New Jersey Politics and Government
Rivergate Regionals
Rivergate Regionals is a collection of books published by Rutgers University Press focusing on New Jersey and the surrounding area. Since its founding in 1936, Rutgers University Press has been devoted to serving the people of New Jersey and this collection solidifies that tradition. The books in the Rivergate Regionals Collection explore history, politics, nature and the environment, recreation, sports, health and medicine, and the arts. By incorporating the collection within the larger Rutgers University Press editorial program, the Rivergate Regionals Collection enhances our commitment to publishing the best books about our great state and the surrounding region.
New Jersey Politics and Government
The Suburbs Come of Age
Fourth Edition
Barbara G. Salmore
with
Stephen A. Salmore
Rutgers University Press
New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Salmore, Barbara G., 1942
New Jersey politics and government : the suburbs come of age / Barbara G. Salmore with Stephen A. Salmore. Fourth edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8135-6140-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8135-6139-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8135-6141-7 (e-book)
1. New JerseyPolitics and government. I. Salmore, Stephen A. II. Title.
JK3516.S35 2013
320.9749dc23 2012040293
A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copyright 2013 by Barbara G. Salmore
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.
Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu
Manufactured in the United States of America
For Elizabeth Hiatt Salmore and Debra Azarian Taylor
They know why.
Contents
Percentage Rating New Jersey as a Good or Excellent Place to Live
Party Identification in New Jersey
Contributions to Legislative Candidates, 20012011
Campaign Spending, Legislative Elections, 20032011
Fund-Raising by Selected County Parties, 2003 and 2011
Interest Groups Most Frequently Cited by New Jersey Legislators, 1962
Effectiveness and Credibility of Selected Interest Groups, Ratings by New Jersey Legislators, 1987
Cabinet Departments of New Jersey State Government
New Jersey Average per Capita State and Local Expenditures, Selected Functions, 1977, 1987, 2004, and 2007 as Percentage of U.S. Average
Revenue Sources by Percentage, U.S. and New Jersey Average, 2004
Index of Tax Capacity
Index of Tax Effort
Percentage of Family Income Paid in State and Local Taxes, New Jersey and U.S., Selected Years
Like many residents of New Jersey, both authors of this book were born in New York City, but we have been privileged to be observers, participants, and analysts of New Jersey politics for all of our adult lives. Our greatest debts are to the countless members of the states political community who observed, participated, and analyzed along with us. Without the insights they shared over many years, this book truly could not have been written. Some demand special mention.
We acknowledge with particular thanks the contributions of Michael Aron, Mary Annie Harper, Frederick Hermann, Peggi Howard, Thomas Kean, Frank LoBiondo, Eve Lubalin, Gerald Pomper, Ingrid Reed, and Alan Rosenthal. Jeff Brindle and Steven Kimmelman at the Election Law Enforcement Commission have responded to data requests with graciousness and alacrity. It was a special pleasure to learn about New Jersey politics from former students who became active participants in New Jersey politics, especially Drew alumni Lysa Israel and Bob Bostock and Rutgers alumni Gregg Edwards and Bill Palatucci.
We also benefited from the thoughtful suggestions by Daniel Elazar, Russell Harrison, John Kincaid, and Steven Schechter, who read the original manuscript. Grants of released time and administrative support from Drew University and the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University were essential for initially getting us started on our work. We also thank Marlie Wasserman and the whole team at Rutgers University Press for believing in this book.
The Eagleton Institute has long been a place where practitioners and scholars gather together to discuss and study New Jersey politics. In a reflection of this commitment, Eagleton had since 1975 sponsored three edited volumes on New Jersey politics and government. The four editions of this book can be considered as the latest in that series. Since it is not an edited volume, it reflects the particular opinions and idiosyncrasies of the authors, a bipartisan team.
Stephen Salmore died suddenly in the midst of our work on the third edition, but his extraordinary understanding of his adopted state still infuses every page of this one.
Prologue
Countin the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike.... Theyve all gone to look for America...
Paul Simon
In 1923, Ernest Gruening edited a delightful guide for armchair travelers, These United States. Edmund Wilson Jr.distinguished literary critic and native of Red Bank, New Jerseycontributed the essay entitled New Jersey: The Slave of Two Cities. He offered the following thesis: It is precisely its suburban function which gives New Jersey such character as it has. It is precisely a place where people do not live to develop a society of their own but where they merely pass or sojourn on their way to do something else. Its distinction among eastern states is that it has attained no independent life, that it is the doormat, the servant, and the picnic-ground of the social organisms that drain it.
In the 1971 preface to a reprint of his 1923 work, Gruening told a new generation of readers that is was important to know a different America. He offered but one caveat: I doubt that Edmund Wilson, Jr.... would find much to change in his New Jersey, the Slave of Two Cities. Gruening reflected a common view of New Jersey, but one already becoming out of date. Four decades later, it is almost entirely wrong. It is not that New Jersey is no longer a suburban state. It is that the United States has become a suburban society.
As New Jersey resident Yogi Berra once remarked, You can observe a lot just by looking. New Jersey looks different than it did in 1923 or 1971. To be sure, there are still pockets of the cramped smudgy life of industry that Wilson described. Parts of the southern Pinelands are still desolate wilderness. And certainly a journey to Princeton still means that one seems to have at last reached a place where no one cares what is happening in New York. Yet much of blue-collar Jersey City is now a yuppie haven; retirement communities encroach on the Pinelands; and many New Jerseyans no longer care what is happening in New York.
The New New Jersey
Today, the changes are everywhere. Among the places George Washington slept is eighteenth-century Liberty Hall, ancestral home of William Livingston, New Jerseys first governor, and of Thomas Kean, its forty-eighth governor. Liberty Hall is now a museum, its grounds given over to an office park. The stately Chalfonte-Haddon Hall Hotel on the boardwalk in Atlantic City is the Resorts Casino Hotel, which was the first legal gambling salon on the East Coast. A Newark synagogue is now a Pentecostal church. Irish saloons have been replaced by restaurants serving young professionals who have renovated Hobokens brownstones and commute to Wall Street. A sports and entertainment complex is built atop the swampy landfills of the Meadowlands.
