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MONMOUTH COUNTY, N.J.—Phil Murphy is doing something.


It’s not the same something as Florida Governor Rick Scott—who, one day after a high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, left 17 dead, said he wants to have “a conversation” in Tallahassee, where many state gun regulations have been struck down in recent years. It’s not the something supported by Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who said on the Senate floor last week that no law is going to stop a person who wants a gun from getting a gun.

Murphy, who has been governor of New Jersey for all of a month, is out to make his something the answer to a debate that’s become defined by endless rounds of pledges that “something must be done,” which take up attention briefly and then fizzle out—like the pledges from congressional leaders after the Las Vegas massacre five months ago to address bump stocks, which so far have amounted to nothing.

“I’m all for the ‘thoughts and prayers’ and ‘our hearts are with you,’ and symbols matter and words matter, but this is a time for action. And I completely reject this notion that there’s nothing we can do,” Murphy said in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “And I hope at the end of the day, that New Jersey can actually be a model for, ‘You know what, there is something you can do. And they’ve done it.’”

The day before the Florida shooting, Murphy happened to be hosting a roundtable to roll out a package of proposed new gun laws, including a measure to limit magazine size that passed after the Newtown, Connecticut, massacre and was vetoed by his predecessor, Chris Christie, in 2014.

Murphy—who kicked off his gubernatorial campaign by pitching major new gun regulations and talked up the issue throughout a candidacy that managed to be both a runaway success and completely overlooked both nationally and at home—says the laws he’s proposing will save lives.

When I asked Murphy whether that means he thinks people who don’t back laws like these are costing lives, he didn’t hesitate. “I believe so,” he said. “I think it’s that simple.”

As for Scott, Rubio and others, Murphy said, “I’m sure they care” if people are killed. But he says their arguments don’t make sense.

“Trenton Makes The World Takes,” reads the locally famous, prideful but passive-aggressive sign on a bridge not far from the New Jersey state capitol. And Murphy hopes that on gun violence, the reforms being made in New Jersey will be replicated.

Murphy is proposing a state-level gun law compact of like-minded governors, modeled on the state climate alliance that formed after President Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris agreement. He’s reaching out to regional allies like Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who since the Newtown shooting have championed state-level gun regulations. Cuomo released a statement over the weekend saying that Washington was responding to the mass shooting in Parkland with “the same appalling complacency and inaction it provided to the hundreds of mass shootings that have devastated our country since Sandy Hook.”

Click here to subscribe and hear the full podcast, including what Murphy learned from getting his start selling college textbooks, and what he thinks Democrats across the country in this year’s midterms should learn from his big win.

One of the two governors to have won statewide elections since Trump was elected—and the only one to have flipped the party that controlled the governor’s seat—Murphy is now perhaps the most liberal governor in the country, the kind of guy who mentions his support for universal health care as an aside.

“I think he wants to be known as that,” said Steve Sweeney, the Democratic president of the New Jersey state Senate, who will play a central role in seeing which of Murphy’s priorities actually make it through the Legislature. “He’s not masking who he is and what he believes.”

Some leading Democrats in the state worry that Murphy—who said he believes his 14-percentage point margin of victory gives him a mandate for rediscovering the state’s “progressive soul”—could hand the next governor’s race to a Republican by trying to push too far in a state that is generally Democratic but has had Republican governors for 24 of the past 35 years. They’re not overly enthused about the push to make New Jersey a lefty laboratory.

The first bill Murphy is set to sign into law will restore funding to Planned Parenthood, which Christie routinely pulled out of the budget sent to him by Trenton’s Democrats. On guns, paid family leave, raising the minimum wage, “I agree with a lot of things he wants to do, but the devil’s in the details for everything,” said Sweeney. “There’s a lot of things we’re going to get done. A lot of the things … that Democrats tried to get, and Christie vetoed.”

Still fresh on the job, Murphy makes a show of being reluctant to talk about national politics. But on immigration, tax reform, offshore drilling and now guns, he’s already eagerly clashed with the Trump administration, arguing that in the current situation, being concerned about what’s best locally means fighting Washington—and not just on policy.

Two decades at Goldman Sachs made Murphy worth somewhere between tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars, helped him become the finance chair of the Democratic National Committee under Howard Dean and then Barack Obama’s first ambassador to Germany (a posting that was defined in part by being caught up in the first major WikiLeaks document dump, when he was caught on diplomatic cables calling Angela Merkel “insecure,” among other things). His time in Berlin and the history of the 1920s and '30s gave him a view of Trump’s presidency that got him into trouble last year on the campaign trail, but one he stands by.

“Sometimes societies begin down a slippery slope, and when institutions and individuals—and I say both—realize you’re going down that slippery slope, unfortunately history proves it’s sometimes too late to catch that train and stop it,” Murphy told me.

“We can do irreparable harm to our country, to our values, to our institutions. And I think if that’s what we believe, we have to call that out,” Murphy said. “On things like this, I think his presidency has been worse than I expected.”

After a weekend of watching Parkland students rally across the cable networks for new gun laws, Trump tweeted about Democrats’ failure to pass background check laws in 2013 (most Senate Republicans voted against them, as did enough Democrats to kill the bill). White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement saying that Trump spoke to Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) about a bill that would restrict gun purchases by people with mental illnesses and criminal backgrounds, saying, “while discussions are ongoing and revisions are being considered, the president is supportive of efforts to improve the federal background check system.”

A march on Washington has been scheduled, led by student survivors of the Parkland massacre. Democrats and some Republicans in Washington have said that maybe the latest gun tragedy will be what changes a national debate that’s been entrenched for years. In Florida, the incoming Republican president of the state Senate is introducing bills in response to the Parkland shooting that would create a minimum age and waiting period for purchases of assault weapons.

Back in New Jersey, Murphy is pushing forward with the gun laws he promised as a candidate, though Sweeney, even as he supports the laws, says he worries that the problem Trenton can’t solve is how to enforce them.

“He was a strong, muscular voice for gun safety during the campaign,” said John Feinblatt, president of the Mike Bloomberg-backed Everytown for Gun Safety. “We’re only five weeks in, but it’s pretty crystal clear from his actions that he sees this as an absolute important issue for the people of New Jersey.”

Meanwhile, Murphy’s attacks on the president have been so frequent and intense that critics chatter that he must be thinking about running for president himself. Murphy’s response, when presented with that speculation: “Jeez Louise.”

If only because it gives him another chance to contrast himself to Christie.

“One hundred percent no,” Murphy said. “That’s a mistake that gets made, and we’ve paid a big price for that. We had that in our state not that long ago.”

