Christine todd whitman heights finance

Governor of New Jersey 1994-2001

Christine Todd Whitman, the 50th Governor of the State of New Jersey, and its first woman governor, was elected on November 3, 1993 by a 1% margin or 26,093 votes, defeating incumbent Governor James J. Florio. Inaugurated on January 18, 1994, she resigned on January 31, 2001 to become Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in President George W. Bush’s administration. She was succeeded by Donald DiFrancesco, who was serving as President of the New Jersey Senate.

Whitman was the first challenger to defeat an incumbent governor of New Jersey since the adoption of the 1947 state constitution. She entered the Statehouse as New Jersey’s first woman governor, the second Republican woman chief executive in any state, and the thirteenth woman governor in American history. Whitman was one of four women among the 50 governors serving in 1994.

Throughout the almost two terms of her governorship, while pursuing her substantive policy agenda, Whitman served as a role model for women and girls. Soon after her election, she named the first woman to serve as a New Jersey governor’s chief of staff. Subsequent appointees included the state’s first woman attorney general, later named by Whitman as the first woman chief justice of the state supreme court, as well as several other cabinet officials. These top level appointments were accompanied by many others throughout the government.

As Governor of New Jersey, Whitman’s agenda identified three central policy themes: economic growth, good schools and safe streets. During her first term, she reduced the size and cost of government implementing a 30% income tax cut over three years accompanied by several reductions in business taxes. She reduced the number of state departments from 19-16, eliminating the Department of Higher Education and the Office of the Public Advocate, and consolidating the Departments of Banking and Insurance. Sh

Gross Hypocrisy and The Whitewash of Media Amnesia

[Update below]

Veteran reporter Colleen O’Dea has a disgraceful piece at NJ Spotlight today regarding former Gov. Christie Whitman’s rehabilitation as Co-Chair of a national Taskforce , see: FORMER NJ GOV. WHITMAN TO CHAIR NATIONAL TASK FORCE TO FIX U.S. DEMOCRACY

The piece is all the more disgusting because O’Dea was in NJ during Whitman’s term in office and reported on her self serving pro-corporate “Open For Business” environmental policy rollbacks (for the details on that, see the Bergen Record’s award winning expose series which won a national journalism award for “A New Genre of Environmental Reporting “).

Whitman masked those rollbacks by a sophisticated, carefully cultivated, and self serving PR campaign – with the exception, as reported by the NY Times of a failed Rancocas Creek canoe trip  – a fiasco locally reported on page 1 with an embarrassing photo of protesters confronting Whitman under a headline: “Whitman Paddles Into Trouble (5/11/97)– a PR stunt conducted at the time she was rolling back clean water protections.

The Whitman PR “greenwash” campaign was based largely on imagery (an “outdoors image” created by bicycle and horseback riding, e.g. see NY Times Whitman Campaigns Down on Her Farm

Whitman also relied on her corrupt manipulation amounting to bribery of state “conservation” groups with open space money and her grossly inflated “million acre” goal (thanks again, Mike Catania, you scumbag!). For details on that, see The Nation’s superb report: Whitman, A Toxic Choice”.

Did Ms. O’Dea forget about all that?

But Whitman’s attack on President Trump – while accurate –  is grossly hypocritical because she did exactly the same things sh