Issue 158: What to do if you get a birthday card from a politician.
Plus, more bird art, I talked to Eugene Mazo, a feral (maybe?) of the week, and more!
Good morning!! Ok, a bit of a long newsletter for you today, but I know a lot of you actually like the longer ones so, for you, yay! For me, I’ll be spending Sunday somewhere trying to get cool and take in the last bits of the long weekend. Enjoy! — Amy
MORE Bird Art!!!!
It has been absolutely wild to see this event grow but: if you missed the bird art show at Park Tavern a few weeks ago (which was absolutely packed!) you have to check out this new version. A combination of some of the work from last time plus new additions equals the Jersey City Birds Art Show at Barrow Mansion (83 Wayne Street; July 12, 7-10pm; July 13, 12-5pm), now with family events, programming, and more!
From one of the organizers, Lorraine Freeney:
This upcoming show will be a bigger deal for us, with the reception on Friday evening and then a family day on Saturday, with a birds of prey demonstration from Flat Rock Brook nature centre at 2pm, and some kid crafts and a scavenger hunt. The event is all free to the public but we'll have some merch for sale - t-shirts, magnets, etc.
As before we have over 40 artists contributing, and more than 60 different pieces. Mostly the same as last time - also some new ones.
Here is their flier, which basically says much of the same above:
We stopped by the version that was at Park Tavern a few weeks ago and it was truly amazing to see the whole community come out for this show. If there’s one thing I’m certain about, it’s that JC loves its natural habitat and the creatures that are a part of it. This sounds so fun and so wholesome, and if you love birds and also art, come check it out!
Happy birthday from your local politician!
Friends, readers:
I have learned many things about you over the last couple of years. Two things, in particular, I have most recently learned: many of you are Leos, and also many of you have not lived in Hudson County during an election cycle before. Which leads us to this little local quirk, which is causing a lot of alarm and I’ve gotten several startled emails about over the last few weeks:
Ah yes, the very bizarre Hudson County tradition of sending out birthday (and, if you’re lucky enough, winter holiday) cards to residents, seemingly out of nowhere. If your birthday is happening in the next couple of months, you’ll probably get one from the McGreevey’s — that’s Jim and his daughter, not his wife as many have confused — another from Bill O’Dea (featuring a photo that is just a tad outdated), and maybe even one from Steve Fulop himself (he sent out cards last year but I haven’t heard of any this year, yet). The very best of the best was the Winter Holiday cards from Brian Stack, featuring his girlfriend and their two fluffy, white dogs, but he’s been re-districted in the state senate so I’m not sure if we’re getting those anymore.
Anyway, these are all meant to make you feel really good and like your politicians really care about you, and not at all creepy that somehow all your personal data is available somewhere that they can find. But of course, it’s the latter — your info is out there, I’m sorry to tell you. Usually we’re brought to realizing this more subtly (odd how all my Instagram ads are about menopause and art supplies? surely that’s a coincidence) but this is just a weird reminder that all that info exists somewhere, out there, and is for sale.
So no — you’re not on a secret political “in” list (unless I am too, and I promise you, I am not). No one is (especially) watching you, any more than everyone else is being watched by advertisers, companies, and politicians, who all want your attention. And again, I think these guys mean this as a nice thing or as a perk — not anything creepy. There’s just a bit of a generational divide that exists between Hudson County and the rest of the world regardless of the age of the actual candidate sending out stuff like this, and this tends to be one of the more tangible expressions of that. Personally, I love it — it makes me feel like this is still a small town and I think it’s funny and weird and plus the only other thing that ever comes in the mail is bills, so why not.
Anyway, don’t worry! Put it on your fridge or into the garbage — it’s up to you.
Lots and lots of words about the NJ10 race, none of the resulting in any more clarity about anything, unfortunately. But I did have a phone conversation with Eugene Mazo.
With everything happening in the presidential election, it can be hard to focus on the upcoming — less than two weeks away! — primary for the NJ10 congressional seat. Last week, an article (one, sole article, as far as I can tell, as opposed to multiple papers/media outlets announcing it) came out on Monday announcing a candidate forum with all eleven Democratic candidates; the forum was on the next day in Newark and not streamed or broadcast anywhere. I found it hard to look at the forum as anything but an extension of the party shenanigans that have plagued this whole race — sure, we’ll have a forum, but we won’t tell anyone about it.
But as frustrated as I am with the county leaders pushing through this primary as quietly as possible, I’m also frustrated with the other ten Democratic candidates in the race. If we believe the theory that the point of the forum was to get it over with, pack the room with supporters of party fave LaMonica McIver, and just go through the motions without really letting voters know what their choices are, but still being able to say they did it (this is a very, very credible theory), where are the other candidates pushing back? Why aren’t they screaming from the rooftops about this very obvious distortion of the process? What’s the point of having a slew of non-machine candidates in the race, if they’re not using this moment to at least call things out more?1
One candidate who is definitely calling things out — sort of, in a way that might be a bit confusing for your average voter, but we’ll get to that in a moment — is Eugene Mazo, the law professor who has run for a number of offices before. In media reports of his campaigns, I’ve seen his reason for running credited as “academic research,” which — as a fellow college professor — I thought sounded pretty interesting and assumed meant he was purely in the race to gather information for a book or article he was writing. While this is what ultimately led me to have a pretty long conversation with him via phone earlier this week, I pretty quickly came to realize that I was wrong in my assumptions, and that this description of why he runs is more than a little simplistic.
(Before I get too distracted relaying my conversation with Mazo, I did want to point out that there is an article here about the candidate forum, written after the event. It has a little information about how the candidates responded, and it might be helpful if you’re still trying to figure out who to vote for. There’s also an audience member who filmed a video of the forum that you can see here — the video is shaky and the audio isn’t great, but it’s something and I’m glad to see someone at least try and provide access to this event to the public. Also, I linked to all the candidates’ websites here, or to articles where they answered questions in the case where they didn’t have a website, in case you want to read more.)
Mazo’s whole point in running is to call out the profound unfairness and just, for lack of a better term, wobbliness (arbitrariness?) of NJ elections. As has been pointed out by so many in the past, the rules that guard our election are confusing and opaque, and appear to be set up such that can be massaged in whatever way best suits the party machine, rather than existing in a way that is fair to all candidates. Some people point these things out on a blog or newsletter, or through talking to the media; Mazo is choosing to make this point by running and questioning (and litigating) every tiny rule he can. The theory goes, if this was truly a fair system set up to support fair elections, every little rule would be definable and defendable and backed up reasonably and fairly across all candidates and races. That certain rules get fudged or enforced for one candidate and not another means that they get fudged for someone’s benefit as it’s the machine that’s in charge of enforcing the rules; eventually, the amount of rules fudged and/or enforced or not enforced lead to the point where the machine pick has an advantage the others do not.
This leads us to ballot slogans. Ballot slogans, in my mind, are one of the silliest parts of the election — I tend not to notice them at all until I get my sample ballot, and then I usually just sort of chuckle at the more odd ones, and then immediately forget about it all and just vote for who I was planning on supporting anyway. But Mazo pointed out to me on the phone that ballot slogans are actually, in many ways, where The Line grew its power. Candidates were lined up according to their slogans — so you have to wonder what happens to The Line if we technically abolish it, but still allow slogans. If we leave slogans alone, this give the county leadership a way to work around the end of The Line that still communicates to voters who they “should” be voting for?
Mazo’s strategy in drawing attention to this issue is to get, well, petty — but petty for a very good reason. Think something like, death from a thousand cuts. Meaning, as a candidate, he challenges election laws on details that others might just take as silly or unimportant, but with the intention to point out that it takes dozens of tiny little “unimportant” things to build up the firmament that is the county party system. It’s not just The Line — that was the big issue we’ve all heard of. It’s all the small things that come together to give The Line power and influence, and until you defeat all those things, you haven’t really defeated anything.
So in this case, there are a million little rules that come in to determine who can use what slogan, and what — exactly — are the rules around that. One such rule that seems, at first glance, to be pretty straightforward is that when it comes to picking a slogan, candidates are not allowed to mention a person or organization’s name without written approval from them. In other words, a candidate can’t pick “Endorsed by Amy Wilson” as their slogan, unless they have written permission from me.
But wait a minute. “Amy Wilson” is a pretty common name — I find myself answering a lot of misdirected emails and explaining that no, I’m not the Amy Wilson who is with the Brooklyn DSA, or the Amy Wilson who was once on Broadway, or the Amy Wilson who is an archaeologist at SUNY. And that’s just to pick on the Amy Wilsons who live in the nearby area and could, at some reasonable level, possibly be me. The point is, none of us actually owns the name “Amy Wilson.” So say Mazo were to register a corporation called The New York Times in NJ (a thing that he in fact did in a previous race) and then submit the slogan “Endorsed by The New York Times.” Which NYT is it — the one in NYC we all know, or the corporation in NJ that he is the CEO for?2
On one level, this is all massively silly. On the surface, the rule seems to have been put into place to keep out bad actors trying to weaponize voter confusion to rake in a few extra votes for themselves. But, is that why it’s enforced? Or is it enforced because the party leadership wants to make it as difficult as possible for independent candidates to run and differentiate themselves from the machine candidates? If the law surrounding who has to give permission to allow their name on a slogan to be used is poorly written and only sporadically enforced, what else governing elections is poorly written, sporadically enforced, confusing, and opaque? The point here is to hold local election law up to such scrutiny that eventually the party just cries uncle, and we all admit that the process has been jerry-rigged that we eventually demand a full accounting of all of the rules and try to rework this process to be more fair to everyone. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s his strategy here.
There was something deeply surreal about talking to Mazo where and when I was — it was a busy week for me, and I took his call en route to NYC. I found myself on the street level of the PATH station, surrounded by hostile architecture, crouching against a wall because there are no benches, and also surrounded by the very unhoused people that the architecture was meant to ward off. My mind kept drifting to this failure of government that was all around me — people forced to live on the street, the denial of basic comfort to residents as a way to punish those people who have nothing else, and the occasional barking of an intercom announcement of another train delay, same as always. Everything around me seemed to be falling apart and at the same time Mazo on was on a tear about some ruling that got passed down in the 1930s, and I found myself thinking, Really? This is what you’re upset about? Slogans?
His point is — and he is correct — that these two things are not unrelated. We elect people in part because the party leaders tell us to (and they tell us to via the use of slogans and the like); they then do not do their jobs well, and we wind up with a government that doesn’t work. In part, at least. None of this is directly straightforward. There are also things happening at the federal level that affect our city, and then things culturally and socially that do as well, so it’s not as simple as “fix the slogans and JC will get fixed.” But we should fix our election laws and make them more fair — that much is certain. A better, more honest procedure picking our electeds will lead to better, more honest people elected. And to extrapolate a bit from his POV, I think, if we don’t fix things like the slogans, our politics will never get fixed.
Here’s what I think has to happen, and no one is going to like it. Yes, yes, fix the laws, fix the slogans, but more than that: I think one of these candidates who is running without county support and with the intent to fix our broken government has to be very honest with voters. They need to explain that it’s going to take 20+ years minimum to undo the damage that we see around us, if it even ever gets fixed. This special election for Congress (with an overwhelming number of candidates running and little information getting to voters) in many ways appears to be an even bigger disaster than it would be if we still had The Line, and — I hate to tell you this — if you’re over 50 you’re probably going to be dealing with this kind of deeply dysfunctional processes for the rest of your life. Things are pretty bleak for us, but maybe with work and reform, they can be better for our grandchildren. Or great-grandchildren. Maybe.
But my point is, expectations need to be set, or I fear everyone is just going to want to run back to machine politics, because at least it’s neat and orderly and less confusing. We’re all bombarded with information all day, constantly, and we’re used to getting things delivered to us fast. We have heavy demands on each of us; very few people have the kind of privilege I do, where I get to spend my afternoons in front of the PATH station manically scribbling down statute numbers and having lengthy conversations with long-shot candidates who happen to be experts on election law. In situations like this, I often return to a random memory that I had of from several years ago where I was lecturing on the state-sponsored art of North Korea, and I had a student raise his hand and ask, “Wait, I forget — which is the good Korea? North or South?”
I think most people interact with the news like that. Just tell me who to root for, who the bad guy is and who the good guy is. It is extremely valuable, in that space, to have someone who is an academic like Mazo fight for the minutiae that, in turn, becomes something big. But I can also see how it is also confusing to many voters, and how it distracts from independent candidates who actually really want to step into the role that need support. Voters only have so much time to dedicate to figuring out who to support, and only one vote to spend. If there is a candidate in the mix who is super credentialed and just the perfect person to come in and shake things up, it’s hard to differentiate them from the other ten in the race. It needs to be said that if that person does exist in the current race, it’s possible Mazo is helping to drain the very few votes that will be cast at all on July 16th away from them while the machine will still be happily delivering votes to McIver. I firmly believe it’s not his responsibility to not participate in a race for the potential of possibly taking away from some other candidate, but in many scenarios we could map out, his presence doesn’t help3.4
At the same time all of our problems here in NJ are shaking out, we find ourselves locked in an endless loop of “this is the most important election ever.” Trump will bring us to armageddon if we don’t vote for Biden, and if there isn’t a firewall of strong Democrats in the Senate and Congress, every single one of our civil liberties will be stripped away. At least that’s what we’re told over and over and over. That kind of messaging stops us from ever interrogating the strategies we use to elect people or looking into the process that results in who our candidates are. I find myself falling for this, out of pure exhaustion. I said to more than one person this week, Look, I don’t care who the presidential nominee is — Biden, Harris, Newsom, some random person walking down the street, a tree… just tell me who to vote for and let’s get this over with already. And even though I feel that — and I feel that very, very deeply; I am utterly exhausted — that’s a dangerous place to be for our democracy overall. The details do matter.
I think in our post-Line world, the strategy of someone like Mazo running for office mostly to challenge our arcane and deeply corrupt election laws may be substantially less effective than it was in the past. That’s not to say the laws have gotten much better overnight, but the ramifications of him running have now changed. In the past — and arguably, in this race as well — there was basically no chance of someone running without the support of the county leaders to win, so no harm in him throwing his hat into the ring just to make a point and be annoying to those in power en route to getting them to change their rules. But going forward, things have shifted (I mean, he’s still not going to win, but given the incredibly low turnout expected for this race, it is possible that one of the other candidates could pull out an upset if only we could get a clear indication of which candidate is actually worth rallying behind).
That, or his campaign is literally the most important one in the state. I don’t know — it’s hot, I’m beyond exhausted, and it feels like the world is ending — I’m really not sure which one it is. I have never been less than ten days out from an election and been so unsure who I was voting for, but here I am. Somebody please send help.
(Feral?) Cat of the week
Ok, this sweet baby might not actually be a feral, but she is all of us in this crazy July heat:
Yeah, that’s right!
ICYMI
The Pompidou saga made it to The NY Times, including a few tidbits we hadn’t heard before (that the city is looking for a new location; that the open date for the project wasn’t until 2027). Also, they let some absolute lunatic have the final word in the article for some reason. Here’s a gift version of the article, not behind a paywall.
Reminder: you can still send in your statements (up til 7/11) to let your feelings be known about the turnpike extension, and the rally at the Bethune Center (140 MLK Drive) is on July 9th at 5:30pm. Check out turnpiketrap.org for more.
Newark author J Read is doing a tour of JC libraries for their new children’s book, Chickadee. Check them out on July 8th at the West Bergen Branch at 10am, July 9th at the Miller Branch at 11am, July 9th at the Pavonia Branch at 2pm, and July 10th at the Heights Branch at 11am.
I understand the candidates have challenges in doing this, but while Jim McGreevey (as an example) has had a letter to the editor published nearly every week in the Jersey Journal, I haven’t seen anything from any of these candidates — his election is in 2025; theirs is in ten days. I see more in a given day on social media from the candidates for governor — again, a race in 2025 — than I do for this race. I understand these are tiny campaigns that are stretched thin, but as a voter who hasn’t skipped an election in twenty years or more, I’m frustrated that I haven’t gotten a single text, phone call, or email from any of these candidates, other than the machine pick, McIver, whose campaign texted me one time.
The upshot of all of this is that in this current election, there are two candidates running who are challenging the rules governing slogans. Mazo himself is running with “Hudson County Democratic Corporation” as a slogan in Hudson County — ever-so-close to “Hudson County Democratic Organization.” John Flora is running with “Endorsed by Kennedy, Lincoln, and Grant” which are apparently his children’s names.
There was also a time when we had a much more robust press in this state that might be interested in digging down and figuring out, “hey, why does this guy keep running for office? Let’s talk to him,” and that adds further credibility to his desire to keep running: to generate press. But given how little local press there is out there and how spread thin they are, I’m not sure that works so much any more.
If we’re being fair, I don’t think at least six of the candidates currently running for this position help the matter at all — it certainly isn’t just Mazo. I keep thinking of this image from The Simpsons where Mr. Burns had so many diseases all at once, none of them could really develop into anything:
I really think it’s going to be important for independent candidates to check their reasons for running, going forward, and really think about whether or not their presence in a race actually helps or hurts their cause overall. Do you want to run for office because you, personally, want to be big and powerful? Do you want to run to prove a point? Or do you want to run because you want your district to have good, thoughtful, strong leadership that actually listens to the needs of residents, whether or not that’s you? If someone else fundraises and door knocks and connects with voters better than you, are you willing to put your own ego aside and bow out? (Anyway, this race is what it is, but just something to keep in mind as apparently every third person appears to be jumping into the JC races for council next year. More people running is a good thing, I don’t mean to suggest it isn’t. But saying that assumes that everyone deciding to run is doing so with good intentions and the proper qualifications. Just because a candidate isn’t associated with the machine, doesn’t mean they’re honest, smart, hardworking, etc, and vice versa.)
A couple of years ago my dog got a candidate postcard. It was from the candidates dog to my dog about how his owner would add more dog parks. It was an interesting journey to realize that dog licensees are open and accessible in NJ. My dog is pretty anti-dog park, so I mean like not all dogs vote for one issue sir.
I have never received a birthday card from a local politician but my partner always did.