The rivals in the New Jersey governor’s race met Thursday night in a rambunctious first of three debates, with the Republican Christopher J. Christie assailing Gov. Jon S. Corzine over what he called “suffocating” taxes and job losses, and the Democratic incumbent dismissing Mr. Christie’s fiscal ideas as “fantasy” and his criticisms as dishonest.

But it was the little-known independent, Christopher Daggett, a former Environmental Protection Agency official, who all but stole the show, promoting a plan to cut the state’s skyrocketing property taxes by up to 25 percent and haranguing Mr. Christie in particular for lacking a specific plan of his own.

Over 90 tense minutes, Mr. Daggett, 59, seemed to metamorphose from a halting speaker in the early going into a sure-footed vaudevillian, puncturing the arguments of his opponents even as they both seemed to go out of their way to agree with him as often as possible. “It sounds like both these two guys might vote for me,” he said.

Mr. Christie, the former United States attorney for New Jersey, has seen his lead over the embattled governor dwindle to just a few percentage points in the polls, after a four-month barrage of attack ads by Mr. Corzine that Mr. Christie called “shameful.” But he focused almost exclusively on Mr. Corzine’s record, repeatedly ripping into the governor, a former Goldman Sachs chairman, calling him out of touch with the realities on the ground for ordinary residents.