Kelly: It's time for Bob Menendez to apologize for his unethical gift-taking

Mike Kelly | NorthJersey

Show Caption Hide Caption Sen. Bob Menendez lays out his case for re-election Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez talks about battling corruption charges and criticizes Republican opponent Bob Hugin in a June 4, 2018 interview.

This was supposed to be a week of victory laps for Bob Menendez. It’s not. Instead of cruising the state and bragging to his Democratic pals about his political resurrection, New Jersey’s senior U.S. senator finds himself stuck in a muddy past filled with charges of corruption and ethics violations.

This story did not have to unfold this way. But the man squarely at fault here is Bob Menendez.

First, some background.

On Tuesday, Menendez, 64, won the Democratic primary and was formally nominated as the party’s official candidate for U.S. Senate in the November election. On paper Menendez won a landslide in the primary. More than 62 percent of the state Democrats who went to the polls voted for him. Not bad.

But consider the candidate who received most of the other votes.

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2018 NJ Senate candidates Hugin and Menendez: What you really want to know about them Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Menendez and Republican challenger Bob Hugin disagree over baseball and football teams, music, books and movies.

Say hello to Lisa McCormick. She’s 49 and the publisher of a little-known Rahway-based weekly newspaper, "NJ Today." To say she is a political nobody — a rookie with no experience as a public official — is an understatement. Some observers describe her as a gadfly, known mostly for her outspoken support of Bernie Sanders' presidential candidacy in 2016.

McCormick has never held elective office, never worked in government. In her primary race against Menendez, she could not even raise $5,000 — the financial baseline for candidates to officially report campaign donations.

Equally significant, she was unable to gain an endorsement from any major Democratic official. Not surprisingly, the media basically ignored her.

Yet, with a campaign based on emails and personal appearances, McCormick convinced almost 158,000 Democrats to vote for her on Tuesday.

McCormick’s vote tally struck the Menendez campaign like a torpedo. Yes, Menendez received almost 260,000 votes. But the fact that an inexperienced upstart with no widespread name recognition among Democrats across the state captured so many other votes blew a hole in the convenient narrative, carefully crafted by Menendez’s staff, that the senator was back on his political feet after surviving an 11-week federal corruption trial last fall that ended with a hung jury mistrial, followed later by a judge dismissing a litany of major charges and then federal prosecutors deciding not to pursue the case again.

In Tuesday's primary, Bob Menendez came face to face with an inconvenient truth: that a large number of New Jersey voters don’t like him. Maybe they don't trust him, either.

Menendez should have pulled in 80 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s primary, maybe more. That’s what an accomplished incumbent facing insignificant opposition and bolstered by the support of state Democratic leaders generally could expect in most primaries in New Jersey.

But Bob Menendez carried some hefty baggage into this election.

In recent years, while facing federal charges that could have sent him to jail for years, Menendez made a point of trying to go about his business as a significant voice in the U.S. Senate. To be fair, he deftly separated his legal battle against corruption charges from his Senate work.

At the same time, however, the corruption investigation was clearly a sore spot to Menendez and his staff. Journalists were routinely criticized if they dared to interrupt a Menendez press conference about some policy issue to ask about his upcoming trial on a variety of federal charges that he used his position in the Senate to intervene with government officials on behalf of a wealthy Florida eye doctor in return for all manner of gifts from the doctor, including free plane trips to the Dominican Republic as well as campaign contributions.

What’s often overlooked is that Menendez never denied that he took gifts from Dr. Salomon Melgen, a noted ophthalmologist who is facing a long prison sentence after being convicted on unrelated federal charges that he over-billed Medicare. But Menendez never apologized — not even after he was fully acquitted and essentially a free man.

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This is no small thing. Voters don’t expect their elected leaders to be perfect. But when those leaders make mistakes, voters expect some context — an answer, an apology, maybe even a little humility.

After the trial — and Menendez’s triumph — most observers felt that he might offer some explanation of how blind he was in accepting lavish gifts from Dr. Melgen, especially after the Senate Ethics Committee “severely admonished” Menendez for taking those gifts in a four-page letter in April that brimmed with contempt for his poor judgment.

But that explanation from Menendez never came.

Perhaps this was too much to expect of Menendez. He is, after all, a proud, tough man — a Cuban-American who fought his share of battles as he climbed the political ladder from the streets of Hudson County to the Statehouse and then to the U.S. Congress.

When questions were raised about his ethics and his friendship with Dr. Melgen, who was a co-defendent in his trial, Menendez felt he had been unfairly singled out by federal investigators. And after his mistrial in November, Menendez was angry when he stepped outside the federal courthouse in Newark.

First, he played the race card. "Certain elements of the FBI and of our state,” he said, “cannot understand or, even worse, accept that a Latino kid from Union City can grow up to be a United States senator and be honest."

Then, he got personal. "To those who were digging my political grave so that they could jump into my seat, I know who you are and I won't forget you," he said.

In making such a threat, Menendez didn’t sound like an articulate U.S. senator. He sounded like a cheap mobster. Even after his slap-down by the Senate Ethics Committee, Menendez never offered a hint of contrition.

In a recent interview, Herb Jackson, the Washington correspondent for The Record and Northjersey.com, asked Menendez if he thought he should apologize. Menendez's answer reveals much about why the public might have trouble warming up to him.

"First of all, my view is that I went through the ultimate public scrutiny," Menendez said, referring to his federal trial. He added that the mistrial and dismissal of charges by a federal judge was "the ultimate expression of what I did and didn’t do."

So much for an apology -- or even an explanation.

This was the arrogant landscape that Lisa McCormick walked into when she decided to run against Menendez in Tuesday's primary. When I phoned her after the vote, she was ebullient in defeat.

“Heck of an election, hey?” she chortled.

To most people, McCormick had just suffered a crushing loss — beaten by more than 20 points. But she understood what had just taken place — namely that four of every 10 Democrats who went to the polls on Tuesday declined to cast a vote for their incumbent U.S. senator.

“People are angry,” she said.

As for Menendez, McCormick added: “It’s not what he does. It’s what he doesn’t do.”

McCormick went on to describe how she viewed the difference between herself and Menendez. On many policy issues, they agree. But to McCormick a far more fundamental issue was at stake. “It’s a values question,” she said, noting that Menendez, in his accepting of so many gifts, “lost sight of the people” he was supposed to represent.

“Government service is about service," McCormick added. "It’s about service to the people.”

Menendez might argue that he has dutifully built a staff that attempts to serve ordinary people. Even the Senate Ethics Committee praised him for being “committed to assisting constituents.” But the committee also said Menendez “went well beyond Senate norms” in accepting so many gifts as part of that service to people.

Does Menendez have a blind side when it comes to gifts? He wouldn’t be the first politician with such a problem. Just ask Bob Torricelli, who was forced to leave his U.S. Senate seat after taking all sorts of gifts.

But unlike Torricelli, Menendez has a second chance.

Maybe now, as he looks back on the primary, he might learn a lesson from his opponent.

During her campaign, Lisa McCormick made a point of telling supporters: “I don’t want your money. I want your heart.”

Bob Menendez should listen.

Then he should apologize.

Email: kellym@northjersey.com