Olympic gold medalist Carl Lewis hopes to enter dirty Jersey poltiics. (AP Photo)
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If this were just a story about a man named Carl, it would barely warrant mention. After all, what’s so special about a successful businessman who, at the age of 50, decides to enter politics, running as a Democrat for New Jersey state Senate in the district where he grew up?
Except of course, this is not merely Carl, but Carl Lewis, the most accomplished track and field athlete in history, a nine-time Olympic gold medal winner whose face has adorned magazine covers and Wheaties boxes. And his entry has turned the 8th District state Senate race — normally a humdrum affair between two people unknown outside a small area of South Jersey — into some of the best recent political theater in the state, with charges of illegality, dirty politicking, and excessive partisanship flying across party lines.
It started four days after Lewis announced his candidacy in April, when Republicans — citing records that showed he voted in California in 2009 — attempted to get Lewis booted off the ballot for failing to meet the state’s four-year residency requirement. Lewis fired back that he had owned a home in the district since 2005, had a New Jersey driver’s license since 2006 and volunteered as a track coach at Willingboro High School since 2007. The California vote was just an absentee ballot filed by a busy man.
To Lewis, this has nothing to do with residency and everything to do with politics. He’s a Democrat running in what was otherwise considered a safe Republican district, forcing the state Republican Party to spend a lot of money in a place where it usually doesn’t.
“If my name was Carl Smith, they never would have challenged my residency, because Carl Smith wouldn’t have been a threat to them,” Lewis tells The Post. “The fact is I had 90 percent name recognition before I knocked on a single door. Because of who I am and what I’ve accomplished, I can energize people in a way that another candidate might not be able to. And that scares them.”
“This is not about residency,” he says. “This is about them being afraid to run the race against me.”
To which Republicans say: Nonsense. “This has nothing to do with being afraid of Carl Lewis,” says Chris Russell, a spokesman for Lewis’ opponent, incumbent Dawn Marie Addiego. “This has to do with upholding the state constitution of New Jersey.” Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, also a Republican, has agreed with them and has refused to certify Lewis’ candidacy.
The resulting legal battle has been through state court, where Lewis lost; it’s now in front of a federal judge. “The fact is, New Jersey’s constitution violates the US constitution,” says Bill Tambussi, Lewis’ lawyer. “The voters can decide for themselves who they want to represent them.”
Republicans disagree: “I’m sure people on the Garden State Parkway say, ‘Throw out the 55 mile-per-hour speed limit because I want to do 80,’ but that’s not the way the law works,” Russell says.
This past week, the website PolitickerNJ leaked an e-mail sent to the Lewis campaign by the wife of now-former state Assemblyman Pat Delany, Jennifer. Her missive included the sentence, “Imagine having dark skin and name recognition and the nerve to think that equalled [sic] knowing something about politics.”
Pat Delany, who acknowledged the e-mail’s legitimacy in his apology to Lewis, had resigned when it became public.
Of that e-mail, Lewissays, “I don’t want to get into that . . . I don’t want to elevate it any further.”
He estimates having knocked on “between 1500 and 2000” doors in 19 of the district’s 20 towns. And while no polling has been done yet, political observers don’t doubt Lewis’ appeal.
“The toughest obstacle any candidate in a legislative race faces is name recognition,” says Ben Dworkin, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “Carl Lewis, because of what he’s accomplished athletically, has already overcome that. On top of that, he’s personable, he’s articulate and he’s well-financed. He’s a very formidable opponent.”
Republicans aren’t the only ones who tried to get his name off the ballot. His friends and family did, too.
“They all tried to talk me out of it,” Lewis says. “They thought I had totally lost my mind.”
After all, why would he disrupt a comfortable life — being handsomely paid to make public appearances — for the dirty job of New Jersey politics?
Lewis, the son of two teachers and a self-described “political junkie,” told them the same thing he’s been telling voters: “My parents raised me to be someone who would right a wrong,” he said. “Being in this community, seeing what was going on with kids, with families and with seniors, I felt like it was time to do something about it.” But will he get chance? The judge in Lewis’ case says he’ll rule by Sept. 8.
Brad Parks is the Nero and Shamus Award-winning author of a crime fiction series set in Newark, the most recent of which is “Eyes of the Innocent” (St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books).