Attack ads give way to issues as campaign enters final phase

Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Last updated: Wednesday September 30, 2009, 9:23 AM

BY CLAIRE HEININGER

The Record

STATE HOUSE BUREAU

They won't meet face-to-face until Thursday, but the televised debate between Governor Corzine and Republican Chris Christie has already begun.

The advertisements now saturating the airwaves showcase an ongoing argument over the economy, education and health care, describing rosy and nightmare scenarios under the leadership of both top candidates. Bitter personality criticisms — dominant in the summer months — still play a role, but the latest crop of ads mostly sets the table on issues sure to surface in the first debate in Trenton.

Political experts say it's natural in the final five weeks for the campaigns to begin downplaying character attacks and zero in on issues that voters care most about.

"This is a prelude to it," said Joseph Marbach, a political scientist and dean at Seton Hall University. "The Corzine campaign may be tapping into a line of questioning or a line of issues that are going to play to the governor's strengths."

Corzine, who trails Christie in the polls, is channeling his personal wealth into a series of ads potraying Christie as "wrong when it matters most" and out of step with the "values" of a Democratic-leaning state.

"People are coming home to their more traditional voting terms," Corzine said.

Christie has scrambled to stay ahead of the deluge, running his own television ad on the most sensitive issue — the controversy over his stance on mammogram coverage for women — and Web ads on others to debunk Corzine's characterizations.

"These are not trivial issues. These go to the core of what kind of governor I will be," Christie said. "It's time for me to fight back, and I'm fighting back."

Ad blitz

In addition to the mammogram ads, Christie is being hit with plenty on the air. On education, a Corzine ad touts the governor's preservation of funding for public schools even as he sliced the budget. It says Corzine expanded preschool programs and knocks Christie for calling state-funded preschool "baby-sitting."

Christie did refer to preschool as "baby-sitting" in a debate against GOP primary challenger Steve Lonegan in May but says it's the state paying for universal preschool he opposes, not preschool itself. Corzine has expanded preschool programs, until he had to cut the funding out of this year's budget amid plummeting tax revenues. His $29 billion recession-year budget did boost aid to K-12 school districts to $8.8 billion, but used $1 billion in federal stimulus money.

Christie vigorously contests the ad's claim that his rejection of the stimulus money would have led to layoffs of up to 35,000 teachers. Christie has said he would turn down "any of the stimulus money which had strings attached to it, which required me to manage the state in a particular way by the federal government." But he says education does not fall into that category and he would have accepted the funds. A July memo by the Office of Legislative Services included the $2 billion in a total of nearly $5 billion in stimulus money that has conditions attached by the federal government