Spoils of office

She’s laden with public-sector union endorsements, yet desperately short of campaign funds. Although her fellow Democrats far outnumber Republicans in New Jersey, she’s so far behind in the polls she’s almost out of sight. So who can fault Sen. Barbara Buono, Gov. Christie’s challenger in the governor’s race, for grasping at issue straws?

She says those TV ads ostensively promoting the Jersey Shore are really badly disguised Christie campaign propaganda for which taxpayers are stuck with the tab. Well, she’s absolutely right. Alas, however, her lament is likely to wind up filed away and forgotten with the innumerable other examples demonstrating the old proposition that sometimes life’s just unfair.

Governors of both parties have traditionally exploited tourism ads for their own political advantage. When Democrats are in power, they do it and Republicans indignantly cry foul. When Republicans are in power, they do it and Democrats take their turn venting their outrage, as Sen. Buono is doing now.

Citing an Asbury Park Press story, she further objects that in this case the Christie administration awarded an advertising contract to a firm that proposed to feature Christie in the ads — even though that firm’s bid was some $2 million higher than a competing firm’s bid.

The Christie administration says on this point the senator is “willfully abusing the truth,” the truth being that the secondhighest bidder of three firms got the nod because its proposal additionally included the promotion of nine Shore events to boost tourism recovery after the Sandy storm.

All of the heated rhetoric boils the issue down to this: For better or worse — usually the latter — “to the victor belong the spoils.” Not that that’s how it should be; that’s how it is. The tempting opportunity to star in tourism ads is one of the gubernatorial spoils, along with the fancy mansion and helicopter.

Should Sen. Buono somehow pull out a victory, she can then end the tradition. Our wild guess is that the prospects of her ever abjuring the traditional spoils are even more remote than her prospects of being the victor.

The spoils/victor concept is no new political phenomenon, by the way. The quote — “to the victor belong the spoils” — is attributed to New York Sen. William Marcy, in 1828, in defense of the unseemly, unrestrained, pigs-overrunning-the-trough way his party helped itself to the patronage spoils upon Andrew Jackson’s election as president.

This extra bit of info may or may not mollify Sen. Buono, who hails from politicized-to-the-hilt Middlesex County: William Marcy and Andrew Jackson were erstwhile members of her party.

Is this any way to treat the Obamassiah? Didn’t the irate Egyptians on all sides at least check with his media hosanna-hailers before they started with this blasphemous treatment? Evidently not.

Both sides — the extreme and the less-extreme — are out in the streets railing against the Prez. The placards of angry foes of the toppled Muslim Brotherhood depict Obama as a bearded jihadist. The placards of the Brotherhood depict Obama as a sinister doubledealer in cahoots with the old dictatorial regime.

Here’s one interesting assessment: “The Mubarak people