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Bret Schundler Media Archives

Bret Schundler: Former Dem Has The Right Stuff

originally appeared in the Rockford Register Star on Sunday, January 23, 1994.
By Chuck Sweeny

Remember this quote: "The way to really help people isn't to establish government as a powerful interest in its own right, but to use it to enable people to defend and pursue their own interests."

That's from Bret Schundler, who in 1984 was the 25 year old Iowa coordinator for Gary Hart's Democratic presidential campaign. Today, Schundler is the conservative Republican mayor of Jersey City, N.J., a racially and ethnically diverse city of 228,000: 45 percent white, 27 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic and a growing number of Asian and Egyptian immigrants.

A fast, rising star in the GOP'S's "empowerment" wing, Schundler was in Rockford Friday to preach the empowerment gospel to the Northern Illinois Conservative Council. The crowd of 450 at Cliffbreakers was an eclectic mix of people, many of whom were young and newcomers to political activism.

Jersey City voters are 94 percent Democrat, but in 1992 they were fed up with what Schundler says are the highest property taxes in the nation, declining city services and a school system so horrid the state took it over for "educational bankruptcy." After winning with just 16 percent of the vote in a 19 candidate special election in 1992 -- the old mayor went to jail -- Shundler won a three-way race for a four-year term in May 1993.

No stealth candidate, Schundler spelled out clearly his intent to cancel a planned increase in property taxes. He said he'd privatize and decentralize city services to give individual neighborhoods the power -- and resources -- to run their own affairs.

He said he'd give parents vouchers so they could send their children to the schools they choose.

Democrats said the prospect of four years of Mayor Schundler "was just a terrible thing," said Peter Weiss, political columnist at the Jersey Journal.

"They threw in everything to beat him -- Jesse Jackson, Sen. Bill Bradley, "Weiss said. Democrats ran ads picturing Schundler, an investment banker, with his "Wall Street friends" to prove to blue-collar and no-collar Jersey City-ites he wasn't one of them.

"Schundler said party labels don't mean anything. He even tried to run as the New Democratic Coalition, but the judge knocked that out," Weiss said. "But when the election came in May of '93, he won with two thirds of the vote," Weiss said. The nine winning City Council candidates -- all Democrats.

"We're all kind of amazed," Weiss said of reaction to Schundler in a city more accustomed to having its mayors indicted than exalted.

"He's young, he's personable, he looks good. He's already becoming nationally known. He has good ideas. Hey, who knows, president someday?" Weiss speculated in rapid-fire, Jersey-accented English.

Schundler, 35, comes from a nonpartisan suburban New Jersey family. He entered politics to promote social justice.

"The Democratic Party talks about that an awful lot, and so that's where I was inclined to go politically," he said.

But after his 18 months with the Hart campaign, he concluded that the Democratic Party no longer represented people -- it had come to represent interest groups, and chief among them was government itself. Schundler holds a fundamental belief that government should champion and enhance the rights of individuals, not groups.

He noted that 50 percent of delegates to the 1992 Democratic Convention were either members of government employee unions or other governmental interest groups. "The real core of the Democratic Party's financial base is people who work for the government. It's very hard for them to move beyond those interest groups."

The case of one Bill Clinton proves Schundler's theory. As a founder of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, Clinton advocated many of the same reforms Schundler is implementing. Chief among them was school choice.

When Clinton won the Democratic presidential nomination, he suddenly flip-flopped on school choice. Clinton also distanced himself from the DLC's advocacy of privatization and competitive contracting of government services.

Government, Schundler says, should be on the side of the consumer. Schundler knows the GOP is no panacea. It, too, can represent powerful interest groups. But he decided the basic Republican philosophy of individualism provides at least some protection from the statist and collectivist orthodoxy that is canon law in today's Democratic Party.

Back in Jersey City, Schundler has put more cops on the street by kicking scores of officers out of cushy station-house jobs and putting them on foot patrols. (Some of the cops have sued to get their desk jobs back.)
The courts have since ruled that the mayor was right, editor's note.

He's divided the city into 133 neighborhoods. Each is assigned its own cops, augmented with private security officers connected to the police with radios. Crime is down 18 percent.

The neighborhoods will have their own councils and will hire managers to coordinate city services. If they don't do a good job, the neighbors can fire them.

Schundler has Gov. Christie Todd Whitman's support for a pilot voucher plan for Jersey City parents, but he intends to implement school choice with a City Council vote unless he finds a specific state law preventing it.

"What I've harped on is trying to move away from partisanship and focus in on solving the problems people in Jersey City want something done about."

Bret Schundler. Write it down. On second thought, I really don't think you'll need to.

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