigeonhole. On one hand, his definition of ethics is clearly not the same as that of good government groups and advocates of stricter rules for public officials in Trenton. On the other, though, Mr. Bryant's legislative record, by Trenton standards, does not lack substance. He is a highly effective politician, able to articulate positions forcefully and create consensus when necessary. Those skills, along with Mr. Bryant's demonstrated willingness to depart from political orthodoxy on contentious issues, have resulted in some undeniably impressive achievements.

Former Gov. Jim Florio, an early ally of Mr. Bryant, said his colleague from the Camden district was an effective but principled politician who, despite public criticism, was admired by his colleagues. "He is somebody who first and foremost regards himself as someone who is there to reach accommodations," said Mr. Florio, who signed Mr. Bryant's landmark welfare legislation into law in 1992. "He knows how to strike the deal, which is how democracy is supposed to work. It may well be that this style is not universally applauded. Folks have been critical of him, editorial writers, and obviously they have the right to be critical if they want to. For those of us who know how government works, I think there is a great admiration for him as someone who knows how to use the levers of politics to achieve policies that are in the interests of his constituents, even if some might not see it that way."

David Rebovich, head of Rider University's Institute for New Jersey Politics and who writes a column for politicsnj.com, said that Mr. Bryant's capabilities and his ailing public image were not mutually exclusive: "He's considered a smart guy, but he's also become a political entrepreneur at a time when taxpayers are screaming about the cost of government. Let's face it, if you are a person who has relatives on government payroll and citizens perceive that you help them get there, there will be complaints."

To understand Mr. Bryant's almost defiant attitude toward the controversies around him requires a certain understanding of his background. He comes from one of the best-known political families in South Jersey, starting with his great-grandfather who played a role in the formation of Center Township. His grandfather became the first African-American to serve as a calendar clerk in the State Assembly. His uncle served for decades in the State Banking and Insurance Department and his father served for 14 years as president of Lawnside's school board.

The current generation of Bryants has followed suit. Most notably, Mr. Bryant's younger brother, Mark, who has now served as Lawnside's mayor for 13 years.

Mr. Bryant frames the current attacks on him as an attack on that tradition. "When they're attacking me, they're attacking public service," he said. "Public servants have the right to seek fair compensation. No one says anything about people making far more money in the private sector who do considerably less."

As for the criticism over family members on the public payroll, Mr. Bryant says it is gratuitous and fails to take into account their qualifications. Mr. Bryant used the example of his wife, Cheryl Spicer, who works as an assistant general manager at New Jersey's Delaware River Port Authority at an annual salary of $135,000, a job that came after years of work at the federal Urban Mass Transportation Corporation and later as a deputy to Pennsylvania's secretary of transportation. He also mentioned the appointment of his older brother, Isaac, to the $113,000 job of assistant commissioner of education, a job he came to by way of 30 years of experience in psychology.

"If they want to criticize me, fine, but the members of my immediate family who work in public service all got there on their own," Mr. Bryant said. "It's unfair for people to assume that because I'm in office I got them a job."

Nor does Mr. Bryant makes any apologies for his own sources of income above and beyond his $49,000 a year salary as a state senator. "No one is hiring me just because I'm a senator," he said. "Yes, I bid for the work. When I get it, it's because I'm very good at what I do. I bring real experience to the table on how to get things done."

Mr. Bryant suggested that one possible factor in the criticism was related to his race. "I think there are lot of people in and around government who believe that African-Americans ought to be involved in 'African-American' issues - human services, welfare," he said. "I sit on the Budget Committee, there's $28 billion dollars in spending that's under my purview. Maybe some people just don't like that."

If Mr. Bryant shows no signs of changing, he is driving some people in his district to distraction. A local opponent, Ali Sloan-El, a member of Camden's council, is publicly pleading for intervention, of one sort or another, from above. "Bryant is a modern-day mobster," said Mr. Sloan-El, who ran unsuccessfully for Mr. Bryant's Senate seat in 2003. "He's a slick guy, suit, tie, professional talker. The only thing that can stop him now is intervention from above the state. I'm hoping the U.S. Attorney who brought down all those people in Monmouth was just starting there and that they come down and do Bryant next. And if they can't do it, you got to ask God to step in."

It should be noted that the complaints against Mr. Bryant have been on ethical grounds, not criminal ones. And even though the questions about Mr. Bryant are nothing new, his heavily Democratic, half-minority district has remained loyal to him. Mr. Sloan-El considers it something of a victory to have obtained 35 percent of the vote in his contest against Mr. Bryant last time, because "everyone expected him to win by two-to-one."

Much of what Mr. Bryant does is surely predicated on the notion that he is in no immediate political danger. When pressed on how he is affected by the constant criticism, Mr. Bryant conceded that it matters - sort of. "People around here know me," he said. "They know who I am and what I've done for the district and for the state. People who see all of this up in North Jersey - maybe it's different. If you devote your career to this, you don't want to have people thinking bad things about you when you leave office.

.....people outside Mr. Bryant's district ......read that Mr. Bryant makes more than $160,000 a year, supplementing his $49,000 paycheck with consultancies and other outside work in the public sector. Or about a $2.3 million funding increase he helped secure for the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Camden soon after the school agreed to hire him as a consultant. Or about the instances in which Mr. Bryant's Cherry Hill law firm, Zeller and Bryant, received contracts related to his work in the Legislature - most recently a $270,000 deal with Camden to help with land acquisition, paid for out of aid money that Mr. Bryant had lobbied for. Or about the amount of money, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, that Mr. Bryant's close relatives make working in the public sector......

Heard enough? Now wait a sec, Oink-oink Bryant flashes the race card whenever he's criticized.........musta taken ripoff lessons from the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

Anyone who has been to Camden knows that it is unsafe to get out of your car and the best thing to do is accelerate out of the place.

.....It is a moonscape of derelicts, dilapidated buildings, and street thugs.

Yuck

One good thing about him.

While all the chicken-little republicans with no testosterone were too afraid to write and introduce a welfare reform bill, Bryant the democrat did and it was passed.

He's a black man in a black district and will remain until he does something wrong.

The pubs had 10 yrs. to pass pay-to-play and conflict-of-interest legislation and did NOTHING because they stink. They did find time to brow beat the School Board Members by passing a law that required school boards to fill out conflict of interest forms.

That's why they lost both houses because they're not too different from the dems.

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