Lautenberg's family endorses Pallone for U.S. Senate

Pallone-Equality-rally.JPG

U.S. Rep. Fank Pallone appears at a Montclair rally for marriage equality last month.

(William Perlman/The Star-Ledger)

By Matt Friedman and Brent Johnson/The Star-Ledger

TRENTON — Taking several thinly veiled jabs at Newark Mayor Cory Booker, the family of the late U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg Monday said U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone should succeed him in the Senate.

“We are saying: Stick with Frank,” the family said in a news release circulated by Pallone’s campaign.

Lautenberg’s June 3 death touched off an accelerated campaign to fill the remainder of his term, which ends in January 2015. The primary will take place Aug. 13, followed by an Oct. 16 general election.

The high-profile Newark mayor was never mentioned by name in the Lautenbergs’ statement, but the references to him were unmistakable.

The late senator’s family called Pallone (D-6th Dist.) a champion of progressive values and a “workhorse, not a show horse.”

They added that “gimmicks and celebrity status won’t get you very far in the real battles that Democrats face in the future” and “when New Jersey Democrats examine the Senate candidates closely, they may be surprised to find out that not all of them share core Democratic values or loyalty to the party.”

Of the four candidates running in the Democratic primary — which also includes U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (D-12th Dist.) and Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver of Essex County — only Booker fits the statement’s profile. Lautenberg had a famously strained relationship with Booker, who said he wanted to run for the seat before the senator announced his plans for retirement. Lautenberg once said the Newark mayor may need a “spanking” for being “disrespectful.”

At a campaign event Monday in Edgewater, Booker — who leads his rivals in the polls by more than 40 percentage points — brushed off the endorsement, saying he was never named in the statement and it was no surprise because Pallone and Lautenberg had worked together in Congress for more than 20 years.

“We actually expected it,” Booker said. “And ultimately this election is going to be decided by the people of the state of New Jersey.”

Booker instead focused on his first major policy initiative of the campaign: a plan to increase social welfare benefits for poor children, which he said would boost “American economic competitiveness.”

Speaking to a friendly crowd of about 50 at a town hall-style event at a school in Edgewater, Booker proposed nationally sanctioned universal pre-kindergarten for children ages 3 and older, savings accounts for low-income kids in which the government deposits $400 per year, raising the minimum wage to $10.10 from $7.25, and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit to eliminate a marriage penalty.

“We can say we love our children … But if we don’t say or do something about that then we are doomed to repeat mistakes of the past — to entrench more and more Americans in that difficult quicksand of poverty,” he said.

Even though the Lautenberg family endorsed Pallone, another member of the late senator’s staff joined the Booker team. Booker spokesman Kevin Griffis acknowledged that the campaign hired Lautenberg’s state director and former campaign manager Brendan Gill as a paid consultant. Other veterans of Lautenberg’s last campaign now on Booker’s team include political consultants Steve DeMicco and Brad Lawrence, strategist Julie Roginsky and pollster Joel Benenson.

As the Democrats scrapped for attention, Republican candidate Steve Lonegan stood in front of Pallone's campaign office in Woodbridge and trashed both Pallone and Booker.

Lonegan, the former mayor of Bogota, called Booker’s antichild poverty plan “one of the most far-left, liberal, extremist programs I’ve seen in a very long time,” and blasted Pallone for helping write the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.

“What we’re watching with the passage of this monstrous piece of legislation is government intervention on a scale we’ve never seen before into the most personal decisionmaking process in our lives — our health care decisions,” Lonegan said, holding up a towering stack of paper made up of a printout of the health care law.

Ray Zaccaro, a spokesman for Pallone, said the Affordable Care Act “is already helping to restore middle-class security and making health care more affordable and accessible to millions of Americans.”

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Lautenberg's family endorses Pallone for U.S. Senate

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Complete coverage of the 2013 special U.S. Senate election

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