State Sen. Tom Kean Jr. has the best name in New Jersey politics, thanks to his father, a famously independent thinker who inspired trust across the partisan divide, a Republican who won 62 percent of the Black vote when he was elected to a second term as governor in a 1985 landslide.
So why is Kean Jr. squandering that legacy? Why is he lining up with the most reactionary wing of the Republican Party?
Why on earth did he launch his second campaign for Congress Wednesday in a joint appearance with Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, who has disgraced his office in service to Donald Trump?
If Kean wanted to honor his father’s legacy, he would have invited Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who was thrown out of the Republican leadership in May for daring to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the election. That’s the challenge thrown down by the Democratic incumbent, Rep. Tom Malinowski.
Instead, Kean chose McCarthy, the man who led the charge against Cheney, who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s win, who blocked plans for the bipartisan commission to examine the Jan. 6 riot, and who described federal aid to New Jersey during the pandemic as a “blue-state bailout.”
For McCarthy, Kean is a perfect choice. He can expect Kean to cast a few dissenting votes on issues important to New Jersey, like offshore oil drilling, and funding for the Hudson River tunnel. But McCarthy also knows that Kean is a timid character who will stick with the party when it counts, as Kean himself signaled with this joint appearance.
“The fact that the man who engineered Liz Cheney’s ouster precisely because she was independent is now embracing Tom Kean tells us what kind of Congressman McCarthy thinks Tom Kean is going to be,” says Rep. Tom Malinowski, the Democratic incumbent. “He’s not even pretending his campaign is about anything other than putting McCarthy in the speaker’s chair and restoring that faction of the Republican Party to power. He’s hitching his wagon to the guy who is leading the party’s surrender to Trumpism. If he had any strength of character, he’d launch his campaign with Liz Cheney.”
Kean barred the press from his event and declined to take questions on any of this, unusual behavior for a campaign launch. He refused interviews during his 2020 campaign as well, and never holds town hall meetings. That tells you that he lacks confidence, that he can’t defend his positions, that’s he’s scared he’ll make a mistake. Again, it’s the opposite of his father, who freely engaged the press and public.
Malinowski beat Kean in a squeaker last year to win a second term. It was a degrading campaign, even by Jersey standards, marked by Kean’s baseless lie that Malinowski’s work with Human Rights Watch indicated support for child sex criminals.
This time, Malinowski gave Kean ammunition by inexplicably failing to disclose stock trades as required by law. There is no evidence Malinowski was acting on inside information, and he has since disclosed the trades and moved to set up a blind trust. But he did break the rules on disclosure, so this time, Kean won’t have to make stuff up.
For voters, though, Kean just clarified things. If McCarthy had his way earlier this year, and Congress refused to certify Joe Biden’s victory, our democracy would have been plunged into its deepest crisis since the Civil War. If McCarthy had been speaker this year, we never would have gotten the help we need with the pandemic. And if Republicans take five seats from Democrats next year, then McCarthy will be speaker, and Trump will have a new base of power, a lever he can use to disrupt and divide, in the person of Kevin McCarthy.
Kean’s political calculus is a mystery. The 7th District will be redrawn this year, but as it stands, it leans Democrats by a few inches and is packed with college-educated voters, who have abandoned Trump by the millions since 2016.
“These are Tom Kean Sr. Republicans,” says Brigid Harrison, a professor of political science at Montclair State University. “Tom Kean Jr. will spend the next several months running away from this visit. I understand he needs help fundraising, but this could cost him the election.”
McCarthy’s visit just might strengthen Kean’s appeal to the party’s pro-Trump base. But it’s bound to alienate everyone else. And for good reason.
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Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.