One of the truisms of recent American politics is that New Jersey is to Republicans as Lucy and the football are to Charlie Brown. They always believe that this is the time that they're gonna win, that this is the moment that Jersey turns from deep blue. And they've rarely been as confident in their rise as they have been over the past couple months, convinced that their latest messiah -- prosecutor Chris Christie, a cut-rate Rudy manqué -- is on the verge of beating incumber Governor Jon Corzine. Indeed, the polling of the race, which has consistently seen Christie holding an 8-10 point lead, certainly validated their hope.
Yet savvy observers knew that it wouldn't be so easy, and that at some point, the momentum would swing back toward Corzine. At some point, the other shoe would drop, as it aways does.
Meet the shoe.
New documents about Karl Rove's involvement in the U.S. Attorney firing scandal have the potential to create ripples in the 2009 gubernatorial race in New Jersey.
In an on-the-record interview with the House Judiciary Committee on July 7, 2009, the former Bush strategist acknowledged that he had held several conversations with current GOP candidate Chris Christie over the course of several years regarding the possibility of running for the governor's chair.
Christie, Rove said, was interested in mounting a bid and "asked me questions about who -- who were good people that knew about running for governor that he could talk to."
The admission ties the former New Jersey-based U.S. attorney even further to the Bush administration at a time when his election opponent, Gov. Jon Corzine, has attempted repeatedly to push that connection. It also raises questions as to how apolitical Christie was in his prior job . . .
"It's pretty clear now that Christie was running a gubernatorial campaign out of the United States Attorney's office with the Bush White House and Bush's political brain, Karl Rove," said Sean Darcy, Corzine's communications director. "Christie now has to answer a number of questions, including: When did the planning start for his gubernatorial campaign? Who was involved with the planning, including members of the United States Attorney's office? How did all of this impact his investigations, including prosecutorial decisions?"
This really doesn't look good for a candidate running a stuck record campaign screeching about corruption. You can almost see Lucy beginning to pull the football back . . .