Back from the dead?

Never one for small talk, Florio was routinely dissed by fellow pols for his awkwardness. In a 1981 profile, an anonymous congressional colleague complained that Florio's social graces didn't garner him many friends.

"He never says, 'How ya doin,'" the member of Congress griped to United Press International. "I might have met him yesterday. It's his way of dealing with people."

In 1987, in what would become a pattern, Florio claimed to have remade himself. "I've learned a lot from President Reagan," he told the Bergen County Record. "I've learned a lot from Tom Kean." He blamed his loss six years before on "the pig-headedness in me."

Older and possibly wiser, Florio finally won the governor's office in 1989, against Republican Rep. Jim Courter. He did well this time, racking up the third-largest gubernatorial landslide in state history.

"When I leave here, I want to be remembered as the governor who brought new ideas to preserve old ideals," said Florio in January 1990, as he was sworn in as New Jersey's 49th governor. He pledged he would be "disciplined, tough, persistent and honest"

He might have been all of that. But he also was perceived as rigid, arrogant, defensive and self-righteous. And, as a result, all hell broke loose.

Though the tax hike was the main reason for Florio's 1993 loss to Whitman, there were a number of other sucker punches coming Florio's way as well.

"Some of the opposition to my campaign was purely racial," Florio says. "I remember someone putting a sign on my lawn saying, 'Why do you want to educate them?'"

Additionally, Florio had passed a state ban on assault weapons, which aroused the ire of the powerful National Rifle Association.

"The gun people didn't want to fight me on guns, so they fought me on schools," Florio says.

In the waning days of the campaign, the NRA spent $200,000 to fund a phone bank -- an expenditure that violated the state's campaign finance laws. The NRA was ultimately fined $7,000.

More Whitman campaign activities were questioned when her consultant, Ed Rollins, said that the campaign "went into black churches, and we basically said to ministers who had endorsed Florio, 'Do you have a special project?' And they said, 'We've already endorsed Florio.' We said, 'That's fine. But don't get up in the Sunday pulpit and preach it. You know, we know you've endorsed him, but you know, don't get up there and say it's your moral obligation that you go on Tuesday to vote for Jim Florio.' We played the game the way the game is played in New Jersey, or elsewhere."

Still, in addition to the whiff of political scandal, something else was in the air that year: a tangible voter resentment toward the arrogant ways of incumbent Democratic officeholders.

Florio's loss was therefore a harbinger of the momentous Republican Revolution one year later.

"I was governing during a very tough time," Florio says. "I mean, the idea that [in the next election] Mario Cuomo would lose to George Pataki, or that Newt Gingrich and 'Contract with America' would prevail -- until people found out what was in it. I mean, it tells you the stress that was out there during that traumatic time."

That's certainly true, but it also bears noting that Florio exacerbated the stress in his own special way.

Today, Florio says that having been forced into the status of a private citizen for the first time since 1969, he came to better understand the stress of being a common Joe. For the past five and a half years, Florio worked as a lawyer, a teacher at Rutgers and the host of a local radio program.

"I've come to understand the stress and strain people go through just to live," he says. "The logistics of living are very tough."

The fact that many people have tuned out the political world entirely to just go about their daily lives is his "challenge," says Florio. "I want to restructure the debate, I want to reframe the issues so as to allow people a better understanding" of the world of politics. "People say, 'Politics don't involve me.' But political policies do involve people. And the key is to reengage people, at coffee klatches and little town meetings."

By now, Florio has had more rebirths than Shirley MacLaine, more make-overs than the Gabor sisters. And he's hoping for another.

"President Clinton was 'the comeback kid,'" Florio noted at a campaign stop in 1993. "He told me I would be the resurrection kid, coming back from the dead, I guess."

With his nemesis Whitman out of the race, Florio now faces one less hurdle in his battle to come back to life -- one more time.

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