The Unmaking of a Mayor? A look at the Jersey City Kid.

Jersey City, N.J.

Mayor Bret Schundler wanted to talk about dreams. Standing on an empty lot in Jersey City for the Liberty Academy Charter School's groundbreaking ceremony on February 20, Schundler was ad-libbing a speech for a group of children and teachers. Martin Luther King had a dream, he said; everybody should have dreams. It was the sort of unremarkable address that any politician can give anywhere, at any time. But Schundler knows a lot about dreaming. He once envisioned something much grander for Jersey City than a few charter schools: He imagined a citywide school-choice program that would save poor kids from the sorry fate of attending Jersey City's failing public schools. He dreamed of nothing less than sparking a national movement modeled on what he was able to accomplish, almost literally in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. And the whole conservative movement dreamed with him.

Schundler was, not long ago, a conservative golden boy, the first Republican mayor of Jersey City since Woodrow Wilson was president. He was more than that, too. When he won his first full term in 1993-at the age of 34-he scored a big victory in a place where Republicans weren't even supposed to compete: a city wracked by poverty, and with a two- thirds-minority population. Furthermore-unlike Rudolph Giuliani of New York or Richard Riordan of Los Angeles-Schundler prevailed with an aggressive conservative agenda, including school choice, tax cuts, and crime control. The Republican National Committee was so excited at his rise that it put his picture in a brochure, right beside Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. William F. Buckley Jr. once wrote of Schundler, "Look for him in 2008." He wasn't referring to a fifth term as mayor.

But now Schundler is running in New Jersey's Republican gubernatorial primary, and he's a heavy underdog. The state's whole GOP establishment is against him. Even if Schundler somehow wins on June 5, he'll be an underdog again, in a general election that everybody thinks is in Democrat Jim McGreevy's pocket. Jersey City has done well under Schundler; he's been a good mayor, even a great one. But his time in office is a case study in shattered hopes and diminished expectations. School choice did not materialize. Taxes fell, but then bounced back up again. Crime dropped, as it has everywhere, but it climbed again last year. Jersey City never became a laboratory of conservative reform, much less an urban miracle. The story of Bret Schundler is, in large part, the story of how a bold reformer became a mere survivor.

Schundler, now 42, has all the right political tools: He's tall, smart, and well-spoken. Seen at the proper angle, the soft features of his face and his thick, brushed-back hair make him look like Tony Snow of Fox News. These assets helped him overcome the fact that he isn't from Jersey City proper, but a suburb. Schundler says he was "born again" in the ninth grade, and studied sociology at Harvard because he wanted to be an inner-city minister. He wound up working in Washington for Rep. Roy Dyson of Maryland, a conservative Democrat, and then volunteered for Gary Hart in 1984. After that campaign fizzled out, he settled down in Jersey City, married, and made a bundle on Wall Street. He switched to the GOP in 1990, and ran unsuccessfully for a state Senate seat in 1991. The next year, he jumped into a special election for mayor, and finished first in a field of 19 candidates; he won a full term six months later with an astonishing 68 percent of the vote.

The man loves to engage in a one-sided conversation, which can hop between eye-popping boasts and a wonk's passion for detail. Driving around an area of the city where huge new office buildings have sprouted during his term, Schundler gazes out the car window and says, "None of this would be here if I hadn't been mayor." But more often he gets bogged down in minutiae. A question on what kind of tax message he intends to deliver to voters this spring prompts an intricate mini- lecture on New Jersey's patterns of municipal funding, and how he can rearrange things to give mayors more leeway to reduce property-tax rates. Isn't that tough to communicate? "It sure is!" he says. "But if it weren't a hard problem, I wouldn't be working on it."

To his credit, Schundler has solved some hard problems through innovation. He inherited a $40 million budget deficit and a lousy record of property-tax collection, and came up with the idea of packaging tax liens and selling them to investors. The collection rate shot up, and the deficit disappeared. Now other cities are following his example. He also held spending in check, privatized the management of the water system, and created a pilot program of medical-savings accounts for municipal workers.