It was almost Halloween. Maybe that's why no one else noticed that 800-pound gorilla in the room.

I'm talking about the room in Trenton Tuesday where a number of top Democrats gathered for a press conference. The ostensible purpose was to encourage people to sign up for the open-enrollment period of the Affordable Care Act, which begins today.

The room was packed with the usual collection of party faithful, many no doubt drawn by what looked like a great lunch buffet.

As a general rule, I prefer my press conferences to be devoid of peanut galleries.

The goal is to inhibit tough questions. And I had tough one indeed for Gov. Phil Murphy, the master of ceremonies who introduced the speakers.

Their theme was the need to protect the ACA's coverage for people with pre-existing conditions as well as its parental coverage for offspring up till the age of 26.

Those are popular initiatives. But they cost money. And money is the 800-pound simian lurking over the incumbent Democrat senator who is running for re-election Tuesday, Bob Menendez.

Menendez was a defender and close friend of the man who was convicted of one of the biggest frauds in the history of Medicare.

Yet when it was his turn to speak Tuesday Menendez accused the Republicans of targeting that and other health-care programs.

That led me to ask the following question when the governor opened the floor for questions from the media:

"I'm wondering how we're going to get medical costs under control when we have Senator Menendez defending one Florida eye doctor who over-billed Medicare by 73 million dollars," I said. "Would you like to comment?"

That question went over with the audience like an episode of flatulence in an elevator.

"We'll pass on that," said the Governor. "Nice try."

I'll keep trying. Someone's got to ask the tough questions at these events. Thanks to the demise of daily newspapers, there just aren't that many of us left.

That's not helping the Democrats. If Menendez had met with the sort of media attack that he might have faced in the old days, perhaps he would have had the good grace to decide not to run for re-election after the Medicare scandal.

Now he's in a dead heat in a race against Bob Hugin, whose Republican Party has not won a Senate race since 1972.

All of this goes back to Medicare. There are a lot of ways of looking at the relationship between Menendez and Palm Beach eye doctor Salomon Melgen - and they're all bad.

That $73 million that Melgen overbilled is enough money to provide a year's coverage to 7,300 people at the national average rate of about $10,000 per capita.

That rate is already the highest in the world by far, so any solution to the health-care issue has to involve cost controls (sorely lacking in Medicare.).

Yet there was our senior senator cozying up to an eye doctor who was billing Medicare for so much money that he could at one time afford not one, but two private jets.

Instead of raising the issue with his pal, Menendez jumped on the jets and took trips to Melgen's Caribbean crib. When the feds first came after Melgen for overcharging Medicare by a mere $8.9 million, Menendez leaped to his defense.

He went as far up the food chain as Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius to try and protect the ill-gotten gains of his eye-doctor buddy.

At their trial last year, Sebelius testified that she was shocked to have a senator contacting her over a billing dispute.

"I think it's the only time I was asked to discuss a practice involving a billing issue," Sibelius said on the stand.

That trial ended in a hung jury, and the feds elected not to retry the senator. If Menendez had faced a tough enough grilling at that point, his fellow Democrats might have driven him from the race.

They didn't however, and now he's in a cliff-hanger. The national party has had to throw in $7 million to get their man off the cliff.

That's money that could have been spent elsewhere if the Democrats had run a candidate like former Sen. Bill Bradley.

Heck, they could have nominated Bradley himself. He's just three years older than the president. As a senator, Bradley did a great job sorting out the problems with the tax code. The voters might think he'd be a good choice to sort out the problems with health care.

As for Menendez, he may have ducked the tough questions throughout this campaign.

But I suspect the voters might have some answers for him on Tuesday.

ADD - IF MENENDEZ IS TELLING THE TRUTH, THE SITUATION IS EVEN WORSE: During the trial and afterward, Menendez maintained there was nothing illegal about his pal's practice of billing Medicare at a rate of more than $20 million per year.

If that were the case - which it's not - then a mere 50 eye doctors could legally bill Medicare for a billion dollars a year. At that rate Medicare could no longer sustain itself.

So it's a good thing Menendez is lying.

Otherwise we'd really be in trouble.

Follow Paul Mulshine Twitter at @mulshine.

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