Lynch, McGreevey: Two
men, one irony
EDITORIAL, Home News
Tribune Online September 17, 2006
There is something terribly ironic in
the fact that the two most powerful politicians in a generation in Middlesex
County should find themselves sharing headlines in the state's newspapers one
more time. Former Gov. James E. McGreevey and former Senate President John
Lynch long ago went their separate ways, of course, and the headlines that
connected them on Friday could not have been more different: McGreevey is
beginning to peddle his tell-all confessional, a book that attempts to lay the
blame for his failed political career on the steps of his hidden homosexuality,
while Lynch was in a Newark courtroom, confessing to corruption that will put
him behind bars for some time.
But the pair are forever linked in the annals of New Jersey politics.
McGreevey was the political heir of Lynch. He became the governor that
Lynch, because of the very different skeletons in his closet, could not be.
And however dissimilar their temperaments, their personal lives and their fates,
they were remarkably similar politicians — bright, personable, ambitious and
adept at manipulating the system.
That system, as has been abundantly clear from the mounting convictions and plea
deals in U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie's federal court, is corrupt,
pervasive and party-less. There may be lip service to some political
ideals, but the system was really designed to perpetuate and consolidate power
and to benefit its members. It was oiled with the money of people who
needed things done. In his guilty plea Friday, Lynch admitted that he had
taken at least $25,000 from a mining company in South Brunswick that was trying
to create a water park on state parkland. In exchange, as a powerful state
senator, he twice recommended the company to the Environmental Protection
Agency.
Lynch was contrite in a statement he issued after the plea, but until then he
had been unapologetic. As news of his secretive consulting company and its
deals trickled out over the last year, he made no excuses for having used all
his connections and the power he still held after having retired to enrich
himself in the private sector, and to ensure that his various clients got the
deals they sought. That was the way the system worked, he said. Who
was he to challenge it? (Likewise, in published excerpts from his book,
McGreevey seems not as disturbed at appointing his lover to a position for which
he was unqualified but for having drawn attention to the appointment by bragging
about his lover during an interview).
There is plenty to rue about the system and its abuses; the Jersey landscape is
littered with the chaff, be they ill-advised billboards, unnecessary strip
malls, badly built highways, misused open spaces or dirty streams. The
public certainly deserves an apology.
There is plenty to rue about John Lynch, too. It is too much to drape him
in the cloth of tragic hero; still, there was much to admire. He was
charismatic and capable. He was approachable and down-to-earth, a true
Jersey boy. He once said his favorite job was being mayor of New Brunswick
— and he was good at it. Even now the city's resurgence is attributed to
his leadership.
In his memoir, McGreevey called Lynch one of the three most powerful Democrats
in the state, a man whose support was essential in seeking statewide office.
Just think what that power, in the right hands, might have been. Instead,
of course, Lynch is likely to be remembered infamously, just one in an ever
longer and more desultory list of corrupt politicians.
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