Word: florio
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...President's chances of making further gains, however, were not improved by last week's off-year elections. Clinton campaigned hard for New York City Mayor David Dinkins and New Jersey Governor Jim Florio, but both lost. That may cause many Democrats to ask, in effect: Why should I buck anti- NAFTA sentiment in my district to please a President whose ability to help me win re-election is suspect? One Congressman who admits he found the results "unsettling" is Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, a state where labor is strong and every other Democratic Representative has come out against...
...President was not on any ballot last Tuesday, of course. But two Democrats he campaigned hard for, New York City Mayor David Dinkins and New Jersey Governor James Florio, were turned out of office. Their defeats were the more galling because of the identity of their Republican conquerors. Former prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani had lost to Dinkins four years earlier; Christine Todd Whitman was a relative novice who had held only one minor elective office in New Jersey and proposed pie-in-the-sky tax cuts...
...results were less pro than anti, not so much for Republicans as against almost anyone in office. And even that reading has to be qualified. The New York City and New Jersey elections were so close that shifts of a very few votes would have reelected both Dinkins and Florio and no doubt led pundits to interpret the results very differently (although most American elections are decided by relatively small margins). Moreover, it is still possible for incumbents to win big. In Houston Mayor Bob Lanier promised to put more cops on the streets and did; the crime rate dropped...
Clinton sought to put the best face he could on the election results. Far from being a repudiation of him, he said, they indicated a continuation of the very desire for change that had carried him into the White House. Perhaps, but as Dinkins, Florio and others have discovered, the desire for change that can sweep a candidate into office in one election can sweep him right out again four years later...
...billion increase to pay for a new state health-care plan, and in California, the motherland of tax protest, voters made permanent a half-cent increase in the sales tax for hiring more fire fighters and police. Even in New Jersey, anger at the $2.8 billion increase Florio pushed through in 1990 would not by itself have been enough to beat him, in the view of Whitman's campaign manager, Ed Rollins. His attack against Florio focused on the idea that the state's economy is still sluggish and schools are still poor, "so you got taxed a lot more...