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A Republican Grows in Jersey City
Originally appeared in the Bergen Record on Monday, April 17, 1995.
He's the former Wall Street bond trader at the helm of a gritty
blue-collar bastion, the Republican who wrested power in a
generations-old Democratic stronghold, the white kid from the suburbs
who grew up to lead a city where immigrants and minorities predominate.
Bret Schundler's election in 1992 as mayor of New Jersey's
second-largest city would seem like a Hollywood-scripted role reversal
if it weren't, in fact, a classic case of the strange bedfellows
politics makes.
So what's Schundler doing in Jersey City anyway?
Making a national reputation.
Schundler, a former Democrat, is one of the new darlings of the
Republican Party, a close ideological ally of Governor Whitman, and an
emerging spokesman for the newly celebrated movement to privatize
government services. House Speaker Newt Gingrich has called him one of
the most "exciting" Republicans in the country. And, in December,
Schundler made Time magazine's "50 for the Future" list of up-and-comers
under 40 years old.
He has crisscrossed the state and the nation with his political
bible, a treatise called "Schoolchildren First" that touts his voucher
plan, which would give tax credits to parents who send their children
to private schools. It is an issue, though lukewarmly received in his
own back yard, that has come to define Schundler and gained him
prominence beyond the borders of Jersey City. But Schundler bristles at
the suggestion that he has concentrated on vouchers at the expense of
his constituents in the city.
"School choice is one of many ideas with the same central theme,
to empower folks in getting the services they choose," he said. "How do
my critics know how much time I spend in Jersey City?" As Jersey City's first Republican mayor in more than 75 years,
Schundler preaches the GOP's entrepreneurial gospel of less government
with the zeal of a true believer, or at least a good salesman.
His oratory is rapid-fire and the boyish-looking 36-year-old mayor
mines a traditionally liberal lexicon to espouse his conservative ideas,
quoting Scripture along the way. He is erudite, skipping from a
discussion of the Hutterite religious movement to state politics in
sometimes dizzying fashion. There is much talk of "empowering the poor"
and using government "proactively," all the while maintaining that free
enterprise will result in healthy competition.
"The system is rigged against the poor," Schundler says of big
government programs that have become the public lifeblood of places like
Jersey City. "We need to empower people to get better services."
Last year, he was praised at least a half-dozen times on the
editorial pages of the stridently conservative Wall Street Journal.
As his driver navigated Jersey City's streets on a recent
afternoon, passing the modest row houses that line block after block,
Schundler pointed east. There the setting sun had bathed the skyline of
Manhattan's financial district in orange, and the glowing silhouette
loomed over this old industrial town.
"From their offices, the Wall Street Journal writers look right
down on Jersey City Hall," he said with a smile, an observation of
which it is doubtful mayors before him took note.
Politics, Hudson County-style, has been an insular,
rough-and-tumble affair. "Here, people are willing to bash your brains
in for the hell of it," Schundler said. By way of example, he pointed
to the smear campaign in the last election that labeled him the
"candidate of apartheid" and signs that read, "Don't let the Wall Street
shark sell off Jersey City."
Schundler's predecessor, Gerald McCann, was forced from office in
1992 after his conviction for mail fraud and income tax evasion. And,
like an anthropologist who has unearthed a find, Schundler shows
visitors the safe adjacent to his office, now a supply closet neatly
lined with stationery, where former Mayor Frank "I Am the Law" Hague,
who ruled the city for 30 years until 1949, stashed his bribe money.
Indeed, Schundler says his dissatisfaction with the Democratic
machine aided "the evolution of his political thought."
As a new Harvard University graduate in 1984, Schundler was a
campaign worker for Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart.
Schundler met his wife, Lynn, on the Hart campaign, where he worked in
the Iowa caucuses. She was a Democratic committeewoman from Cranford,
the Union County town next door to Westfield, where he spent most of his
youth as the youngest in a family of seven brothers and one sister.
The Schundlers married in 1985 and moved to a Victorian-era
brownstone a short distance from City Hall. From there, his wife had an
easy commute to law school in Newark and Schundler was a PATH ride away
from his job at Salomon Brothers in lower Manhattan.
Schundler did well on Wall Street, he'll only say he made many
times his annual mayoral salary of $65,000, and moved to C. J. Lawrence
Co. before he and Lynn, then working for a law firm in Newark, quit
their jobs to travel in the spring of 1990.
The couple went from "revolution to revolution" during that season
of foment in Eastern Europe before heading to Africa and Asia; they
traveled extensively in China and Nepal and drove across Tibet.
Upon their return a year later, Schundler got involved in politics.
It was his experience with the political machine in Jersey City that put
the nail in the coffin of his Democratic liberalism.
"I thought the government here was more than just incompetent, it
was abusive... it treated people as basically sheep to be shorn,"
said Schundler. "It seemed to me that the Democrats, while they talked a
good game, were more interested in maintaining programs. It was
government as a club."
He became co-chairman of a fiscal watchdog group and made an
unsuccessful bid for the state Senate as a Republican in 1991. Schundler
won the special election to replace McCann in 1992 in a field of 19
candidates, and was reelected six months later with 68 percent of the
vote.
Voters said they viewed the relative neophyte as a "breath of fresh
air," and on a recent walking tour of the Central Avenue business
district, despite critics claims to the contrary, it was clear that the residents of Jersey City are very happy with their choice.
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