At Least He Bypassed Terry McAuliffe: Jon Corzine and Media Smarminess

What's more disturbing is twofold: the revelation that Corzine's campaign spent $200,000 on private investigators to dig up dirt on his scroungy competitor, the hapless Jim Florio; and perhaps more important, Corzine's boring 1972-vintage limousine liberalism. He's a proponent of universal health care, supports mandatory gun registration and he's against the death penalty. Somewhere in his platform there must be a plank to save the whales and exhume Max Yasgur.

That's why the Daily News' endorsement of Corzine was both wrongheaded and repellent. The former quality was demonstrated by this line: "Indeed, Corzine is about the future." The latter, laughable considering that Mort Zuckerman owns the News, by this: "A man of rock-solid integrity and strong social conscience, Corzine has a basic decency that is reflected in his devotion to charities, both large and small, and his concern for everyday people... Those are qualities not typically associated with Wall Street tycoons."

It's hard to figure out what to make of the News' slur against an entire industry, one that contributes so heavily to New York's economy and charities, especially in light of Corzine's Clinton-like use of private investigators. Florio, who sandbagged the citizens of New Jersey in his disastrous term as that state's governor, doesn't deserve much in the way of apologies given his wretched career as a public servant. But no candidate should have his personal life investigated by lowlife dicks.

This contest has also brought out the worst in the local media. The New York Times, which endorsed Florio, ran one of the most condescending "news" stories in recent memory on June 1. Reporter Andrew Jacobs, in writing about a possible backlash against Corzine's open-checkbook way of running a campaign, sums up the feelings of Florio supporters in a story datelined Bayonne. Describing the life of that city, he writes: "The crash of bowling pins. Fifty-cent Budweisers. The Jersey Devils on the big television beating the pants off their Stanley Cup rivals. Life doesn't get much better at the Knights of Columbus lounge, a dark and smoky cocoon where generations of stevedores, crane operators and refinery workers have drunk away their daily aches."

Is it any wonder that the Times is so loathed by "the people" they pretend to represent in their political views? The myopic management of The New York Times probably doesn't see the irony of what appears in its own pages. Do you think publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., or most of his reporters or pundits for that matter, would be caught dead in a Knights of Columbus lounge?

Jon Corzine has every right to purchase a seat in the U.S. Senate if New Jersey voters are willing to accept him. It's the utter hypocrisy of his campaign, and of the media outlets that have commented on the race, that smells worse than James Carville on a weeklong bender.