March 23rd, 2006, 09:08 PM
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Join Date: Dec 2003
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Two ships passing in the night...
Quote:
Sen. Kean regrets
Wednesday, March 22, 2006 BY EDITORIAL
You'd think that if a Very Important Person came all the way to Washington, D.C., to raise money for somebody's political campaign, the beneficiary of the effort would show up to introduce the VIP and say thanks.
But we're talking about New Jersey Republican politics, which presents those who practice it with unique kinds of challenges. And so it was that on Monday, when Vice President Dick Cheney visited Newark to enrich the U.S. Senate campaign of state Sen. Tom Kean Jr., R-Westfield, by some $400,000 and praise his fellow Republican as a "man of experience ... values ... vision," Sen. Kean was unable to make it to the event in time to shake the vice president's hand.
Did the fact that Mr. Cheney seems to be unpopular with a large number of New Jersey voters, and the awareness that any photograph showing him and Sen. Kean together would have been exploited by Democrats to link the two Republicans in the public's mind, play any part in Sen. Kean's scheduling plans? One can only speculate.
In any event, the senator first attended an afternoon Senate session at the State House, where his agenda included such urgent acts as voting against Gov. Jon Corzine's plan to save New Jersey's transportation program from collapse (the bill passed easily anyhow). Once the session ended, Sen. Kean headed north to the fund-raiser "as quickly as I could," he said.
Unfortunately, he and his driver selected the road that normally is the slower choice at rush hour -- Route 1, rather than the Turnpike -- and by the time he arrived in Newark, he told reporters, "I ended up running down the street" in a desperate attempt to get to the event before the visitor from Washington departed. Alas, the vice president's motorcade already was on its way to the airport.
Sensing that some might be cynical, Sen. Kean's spokeswoman, Jill Hazelbaker, said "There was no concerted effort . It was two ships passing in the night." And one of the ships was keeping a lot of ocean between them.
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