"We should give Jersey City a chance to experiment with a limited tuition voucher program," Whitman asserted in her speech to a joint session of the Legislature. But that chance will not come, if it comes at all, until September of 1996-one year later then Whitman proposed it at a gubernatorial candidate and as a newly elected governor who hailed the voucher plan as a potential answer for an urban school district she said was still failing after five years of state control.
Whitman, saying that Legislation needed time to form a consensus on a voucher plan, announced yesterday she would form a task force to study the plan that would set up a test program to pay tuition for some Jersey city children attending private and religious schools.
In the meantime, the delay raises questions about whether Whitman is building her popularity with the voters by signing popular measures like tax cuts and "Megan's Law" and is unwilling to risk her political capital in a fight for a voucher program that she might have lost.
The delay has its own political price. Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler who allied himself with Whitman at a time when her 1993 gubernatorial campaign was in jeopardy, is now bitterly attacking the governor. The New Jersey Catholic Conference also reacted coolly to her decision.
But the speech was Whitman's first State of the State address as a political statement, it would have been hard to top. It was carried live either in its entirety or in part by New York, Philadelphia, and New Jersey television stations and also was covered by C-SPAN. "We keep our promises," the governor declared. "The budget I present on Jan.23 will continue the income and business tax cuts that are fueling our economy."
And, in a vivid piece of rhetoric she proclaimed, "the message quite simply, is that the best of New Jersey is the best of America." Those words triggered a long ovation that brought the legislators and guests, including members of the state Supreme Court lend by Chief Justice Robert Wilentz, to their feet. The governors's unstated concession that the voucher issue is too hot to handle in an election year when the state Assembly's 80 seats are on the ballot drew little response. Whitman tried to gloss over the concession , saying only that she would form a task force "because of questions surrounding the issue."
In a brief news conference later, the governor argued that her decision to put the voucher proposal on the back burner for a year will actually give the plan a better chance of becoming law then if it had been brought to a vote this year. But Republican and Democratic legislative leaders were unconvinced.
Senate President Donald DiFrancesco and Assembly Speaker Chuck Haytaian said the voucher measure had little support. Administration officials explained privately that they came close to a consensus within the Legislature on a voucher plan a little more then a month ago. What happened after that is a matter of whom you believe.
Some administration officials blame Schundler. Others blame Assembly Minority Leader Joseph Doria D-Bayonne, who they thought was almost willing to sponsor the voucher plan, giving it the bipartisan support that might have pushed it through the Legislature. Doria says Whitman's aides handled the whole matter "ineptly."
Portugal hotelsFrom the administration side, the voucher plan was a victim of Schundler's ego and Doria's craftiness. Schundler made a acceptance of the voucher plan a litmus test in the 1993 campaign when Whitman and incumbent Democratic Gov. Jim Florio were both seeking his endorsement. Schundler, the first Republican mayor of Democratic Jersey City in 70 years, backed Whitman to the applause of conservative activist across the country.
accommodation in WarsawWith Whitman elected, conservatives as a prominent as William Bennett, the former national education and drug commissioner, were touting the Whitman-Schundler alliance as the key to a national breakthrough on the voucher issue and in their campaign against what they view as the public schools' monopoly on education.
Piraeus hôtelsSince she was elected, Whitman has missed few chances to champion the voucher plan. But yesterday, Schundler's name was conspicuously absent from the governor's speech as was his presence in the Assembly Chambers. Administration officials say the chance for a consensus on vouchers fell apart when Schundler convinced Doria that the New Jersey Catholic Conference would back his proposal for a much larger voucher program then the one advocated by the administration.
Doria and Schundler disagree. Schundler says he and the Catholic Conference were willing to accept any voucher program "just to get the program started." Doria says he opposed Whitman's small-scale version "as an experiment doomed to failure." Doria says the real problem is the administration didn't do its homework.
"I've been in the Legislature for 15 years and I've worked with Republican and Democratic governors on important and controversial legislation," Doria says. "When I worked with Tom Kean (a Republican governor), we met constantly, discussed all of the elements and everyone understood what was going on."
"On school vouchers, I met once with (Whitman's chief legal counsel) Peter Werniero and a couple of times, there were staff meetings. I think the mayor (of Jersey City) was a little naive but this plan was never going to happen unless the governor got into the thick of it and went to battle for it the way Tom Kean did." Carl Golden, Whitman's spokesman, argues that the governor can still get a school voucher plan enacted.