This ugly governor's race shows nothing is too low for Trump's GOP

NEW BRUNSWICK — In a crowded room on the Rutgers campus on Thursday, two state senators tried to impart the wisdom of political civility to students at the very moment our state’s gubernatorial race was devolving into the campaign’s ugliest day yet.

Sen. Jon Bramnick, a Republican, and Sen. Joe Cryan, a Democrat, are on what they’re calling a college civility tour, one they announced after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed on Sept. 10. I have my doubts about whether two lawmakers from New Jersey can help drag American politics out of the sewer, so I visited Rutgers to see if Bramnick and Cryan would dispel my doubts.

Momentarily, they did. Bramnick spoke somberly about the strife and violence of the 1960s and how he fears those days are returning, and Cryan was sincere when he urged the students to remember that we don’t all live life’s experiences the same way.

“Always keep in mind that somebody else’s perspective isn’t ours, and as a result of that, let’s listen, learn, and be a part of the great shared experience called this American experiment,” he said.

Well said! Unfortunately, outside the walls of that room on Rutgers’ campus, the race to succeed Gov. Phil Murphy was deteriorating into acrimony, raising doubts about Bramnick’s and Cryan’s premise that we can all just get along.

The ugliness stems from two stories that dropped Thursday, one from the New Jersey Globe that says Democrat Mikie Sherrill did not walk with her graduating class at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1994 as punishment related to a massive cheating scandal that implicated more than 100 of her classmates, and a CBS News report that the National Archives released an unredacted copy of Sherrill’s military records to an ally of her GOP opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, records the Ciattarelli campaign then distributed to reporters without shielding personal information related to her and her family.

Republicans used the Globe story to accuse Sherrill of “cheating her way” through the Naval Academy, and are calling on her to release her disciplinary records to confirm her claim that she was merely punished for not turning in students who did cheat. And Sherrill said the CBS story proves the Trump administration and Ciattarelli are “breaking the law and exposing private records for political gain.”

The problem for Sherrill: The Globe story calls into question the very thing she has centered her campaign on, her military record.

Contemporaneous reports about the cheating scandal — an unknown number of students obtained a copy of an electrical engineering exam days before the test was given — indicate the Navy believed 15 percent of Sherrill’s graduating class were implicated, and a special naval tribunal found dozens guilty of honor violations and issued them punishments like loss of privileges, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Sherrill’s claim that she didn’t walk in her graduation ceremony as punishment for not turning in fellow students who cheated is a plausible story. She could confirm it by letting us take a peek at those disciplinary records, but her campaign has nixed that idea.

What should have been a victory lap for the Ciattarelli campaign, though, was marred by the CBS story, which implicates the campaign in distributing documents that included Sherrill’s Social Security number, personal information about her parents, life insurance details … incredibly personal stuff handed out to reporters and God knows who else.

The campaign has pinned the blame on the National Archives, which appears to be 100 percent responsible for releasing the unredacted records in the first place, but had no role in giving them to members of the media.

Both stories dropped the same day a new poll said the governor’s race is all tied up, with Ciattarelli and Sherrill both at 43 percent and a whopping 11 percent of voters undecided. If this race is indeed a dead heat, things are only going to get uglier from here.

Meanwhile, David Weigel of Semaforreported Thursday that conservative super PAC American Principles Project is going to flood our airwaves with an ad to scare voters about transgender people. Really nasty stuff.

Back on the Rutgers campus, I asked Bramnick what he thought of the civility of the current gubernatorial campaign.

“Not bad, actually. I watched the debate — I didn’t really hear any personal insults. I think it’s shockingly good from that standpoint,” he said.

He’s right that Sunday’s debate was no brawl. But I think the days of this race being civil are over. Buckle up.

• Editor Terrence T. McDonald is a native New Jerseyan who has worked for newspapers in the Garden State for more than 15 years. He has covered everything from Trenton politics to the smallest of municipal squabbles, exposing public corruption and general malfeasance at every level of government. Terrence won 23 New Jersey Press Association awards and two Tim O’Brien Awards for Investigative Journalism using the Open Public Records Act from the New Jersey chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. One politician forced to resign in disgrace because of Terrence’s reporting called him a "political poison pen journalist.” You can reach him at tmcdonald@newjerseymonitor.com.