[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: More Trouble on the Turnpike

Sat Aug 14 12:10:36 PDT 2004

The article below from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by michael at intrafi.com.

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More Trouble on the Turnpike

August 14, 2004
 By ERIC DEZENHALL 

My fictional alter ego, a disgraced political operative,
once suggested a motto for the Garden State: "New Jersey:
you got a problem with that?" Maybe you have to be from
Jersey (we leave out the "New") to appreciate the slogan.
Jersey is all about confrontation; we dare you to see just
how much we'll tolerate before things get ugly. 

I watched the resignation and outing of Gov. James E.
McGreevey of New Jersey with this motto in mind. I was
riveted: as a novelist who has written about a New Jersey
governor who tries to cover up a sexual secret; as a crisis
management consultant whose day job is making bad news go
away; and as a Jersey native with a working knowledge of
the rules of local politics. 

The novelist in me empathized with Mr. McGreevey's
confession because, in literary terms, he executed the
denouement of his "character arc" flawlessly. A writer
agonizes to make even his villains human, so one would have
to be heartless not to feel the genuine conflict in the
soul of this earnest Catholic boy, the son of a Marine
drill sergeant, who had devoted his life to public service.

As a crisis manager, however, I saw only a stone-cold
exercise in damage control. Mr. McGreevey was a politician
in deep stew who shrewdly cut his losses. As I watched his
news conference, I thought to myself: somebody's got him
dead to rights. In New Jersey, no less, where it's hard
enough for a guy to be sensitive, never mind gay. 

Better to step down under the aegis of postmodern bravery
than launch the all-consuming - and futile - jihad of
damage control. No, the governor's announcement wasn't just
a discovery of the soul. This was a catharsis by a man who
was going to get into the back of the proverbial cop car
either sitting up proud or lying down bloody - but he was
getting in. Damage control is all about selecting the best
of only bad options. 

What made the governor's resignation such a watershed was
his flouting of a core principle of modern damage control.
The objective of most people in Mr. McGreevey's position is
to learn how to keep sinning and still be able to leave the
arena with the prize (and public adoration). But Mr.
McGreevey recognized that his redemption would require the
loss of something precious. By resigning, he succeeded in
defusing what would have been a death-by-a-thousand-cuts
crisis. He failed, however, to keep his job. 

Yet perhaps the most important variable sealing Mr.
McGreevey's fate was the setting for his drama. While New
Jersey leans Democratic, these are not the Democrats of the
Upper West Side or Malibu. These Democrats are still loyal
to the "Three I's" of Garden State politics - Ireland,
Israel and Italy. These are the union boys, the tradesmen,
the enlightened professionals who remember their parents
cut stone in Newark and stirred great vats of soup at
Campbell's in Camden. 

With the Three I's, one can weather corruption charges, as
Mr. McGreevey did until this week. In Jersey politics,
rolling with the punches of graft has long been a
shibboleth of manhood. Being gay, however, is not. It's one
thing for a governor to sell a political appointment. It's
another for him to have sex with the guy he appointed.
Perhaps in another state - Vermont, maybe - a governor
could have survived being gay, but not corrupt. 

Pundits will celebrate the McGreevey confession as an
example of good crisis management, which it may well be.
But we should be on guard for the insipid cliché that
everyone in crisis would be well served to just "fess up."
The coarse reality is that most of those who do the right
thing from a moral perspective in sex scandals lose their
jobs (the Reverends Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, former
House Speaker Newt Gingrich), while artful dodgers
(President Bill Clinton, Representative Henry Hyde) shuck,
jive, obfuscate, spin - and survive. 

The brutal fact of damage control is that not all clients
are created equal. It's a lot easier to defend a priapic
president when the Dow is shattering records than it is to
defend an indicted chief executive when unemployment is
rising. In any drama, context is everything. 

If, as it's often been said, politics is a contact sport in
New Jersey, then James McGreevey has learned that some
forms of contact are still off limits. While the media
culture will probably applaud his courage under the
Seinfeldian "not that there's anything wrong with that"
umbrella of tolerance, the state's political culture will
not. 

Jersey is shaped like a boomerang. No matter what you throw
out there, things always seem to come back to knock you off
balance. The same state that has unsightly smokestacks also
possesses one of the largest freshwater marshes in the
Northeast. One has to see the contradictions to get Jersey
right. Jersey's capable of being unforgiving, but it can
also let things go once a story is played out. 

My home state's first governor, Lord Cornbury, was said to
have worn exotic dresses to work. Perhaps he entered the
colonial statehouse in the early 1700's in full regalia and
queried his fellow Jerseyans, "Dost thou have a problem
with that?" 

Eric Dezenhall, the author of the novel "Shakedown Beach,"
is president of Dezenhall Resources, a crisis management
firm. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/14/opinion/14dezenhall.html?ex=1093510636&ei=1&en=e70da77c37653b4a

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