SO MUCH FOR TOURISM:

Will Kerry be buried by New Joizee doyt? (Roger Franklin, August 22, 2004, The Age)

It's not often that New York's civic fathers can feel more upright and honest than their counterparts in other states. Corruption charges, accusations of sexual harassment, even of rape, pop up with such regularity that it's a wonder the newspapers don't list the latest market prices for buying an elected official.

Just now, however, with a jury watching surveillance videos of a senior judge accepting $US1000 ($1380) and a box of cigars to fix a trial, even New Yorkers can feel proud. All they need do is cast an eye across the Hudson River to neighbouring New Jersey, where that sum would be small potatoes indeed. In fact, by Joizee standards, it might even qualify as an honest transaction. In New York, at least the plaintiff secured the verdict he paid for.

Standards are different in New Jersey. There, as events leading to the downfall of Democratic Governor James McGreevey demonstrate, politics means everything from trying to put your gay poet lover in charge of homeland security to being at the beck and call of power broker Robert Kusher, who set up his brother-in-law with a hooker and then sent videotapes of the encounter to the man's wife, his own sister.

Anyone who has ever watched The Sopranos will have some idea of what New Jersey is all about. Charmless, smelly, down-at-heel and dirty, the landscape still manages to seem clean in comparison with the state's politicians. [...]

Kusher should be out of prison by the 2008 presidential race, and one suspects a Kerry loss wouldn't distress him too much. How so? Well, he has another potential horse in that race. According to federal electoral records, Kusher is the third-largest contributor to Senator Hillary Clinton's political war chest.

That's the kind of coverage the state is getting abroad, yet Democrats have decided to let the Governor stay?

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 22, 2004 10:36 AM