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I am retired from government, law enforcement, politics and all other pointless endeavors. I eat when I am hungry and sleep when I am tired.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

THE RIGHT SALESMAN

Corzine, that most tone deaf of political maestros, turned an ordinary blunder into a fiasco when he appointed Bob Franks to sell his monitization plan to an already hostile public. The plan itself is so idiotic as to need no description beyond the word gimmick.

If he's trying to sell this creation, worthy of Baron von Munchhausen, to a skeptical legislature, why did he pick a notorious political opportunist like Franks as his salesman? Franks, a former legislator/Congressman of no known principles who is famously untrustworthy, and who now looks like a Wagnerian troll, will convince no one of anything, except that the plan must be even worse than it sounds.

I got to know Franks during the early Kean years and worked on his Study Commission on Regulation. I soon learned to believe nothing he said. It's said that politics is just a form of show business for the ugly. A corollary would be that for all too many Baby Boom Republicans like Franks, politics is a branch of advertising for the uncreative. Franks was always on the make, a polished salesman of nothing in particular, except himself and his own vanity and advancement. By turns a Reagan Conservative, a Kean Republican, a Gingrich Conservative and finally the great white hope of the GOP moderates; was he any of these things, or none?

So on second thought, Corzine has found the perfect messenger for this plan.

3 comments:

  1. Ahhhh, YES! Bob Franks!

    But please, you have a talent for such decided understatement, no??!!

    That was the Bob Franks we Republican staffers all had to learn to do XXXXX in order to avoid his mendacity!

    (PLEASE, FILL IN the XXXXX box with whatever it was that you personally had to do in order to avoid either becoming one of his reprehensible and vile little "tools," or to stay out of his sights in order to avoid becoming one of his victims!)

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  2. I didn't have to degrade myself. I just provided the expertise for his Commission on Regulatory Efficiency. I was on loan from the NJ Office of Management and Budget and essentially wrote the recommendations for the Commission. These are the same recommendations that found their way into The Contract for America as Frank's contribution.

    When the Commission ended, Franks refused to enforce the terms of my loan. Thanks to him and McGlynn I was laid off six months before the Kean Administration ended! Bear in mind that I worked on the Kean campaign and the recount.

    Franks was mister Regulatory Reform in those days but he never stepped foot inside commissions offices, didn't give a damn about what I proposed and let some munchkin on his staff named Haskell Birdbath interfere with the process.

    He's just a one-way guy with a breathtaking lack of integrity. Everybody in Trenton knows it but Corzine apparently.

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  3. And also on the little list of tools, a stairwell compatriot . . . a boy named Sue. (Or was she really a she?)

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