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Schundler Advances the Right Ideals

Originally appeared in Insight on 04/25/2001
By James Harder

Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler, a savvy onetime Democrat who saw the light, hopes to be this year’s GOP nominee for governor of the Garden State.

Bret Schundler’s narrow victory in the race for the Jersey City, N.J., mayorship took his competitors by surprise in 1992, and no wonder: No Republican had held the job since World War I. Schundler since has been twice re-elected to become the city’s longest-serving mayor in more than half a century. Jack Kemp has called him “the gold standard of political leadership.” William F. Buckley regards him as a future presidential contender.
       Schundler was born the youngest of nine children in Morristown, N.J. He grew up in Middlesex and Union counties in the same state and was an all-state football player at Westfield High School. He studied for a semester in Israel and he was graduated with honors from Harvard University.
       In was in college that Schundler made plans to become an inner-city pastor. But then, while visiting Washington on a stint with the religious group Sojourners, he undertook a congressional internship to learn about government. That internship led to a job with Rep. Roy Dyson, D-Md., and that, in turn, to his work in Gary Hart’s 1984 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
       Disillusioned with the Democrats, Schundler left politics and moved to Jersey City. After taking a year to tour Eastern Europe with his wife, where they witnessed firsthand the overthrow of communism, Schundler recommitted himself to politics, this time as a Republican. He now hopes to be governor of New Jersey. On June 5, the state’s Republicans will choose their candidate to run in the Nov. 6 general election.
       
Insight: Why did you decide to run for mayor of Jersey City?
       
Bret Schundler: About a third of my neighbors were losing their homes, and something had to be done!
       I had moved to Jersey City because I wanted to live in a city that had some problems. I was working on Wall Street at the time, but as a younger person I had wanted to be an urban minister. I hoped avocationally to pursue lay ministry in an inner city with an inner-city church. We got very involved in community organizations.
       So here we were, in a city with more than its share of problems, and suddenly we had the city government doing property-tax reevaluation. The mayor went into areas where I think he felt he had no chance of getting voter support and raised the tax assessment. He then went into areas where I think he hoped he could buy back political support and gave those people a lower assessment.
       That way you ended up with some people carrying a very large share of the total burden and they just couldn’t afford it. In my neighborhood you had a full one-third of people driven to default on their taxes and at risk of losing their homes to a government that was supposed to be serving them.
       
Insight: Are you surprised where your calling has led you?
       
BS: I never anticipated going into government. There are some people who have this grand vision of where they’re going to be in 20 years. I’ve never had that.
       There’s a Scripture that says, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet” [Psalm 119:105]. If you think about that image, the reason you need a lamp is because it’s dark. All you can see is the next step, and God’s word gives you a sense of how and where to make the next step.
       
Insight: Why did you leave the Democrats and become a Republican?
       
BS: I came to see that the programs they had erected to serve the poor had the result in fact of trapping the poor into dependence. I saw some Democrats talking about reforming those programs, but I saw the overall party absolutely resistant to reform.
       It became clear to me that what you really had going on was a government that had become an advocacy group for itself. For those Democratic advocates the issue
       wasn’t, “Can we use government to empower the poor?” It had become, “Can we as government take power for ourselves and use the poor as the excuse?” I just became disgusted with politics in general after that presidential campaign with Gary Hart.
       
Insight: You talk about empowerment of the people. What do you mean by that?
       
BS: In a technical way you can describe empowerment as having two facets: first, as creating competition in the provision of government services and, second, as allowing the intended beneficiaries of the services to choose the provider.
       Normally, government operates by monopoly. That is, government takes your money and it decides what you’re going to get for it. That’s not very empowering for you. You’ve lost your money and you’ve lost every ounce of decision-making power. If we have competition in the provision of services there will be some accountability at least to see if the service provides a good service and does it at a good price.
       Empowerment is about government being the people’s servant. America is a republic. This means governance where the power of government is not used in the service of a dictator or even, for that matter, for a majority. Rather, in a republic the power of government is to be used to secure the property of each individual in their life, their liberty and in the fruit of their labor. That’s the classical idea on which our country was founded. Government is restricted here to empower you to have the freedom to be happy. My sense is that empowerment is synonymous with that: freedom. It’s not about doing whatever you want; it’s about having your natural rights protected.
       
Insight: You were working in the private sector before running for mayor. What were you doing?
       
BS: My community involvement over time got greater and greater. I became the head of a coalition of neighborhood communities, and I got involved in that tax effort that was costing people their homes.
       One big break was that my wife and I did very well financially. I was working for Salomon Brothers during what was a tremendous financial boom, did well, and we had the financial freedom to make a decision about what else we might want to do in life.
       I had started working on Wall Street to try to pay off some debts, and now we had a tremendous amount of savings. I could afford to take some time to think about what I really wanted to do. We quit our jobs and traveled around the world. We started in the spring in Eastern Europe, would read where the next revolution against the communists was going to happen, and then we would go watch as the people freed themselves.
       I had thought about buying a weekly newspaper. I wanted a forum to get people focused on how we could make urban changes in fresh ways that would respond to the needs of the inner city.
       
Insight: Do you think President George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative is a step in the right direction?
       
BS: Absolutely. And I like President Bush’s policy that you should have more of your own money. To say that you don’t have the right to the fruit of your labor, that the government should decide everything, is to say that you are a slave. We abolished that theoretically in the 1860s. To say that you should be able to make decisions as to what is best for yourself and your family with regard to what schooling would be best for your children also is good.
       I think the important thing to remember about faith-based policies is that the government must not begin to regulate religious institutions. The First Amendment not only prohibits the government from establishing religion, but prohibits government interference with the free exercise thereof. To have government try to take away the freedom of religious organizations would prohibit free exercise of religion and violate the Bill of Rights.
       
Insight: Indeed, you have been very strong in promotion of school choice. What are your proposals?
       
BS: You don’t necessarily have to do a voucher program. One opportunity would be to create significant tax credits at the state level for donations to scholarship funds. I have a scholarship fund where we gave kids a million dollars last year to make it possible for them to consider privately managed schools.
       If you give to my scholarship fund right now, you get a federal tax deduction for charitable giving. So why don’t we just layer on top of that a state benefit for such charitable giving? You would then be able to raise a lot more money.
       
Insight: You’re running for governor of New Jersey. What do you hope to do if you win?
       
BS: The single biggest problem we have is in our state capitals, and the single biggest problem we have in government is monopoly control of education by government. John Stuart Mill in his essay “On Liberty” wrote that if you have a government monopoly of education you have invited despotism over the mind. That leads to despotism over the body. It also undermines the spiritual wisdom of children. This has created curricula in which you can’t teach youngsters what life really is all about; you can’t inculcate the obligation of every child to use their God-given ability to overcome what obstacles have been set in their way; you can’t teach children how and why they should and could take care of their family and love their neighbor as themselves and try to be the kind of citizen who builds up their community.
       

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