My father tells a story about what I guess qualifies as a political awakening. He was a kid in Jersey City, playing in the street with his friends, when a truck decked out with advertising for a local political campaign turned down the block. On the back of the truck, a man held a megaphone through which he yelled, repeatedly, "Who troo da bomb, Louie?" The particulars of this—who Louie was, which candidate he was supporting, who or what got bombed and who troo it—are lost to time, or anyway not things my dad remembers anymore. But they are also not important to the story or the awakening therein, which has less to do with what this particular Louie did or didn't do or knew or didn't know and more about what a person gets accustomed to as a participant in public life in New Jersey—the Louies, the bombs, the noise, the grim gradations of scuzz and cynicism and abstraction making their way down your street, haranguing you endlessly, and to no clear end.
Mostly what this does to someone who cares about or just notices politics is establish a palate. There isn't really much to be done about it, give or take the odd and invariably overdue federal investigation. The state is still run by stupid machines and dumb money and the various even-dumber forms of personal animus and cultural ugliness that ride over politics everywhere. All the elements that conspire to make any state's politics bad are easy to find in New Jersey—entrenched power in the hands of some lazy and long-tenured cynics and crooks, party machines that exist primarily to perpetuate their own existence and make sure nothing new happens, familiar in-state/out-state tensions underscoring equally familiar cultural manias. They are all somehow expressed more loudly and overtly than usual, but that fits, too. A person living in this environment becomes a connoisseur more or less by default. There is a crucial difference between saying "I'm getting some Torricelli notes on the finish here, delightful" and actually being able to spit any of this swill out in any meaningful way. You learn what benzene tastes like either way.
What's left is mostly affective, or just aesthetic. Even veteran observers of New Jersey politics can, for instance, appreciate the South Jersey political boss George Norcross III showing up ostentatiously sockless and sitting in the front row for the event at which the state's attorney general unseals the 13-count racketeering indictment against him. No one likes any of this, of course; there's no joy in being able to judge the fine points of a floor routine that ends with someone you disdain sticking the landing on an exclamation-point somersault right into your solar plexus. The Norcross brand of political corruption sucks on principle, but also in a way that does not have even residual benefits for the people living under it.
But a corrupt politician who takes care to take care of his constituents can generate a great deal of loyalty alongside all that shrugging what-are-you-going-to-do fatalism, and there are some of those in New Jersey, too. On balance, Sen. Bob Menendez was closer to that kind of politician than he was to a bullying Boss Baby type in the Norcross mode. That willingness to do just enough of his job—his longstanding support of immigrant communities, for instance, is admirable and undeniable—alongside Menendez's own signature personal shamelessness and the generally defeated state of things, helped him get re-elected despite numerous previous scandals and his own manifest and obvious scuzziness. It is a hell of a thing to say about someone who was convicted in federal court last week on some hilariously oafish bribery charges, but he definitely could've been worse.
On Tuesday afternoon, Menendez announced that he'd be stepping down from the Senate on Aug. 20. There are not a lot of unanswered questions remaining in this case; "What kind of a prison sentence would an elected official receive for taking gold bars and wads of cash from foreign nationals in exchange for military hardware and a no-show job for his wife?" will be answered when Menendez is sentenced just before Halloween. I followed Menendez's case with some interest, as a masochist and out of residual civic duty to a state I haven't lived in for 24 years, and at the risk of coming off as snooty I will say that it was both satisfying and somewhat lacking in surprise.
There were some grace notes—Menendez's initial claim that he was hoarding all those gold ingots at his residence due to inherited epigenetic trauma was bold, piquant, bracingly rich; him summoning his wife with "a little bell" during a backyard meeting with a bribe buddy added some jarring fizz. That Menendez was doing all this in places that I myself have visited made it fun/"fun" for me—a Politico story headlined "Diners, Drive-Ins, And Bribes" about Menendez's preferred places to hang out and get bribed includes the bar at the hotel that hosted my senior prom, a restaurant at which I ate with my grandparents at least a half-dozen times, and the steakhouse where my father celebrated his most recent birthday. Still, this was mostly just a familiar type of corrupt guy doing garden-variety corruption until such time as gravity, or the feds, finally took hold.
Mostly. But there is one bit of information that emerged during Menendez's trial that I consider unresolved, if also quite possibly unresolvable. As the Politico piece noted, Menendez preferred to do his corruption over food and drink and, a bit predictably, cigars. Some of this is borne out in photos of Menendez and his buddies leering over a breadbasket at an Italian restaurant on Route 17, and so no challenge to visualize at all. The stuff that happens at the Washington, D.C. outpost of the steakhouse chain Morton's goes beyond that, and not because any of it is especially strange—it is not in the record, but I am confident in asserting that Menendez wasn't ordering the Chicken Christopher or anything like that. This is strictly a question of volume.
"He pays using his leadership PAC’s credit card," Politico reported about Menendez's visits to Morton's. "Which means donors pick up the tab at the legendary eatery where a bone-in ribeye runs $73." This is piddly shit, the sort of thing that the average Senator does as a matter of course. The remarkable bit, the Robert Menendez Difference, is how frequently it happened. During his trial, Menendez's attorneys asserted that he ate at the Morton's on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. an astonishing, unforgivable 250 nights per year. That is every weeknight for 50 weeks, which is among other things many more weeks than Senate is in session; during Menendez's time in office, no Senate session has been longer than 2017's 195 days. This leaves us no choice to assume that there were days—even, chillingly, weeks—during which Menendez had both lunch and dinner at the steakhouse. Whatever the dozens of bacon-wrapped scallops consumed, however stately the seafood towers brought low, regardless the numbers of Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of creamed spinach that were drained during this period, the number will be greater than any of us could bear.
Here, finally, is the remarkable part of what is otherwise an unremarkable bit of corruption from an unremarkable man working in an unremarkable tradition. The bribes and arms deals and all the various sweaty particulars and protagonists are familiar, the sort of dull criminality that dull criminals do. I am not really sure that Menendez is different than the corrupt Jersey pols who came before, or that he did anything any of the Louies that paved the way wouldn't have done with a seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But I think of all those trips to the steakhouse and cannot deny that he is Built Different. The endless rounds of medium-rare filets and big gloating dollops of Truffled King Crab Oscar unlock something about what is otherwise some pretty standard sleaze. All that luxury and excess are pounded into something rote by repetition, and revealed as nothing more or less than the diet of a creature so warped by environmental and evolutionary circumstance that this is all it even knows how to eat.
