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In Search Of Next President,
GOP Could Look To Jersey City
King Features Syndicate,1993
The job of being president of the United States is now more or less open. And of course there are plenty of claimants. The interesting question arises of whether a brilliant young man, Bret Schundler, could go in one bound from being mayor of Jersey City to running the Oval Office.
Schundler, a 34-year-old successful Wall Streeter, has the aura of a man on whom the sun is rising. I had lunch with him recently, and I was struck by his intelligence and intensity. He possesses the compelling quality of a man unaccustomed to losing.
He has turned the down-at-heels and corrupt Jersey City upside down as its first Republican mayor since 1917.
Last year, with the city's previous mayor in jail, Schundler squeaked into office with 16 percent of the vote in a 19 candidate field. Just a fluke, said the Democrats.
But then Bret Schundler went to work. His first move as mayor was to reject a tax increase proposed by the City Council. Instead, he bundled up the tax liens owed to the city and sold them to private investors for $44 million. He cut 200 staff positions -- patronage positions -- from the city payroll. He increased police walking the beat from 32 to 64 percent of the force: out from behind desks and onto the street.
He has gone relentlessly into the city's public housing projects and told willing listeners -- mostly black -- about the economics of public education. The city's schools spend $9,200 per pupil, yet have dismal results. Private schools in Jersey City spend $1,400 per elementary school pupil and $3,500 per high school pupil. Their results far outdistance the public schools.
Schundler is campaigning to allocate $6,000 of state education aid per pupil to parents in the form of vouchers. Vouchers could be used at any public or private school. His plan has been endorsed by Republican gubernatorial hopeful Christine Todd Whitman. It might, in fact, be the high point of Whitman's campaign. I f she wins it will be on Schundler's coattails.
In May, Schundler won a full term as mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey's second most populous city.
In a city where 6 percent of the voters are registered Republicans, he won a landslide 68 percent of the vote, even though the Democrats had trotted out Jesse Jackson to hint broadly that Bret Schundler is a racist.
Schundler carried 40 percent of the black vote, 75 percent of the Hispanic vote and 85 percent of the Asian vote.
Those voters stunningly rejected the sleazy allegations of racism. They know that Schundler is energetically reforming a corrupt old city, making visible changes in their own lives. He has cut property taxes, expanded the city's enterprise zone -- where sales taxes are now cut in half -- and made Jersey City attractive to investors for the first time in living memory. He has even cut his own salary by 15 percent.
If Bret Schundler ran again today be would certainly get more than 68 percent of the vote, Jesse Jackson or no Jesse Jackson.
This Schundler is an extremely bright guy. He seems to know how to implement Ronald Reagan's ideas better than Reagan did. He understands that a politics of "rights" encourages a politics of grievances. He understands that the Great Society, driven by "entitlements," means, in practice, vast tracts of urban wasteland decorated by graffiti and shattered glass.
His basic message is that he will not do things "for" people but will help them do things for themselves.
"I think,'' he says, "if a parent wants to send his child to a religious school because he thinks the values that they teach there are important, and that parent wants those values taught to his or her child, I think they should have that right. So we'll have school vouchers so you can go to the best school available, and that will force the public schools to get better as well as making private schools available, even to the poor."
Mayor Schundler has been getting plenty of attention in the national news media. Political Washington watches him with astonishment.
There is little doubt that a Republican will win the presidency in 1996, but Schundler could well win big. If a Republican presidential candidate pulled 40 percent of the black vote he would win all 50 states.
Schundler is not a business-as-usual politician. He radiates a sense of enormous possibility, backed up by a record of specific achievement. He could be the right man in the right place at the right time.
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