New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy
By Jim Vespe
As the Democratic Party contorts itself wondering whether to nominate for President in 2024 an incumbent who will turn ten over par (82) two weeks after Election Day or turn to Vice President Kamala Harris, a far more formidable candidate sits in Trenton, New Jersey, birthplace of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and location where billionaire business…man Jay Z first honed his entrepreneurial skills.
He is New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who checks all the boxes for President, and more.
To paraphrase John F Kennedy’s comment about Yale University, Murphy has the best of both worlds: A degree from Harvard, but not looking like he belonged there. A Hollywood casting director filming a movie in Boston would have placed Phil Murphy behind the bar in a place that served beer not from a keg, but from cans. or yelling while selling popcorn in the grandstand at Fenway Park, or coaching PeeWee league street hockey at twilight in an asphalt rink encircled by triple-deckers, wearing a tattered lime green jacket from St Never-heard-of-him Parish with fading shamrocks on the upper sleeves.
Phil Murphy’s face seems slightly off center, as if he entered one Golden Gloves match in high school, took a pummeling and hung up his gloves. Like my favorite Republican Governor, Ohio’s John Kasich, a coal miner’s grandson, he will never look truly comfortable in a tuxedo, perhaps because he wears his city on his face, which shouts Boston as much as Kasich’s says Pittsburgh.
Phil Murphy can understand sacrifice and struggle because, although he is rich enough to live in the same neighborhood as another blue-collar hero, singer Jon Bon Jovi, he remembers what it was like to have a dad who grabbed any opportunity to bring a few bucks home, like being a pallbearer or short notice.
Murphy took his Harvard degree and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania to Goldman Sachs, where he rose to head their offices in both Germany and Asia, and then was Barack Obama’s Ambassador to Germany for four years.
A poor kid with an excellent education who held senior leadership positions in industry, then served his country overseas at a critical ally before becoming the two-term Governor of one of America’s most diverse states. What’s not to like?
Even many Democrats who supported Joe Biden in 2020 and respect his work as President are uneasy or queasy at the prospect of him running for President at an age at which many of our parents or grandparents were already dead or debilitated or disabled or just plain out of it. Phil Murphy will continue what President Biden has started, and have the energy and enthusiasm to see it through.
In the Catholic church in Astoria, Queens, where I grew up in the 1960s, rivalries, not always good natured, often occurred between Irish and Italian parishoners, where you were expected to support ‘your own kind’ regardless of what they did or said.
I like to think such tribalism is past. But even it it isn’t, I’m one great-grandson of a little village in the hills southeast of Naples who will be proud in 2024 to support Phil Murphy over any paisan…like Ron DeSantis.
