October 10, 2004
NEW JERSEY
Who Is Richard J. Codey Anyway?
By JOSH BENSON, NY TIMES

TRENTON - RICHARD J. CODEY, New Jersey's next governor, was irked.

"You made some remark to one of the women on my staff that I'm an unlikely reformer," Mr. Codey, in his usual calm manner, told an interviewer recently. "Now, she thinks you're a jerk. And she's right."

When it comes to Mr. Codey - the 57-year-old Senate president and the state's longest-serving legislator - what you see is not always what you get.

In a state infamous for politics that is at once two-fisted and palms up, Mr. Codey - after more than three decades in the state Assembly and the Senate - is a deal-maker who gets along well with his colleagues. Even as he has caromed from West Orange to Trenton to Princeton and points in between since Governor McGreevey's stunning decision to step down almost two months ago, Mr. Codey has remained in character: he has kept a low public profile, preferring back-room negotiations to mission statements or grand gestures.

But there are also times, as several prominent Democratic power brokers have found out when they opposed him, that Mr. Codey can be less than collegial - like when he bristled at the suggestion that his longtime insider status made him an unlikely figure to overhaul the way New Jersey's government does business once he assumes the governor's office on Nov. 16.

Pointing out the numerous battles he has had with party officials in Essex County and around the state who "have been after him for a decade," Mr. Codey asserted his political independence.

"I'm not going to sit hear and picture myself as some great reformer," he said, "but I think people would certainly say: 'Wait a minute. This is a guy with the guts to buck the party, and the bosses are against him.' ''

"You'll see, as time goes by," he promised, "I'll take a lot of people by surprise."

It is only logical that Mr. Codey, an easygoing family man who is unknown to most voters, should want to establish his credentials as an agent of reform. After all, as he begins his 14-month term - a term that depending on his decision will either be the pinnacle of a lengthy public career or the prelude to a re-election bid next year - Mr. Codey will find himself at the head of a party, and a state government, that has been tarnished by scandal. He will also have the unenviable task of overhauling the state's finances, since he will be inheriting from Mr. McGreevey a projected $3 billion shortfall in the next budget year.

What this means, in all likelihood, is that Mr. Codey's time in office - and his political future - will be a test of whether he can bring about fundamental alterations to the very system that created him, from reining in campaign contributions to eliminating dual office holding.

"I think that sort of agenda of reform will be a crucial measure of his leadership," said David Rebovich, managing director of the Rider University Institute for New Jersey Politics. "I think if Codey succeeds, he will not only be viewed as a reformer, but in some ways the savior of the Democrats and their social and economic agenda."

That Mr. Codey should even have a chance to be a Democratic messiah is something of an accident. Mr. Codey, who is about to assume one of the most powerful and high-profile governorships in the nation, hardly looks the part. With the substantial build of a long-retired shooting guard, Mr. Codey looks slightly uncomfortable in a suit. He wears a large Seton Hall commemorative basketball ring on his right hand. And when he talks, he does not so much project as mutter. He comes across, in short, like a man who is far more likely to be interested in box scores than poll numbers.

Mr. Codey said he was as stunned as everyone else when Mr. McGreevey announced in August that he was stepping down after having a relationship with a man whom he made his homeland security adviser, and that it took him a while to digest the notion of assuming the governorship for more than a year.

Then, as he was reeling from the news, a controversy erupted when several powerful Democrats tried to block Mr. Codey's ascension by having Senator Jon S. Corzine seek the office in a special election. But Governor McGreevey's intransigence and Mr. Corzine's unwillingness to sow discord within the party assured that Mr. Codey would indeed straddle the offices of governor and Senate president.

But first he has to get there, and it seems Mr. Codey's takeover will not be entirely without controversy. In a final dramatic flourish, Mr. McGreevey has insisted on remaining governor through the final minutes of Nov. 15, a development that took Mr. Codey and other legislators aback. As Leonard Lance, the Republican minority leader, said dryly, "If the governor's time frame now is between the 14th, 15th and 16th, that's a decision I will leave to him."

No Mansion for This Governor

Even now, with the title acting governor firmly in his future, Mr. Codey says he intends to spend as much time as possible with his wife and two sons - and with the fifth-grade basketball team he coaches and whose practices are already written into his gubernatorial schedule. Nor does Mr. Codey plan on going anywhere near Drumthwacket, the governor's mansion in Princeton, which, he noted with admirable candor, smells.

"Where I come from," he said, repeating his what has become a stock one-liner these days, "we were always trying to get out of public housing, not into it."

However anxious Mr. Codey is to establish some sense of routine, he will not have much of a grace period in office. In addition to satisfying a clamor for governmental reform following the federal investigations and indictments of former McGreevey aides and fund-raisers, Mr. Codey will have to plunge into what will probably be an extremely unpleasant business of slashing spending or generating new revenue to avert what is shaping up to be a potential budget mess.

At the same time, Mr. Codey will be under instant pressure to make some sort of announcement about his political future. With Mr. Corzine eagerly waiting in the wings, other Democrats weighing their options and several Republicans already in campaign mode, speculation about Mr. Codey's plans on running for a full term in 2005 have already begun. "The decision is clearly going to have to be in the next few months," he said. "I understand and appreciate that in politics, the next election starts the day after the last one. And in this case, we might have people announcing before I even take office."

Conventional wisdom says the Democratic nomination would be Mr. Corzine's for the asking, with widespread party support and virtually limitless financial resources. But with Mr. Corzine's aversion to intraparty fighting, it is far from clear that he will willingly enter into a potentially divisive primary. On the other hand, Mr. Codey has a history as an effective infighter, having beaten back challenges over Senate leadership positions by two powerful Democrats, George Norcross of Camden and the former senator John Lynch of Middlesex, and come out on top of an ugly internecine struggle in his home county of Essex.

Mr. Codey's contentious history with the state's power brokers goes back to 1993, when he was assistant minority leader of the Senate. At the time, Mr. Norcross and Mr. Lynch pushed to weaken Mr. Codey's position, eventually installing two other senators to the same rank. He clashed again with county leaders in 1997 over legislative leadership posts, and once again in 2001 after the election of Mr. McGreevey.

The pattern continued this year when Mr. Norcross and Mr. Lynch teamed up with Representative Robert Menendez of Hudson County to try to force a special election that would effectively have blocked Mr. Codey from succeeding the governor. And once again, Mr. Codey survived. "It didn't work," he said, allowing a smile.

Mr. Codey has also been at odds with his local county organization, running and winning on two occasions in opposition to the party-endorsed slate of candidates.

Still, Mr. Codey said that he did not expect those past clashes to carry over into his governorship, if only because of the impracticality of it for everyone involved.

No Date, 'but You Can Talk'

"I think they understand that it's in their interest, for those 14 months, for it to succeed to a certain extent," he said. "It doesn't mean you have to date, but you can talk."

In typically pragmatic fashion, Mr. Codey said that he regarded the unusual influence of some of the power brokers as a fact of life. "I didn't create that, and I'm not going to change it," he said. "It is what it is."

For now, Mr. Codey is saying little, except that he is keeping his options open.

"I'm not obliged to do anything," he said. "My decision is not going to be political, but based on what's right for the people in terms of what they've been through and what's right for my family."

As for what Mr. Codey will actually do when he gets into office, for now he is playing much of that close to his chest as well, or, as he put it, "I'm not going to be tied down to any goals."

What is clear is that Mr. Codey fully intends to take advantage of whatever time he has in the state's most powerful position. Even in the absence of a detailed plan of attack, there are already some broad indications of what the Codey agenda might look like.

His attitude toward governmental reforms, at least so far, can best be described as purposeful but measured: he favors the finance reforms already mandated in Mr. McGreevey's executive order - prohibiting the awarding of most state contracts to businesses that have contributed to state or county political committees or gubernatorial candidates - and will encourage the Legislature to codify those rules into law. And he said he would like to impose limits on how much money people can contribute to county committees each year.

Moreover, Mr. Codey wants to establish an independent auditor general capable of investigating sitting administrations, and says that he has already "made it clear" to Attorney General Peter Harvey that "there isn't a corruption office unit working it the way they should be."

"It has to be a priority," he insisted.

Although he intends to maintain his Senate title while he is governor, Mr. Codey insisted that he would like to phase out such dual office-holding. And although he is unenthusiastic about the notion of establishing an elected lieutenant governor - there are already more than a dozen such proposals before the Legislature - he says he will seek to change the rules of gubernatorial succession in other ways. In addition, he says his goal "in the next decade" is the public financing of state elections.

"We in New Jersey, I think, have a good system whereby we have only the statewide office elected," said Mr. Codey, referring to the governorship. "I like our system."

They are hardly the words of a fiery reformer, but in terms of actual ability to rewrite New Jersey's rules of government, that might turn out to be a very good thing. On one hand, Mr. Codey's affinity for working within the system has never made much of an impression on New Jersey voters; a majority, according to a recent Fairleigh Dickinson University poll, still say they have never heard of him. But on the other hand, Mr. Codey has accumulated enormous influence among the lawmakers whose help he will need in passing laws during his abbreviated term in office.

If the specifics of what Mr. Codey hopes to accomplish are not yet clear, his legislative colleagues seem to think that he is in a strong position to push for anything he wants.

'A Wholesome Lyndon Johnson'

"I think that Dick has an incredible amount of potential to get things done because of his understanding of Trenton and ability to work with people," said William Gormley, a veteran Republican senator from Atlantic County. "You almost could say he's like a wholesome Lyndon Johnson - you don't have the mean-spiritedness of L.B.J. but you have the ability to bring people together, the respect of members of both parties and an open door to everybody. And because he dealt with it for so many years, he understands the problems we have in our districts."

Mr. Gormley also said an important asset for Mr. Codey would be the fact that he came to office without an election. "I think because he hasn't been lying around for eight or nine years, making promises to get the job, he has some unique advantages," he said.

But another well-known Republican senator, Thomas H. Kean Jr., whose district embraces parts of Essex, Morris, Somerset and Union Counties, suggested that Mr. Codey's greatest difficulty, especially on the reformist parts of his agenda, was likely to be in persuading recalcitrant Democrats to go along with him.

"The real test for Codey will be to determine how effectually he can force the members of the Democratic leadership in the Assembly to recognize that comprehensive reform is needed," Mr. Kean said. "That's the fight that's going to emerge."

But Mr. Kean, who is himself weighing a run for governor on a platform of governmental reform, agreed that Mr. Codey was sufficiently adept to do the necessary maneuvering.

"Clearly, Dick's been a competent Senate president, and I think he'll be able to transfer his 31 years of experience in the Legislature to the larger leadership responsibilities of being governor. A lot of people like Senator Codey, even when they don't agree with 100 percent of his agenda."

Improving the state's mental health care system will clearly be a priority for Mr. Codey, whose wife, Mary Jo, has fought through both breast cancer and mental illness. (Mr. Codey famously conducted his own undercover investigation in 1987 of hiring practices at a state psychiatric hospital, the results of which led directly to reforms.) Among his proposals as governor, Mr. Codey said, would be to provide tuition relief to college graduates who went to work in state psychiatric hospitals.

"We want to change the way we treat them, to come up with a game plan for the next century on how we deal with mentally ill patients," he said.

Mr. Codey also wants to go beyond Mr. McGreevey in an area that the departing governor has emphasized in the closing days of his term: public financing of stem cell research.

Stem Cell Bill 'Was All Mine'

"That stem cell bill," he said, referring to Mr. McGreevey's commitment to finance a stem-cell research institute, "that was all mine. My idea. Now I want to continue to make New Jersey one of the leaders in the country in that research."

Mr. Codey also wants to improve on the environmental record established by the McGreevey administration by amending a measure that he co-sponsored this summer easing restrictions on development of wide swaths of New Jersey's open land, known derisively as the "fast-track bill."

"When you do a major piece of legislation like that quickly, you're bound to make some mistakes," he said.

And while he is still adjusting to the trappings of his changed status - he asked sarcastically at one point whether an award he was to receive from a medical college later that day had anything to do with his new title - Mr. Codey had a ready assessment of the sort of effect he expected to have on state government. "I'm not telling you I'm going to be able to go into Trenton and reform everything that's wrong," he said. "Nobody can, and that includes me. But you'll see some things that no one's ever done before, I think, that will show that the corruption and waste and fraud is not going to be tolerated any more."
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FOR RELEASE: Immediate CONTACT: Jim Manion
Feb. 24, 2004 Tel: (609) 292-5215

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SENATE PRESIDENT CODEY ON McGREEVEY BUDGET PROPOSAL

TRENTON - Senate President Richard J. Codey today made the following comments related to Governor McGreevey's budget proposal for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

"The Governor's proposal provides compassion for vulnerable children, relief for property taxpayers and hope for those afflicted with serious disease.

"The budget would provide the DYFS reform effort with the required commitment of resources and personnel. Our children deserve nothing less.

"Every available dollar has been targeted for property tax relief so seniors can keep their homes and working couples can build families.

"The gem of gems in this budget is the followup to my stem cell bill last year - funding for a stem cell institute where the research can make recovery from disease a reality. The faces of courage that I've seen in wheelchairs and hospital beds will be able to look to the future with hope."

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