OUR ELECTED FAT BASTARDS

An American type of political office-holder that has been little noted is the obese tough guy who uses his physical bulk and his loud mouth to intimidate critics and to make himself seem an imposing and unstoppable leader.

I can think of three heavy-duty examples, two of them forgotten and one in the headlines now.  In all three cases, we understand more about politics if we know who they were and what they did.

~Philadelphia's most colorful mayor wasn't Frank Rizzo but the Depression-era S. Davis Wilson.   Cigar-chomping and way overweight, he was well-educated and generally well-spoken. But there was nothing genteel about his bellowed "I'll punch you in the nose!" and "I'll wring your neck!".

Time Magazine described him after his death as "Hard-working, hard-driving, hard-drinking red-faced Sam Wilson".  Rampant and unpredictable, he dominated his city.  He wanted to be governor.  And he wanted to be president.

Wilson imitated his contemporary, New York's outstanding Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, in activities like going to fires at all hours and taking charge, conducting the municipal orchestra, and serving as committing magistrate in high-profile criminal cases.  Unlike La Guardia, he also played detective and, several times, tried to frame suspects.  And he did things like disguise himself and spend a night in a homeless shelter to check on conditions there.

Also unlike La Guardia but like another of his contemporaries, Chicago's Mayor Anton Cermak, he tried to take over his city's rackets.  Cermak had bootleg liquor delivered in police vehicles, but Wilson only created his own underworld czar, a fellow named Nate Schaeffer.  Racketeers who wanted to stay in business paid off Nate; otherwise the vice squad shut them down.

But no matter how involved in illegal activities he was, Wilson was an expert at playing the reformer card, the I'm-the-only-one-you-can-trust card.  He brilliantly exposed the dirty deals and crooked involvements of his political enemies.  Over all, he probably lessened the political criminality of Philadelphia for a while.

During his strenuous and increasingly controversial tenure, he changed parties, becoming a New Dealer and raking in all the Federal largess that he could, and - like Rizzo - built up a large Democratic patronage machine.  Whether he could have survived politically is arguable, but his body quit on him after years of booze, cigars, and self-induced stress.

~The late 1930s saw the election of New Jersey's "boy" governor, a glad-handing 38-year-old hail-fellow-well-met who loved to clown with the Circus Saints and Sinners and had a wealth of raunchy jokes. But he was another fat guy with a ton of attitude.  His name was Harold G. Hoffman.  He was a vice presidential possibility in 1940 even though he could never accomplish much.

Unlike S. Davis Wilson, Hoffman not only threatened to punch people out but actually did so.

Unable to succeed himself in office, Hoffman got himself appointed director of a state office he then held for years.  After his heart gave out when he was 58, a letter he left for his daughter revealed that he had been stealing from the state - over $300,000 in all - from the time he was governor.  He began out of necessity, he said, and would have paid it back except that another state official blackmailed him.

This sad, guilt-ridden fat man who seemingly had not a care in the world is perhaps best remembered for involving himself in the Lindbergh kidnapping case.  His investigating and his attempt to hold up the execution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann have often been attributed to political grandstanding.  But I'm not so sure, because I have in mind other crooked governors who sincerely and even courageously opposed capital punishment when there could be nothing but risk in it for them.  There was, for example, Tennessee's Ray Blanton, formerly a Congressman and later a convict.  And there was Maryland's Spiro T. Agnew, afterwards a hideous vice president.  I'd say Hoffman may have been acting from conscience.

~Lastly there's of course New Jersey's current governor, Christopher Christie, who has publicly boasted of being "a fat bully" and who does things like yell "Idiot!" at a veteran who questioned one of his decisions and deride a Democratic legislator as "Numb Nuts".  He's fully in the great tradition.

 Investigative journalists have begun revealing what the political condition of New Jersey actually is and what Christie has done to exploit it.

New Jersey has the strongest governor in the country, no matter who it is; he's the only elected statewide official and can appoint watchdogs like the attorney general and the state treasurer who could otherwise cause him problems..  And New Jersey has great corruption, fostered by the value of land, of which little is available, which makes for a culture of bribes by developers.  And New Jersey i's the last state to feature real old-style political bosses, the most conspicuous ones being Democrats.

For example, there's George Norcross, the handsome, silver-haired unrivaled potentate of South Jersey politics.  And there's Brian Stack, both state senator and mayor of  Union City.  And there's Essex County Executive Joseph "Joey D" Di Vincenzo, a Christie buddy all along.  And there are the bosses' allies, such as State Senator Steve Sweeney, like Christie something of a bully, who wants to be governor.

These bosses and those aligned with them, although Democrats, were openly (Di Vincenzo, Stack) or covertly for Chris Christie for re-election.  Why?  Because he dealt with them as equals, gave them what they wanted, and refrained from using his high popularity to promote his party.  Thus the Republicans made no gains in the legislature though he won a crushing victory.  He also raked in endorsements from numerous Democratic mayors for whom he had done favors, while others, it now appears, may have been threatened or punished for maintaining their independence.

Christie doesn't seem to have lined his pockets, as so many Jersey pols have.  He knows better, having put so many of them in jail as U.S. attorney.  Rather, he worked this top-heavy system for his own political advantage.

Federal storm relief aid, we've begun to learn, has sometimes - maybe many times - gone not to benefit the citizens impacted but to projects proposed by politically connected builders.  So, as usual, the fat cats stay fat and the lean suffer hunger.

Christie is in hefty trouble.  I don't pretend to know what the George Washington Bridge sabotage was about, but I don't believe that someone as hands-on as he is wouldn't have known what was going on or would be as incurious about it as he professes to be.  I'm skeptical that such an extreme action was done to get back at a mayor no one ever heard of for failing to back him.  And I think it's very possible that his underlings who made it happen don't know what the real reason was.

But I also think we'll find out everything, as the Feds are looking into it and the Dems in the legislature are hell-bent to get answers while the Repubs don't dare hold things up.

That Christie will remain in office now seems to me improbable.  And the exposure of how things work in the corrupt and outmoded system of Jersey government may start a wave of reform.

Formerly it looked as though the Dem gubernatorial nomination would be decided by a knock-down, drag-out fight between the bosses' man Steve Sweeney and the new 36-year-old reform Jersey City mayor, Steve Fulop.

Fulop is about as far from being Chris Christie as anyone could be.  He interrupted a big-money-making career at Goldman Sachs to join the Marines and get shot at in Iraq.  He retired one boss, Jerramiah Healy, the mayor he defeated, and is an enemy to the Hudson County Democratic organization.  The bosses everywhere don't like him, and it's mutual.

It may be that bossism and the individual bosses are about to become the big issue in Jersey politics, which could make Fulop the favorite over Sweeney and anyone else for governor.  Perhaps the Democrats have had enough of leaders who are in bed with the opposition.   And perhaps the voters have had enough of a system that creates cynicism and costs them money by giving a few people who are out for themselves the ability to run everything.

Fulop, by the way, is quite thin.