Democrats think Brozak's background makes him particularly suited to capitalize on moderate unease about Bush. The son of Eastern European immigrants who lived under Nazi occupation, he joined the Marine Corps almost 22 years ago after graduating from Columbia University with a degree in East Asian studies. He served on active duty for three years and then joined the reserves. He earned an MBA at Columbia and worked on Wall Street before co-founding Westfield Bakerink Brozak, an investment bank that specializes in biotech and healthcare research.

A married father of two girls, he volunteered to return to active duty during several international crises, serving in Haiti in 1995 and Bosnia in 2000. After Sept. 11, he volunteered once again and went on extended active duty in October 2002, leaving his firm in the hands of his partner. "I went back on duty after 9/11 because our country was faced with an impending threat," he says. "A group of terrorists wanted to bring down not just our democracy but all democracies."

During the Iraq war, he served as national spokesman for the Committee for Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve, which is charged with enforcing the law that protects the jobs of reservists called up for military duty. He soon realized that many employers were openly flouting the law and firing soldiers, who were then left with little recourse except lengthy litigation. Extended tours in Iraq were plunging many reservist families into economic misery. "It was bad, but we didn't know how bad it was," Brozak says.

To find out, he volunteered to lead a study for the military about the effects of the Iraq war on reservists and National Guardsmen. Last summer, he was sent to Kuwait and to southern Iraq to interview such soldiers about their call-ups.

What he found was anxiety and rock-bottom morale that boded ill for reenlistment. "They were completely unsure of whether or not they'd be financially taken care of," he says. "They were unsure of whether or not they'd have jobs to come back to. They were certain they were going to get out of the Guard or reserves system when they were done."

Meanwhile, the situation on the ground shocked him. "The number of people there and how they were prepared in terms of equipment and training was, across the board, criminal in terms of its inept management," he says.

He saw the potential for calamity. "What we are faced with today is our active duty force stretched to the breaking point," he says. "The National Guard and reserve systems are broken, possibly beyond repair. We are staring down the barrel of the draft."

"Do the math," he continues. "How many people do we need going forward? How many people do we have? Where are these bodies coming from?"

When Brozak returned from the Middle East to his post in Arlington, Va., he tried to alert civilians in the Defense Department to the trouble on the ground. But, he says, they were uninterested. "It was that same arrogant, contemptuous attitude. When I came back and said we have a problem, we need to address it right away, we are fighting for our lives, their attitude was, 'We know better than you do.' It was their contempt for the people in uniform, it was their contempt for all Americans" that finally drove him out of the Republican Party.

In fact, Brozak says, Republicans' contempt for soldiers -- coupled with their mawkish reverence for the military in the abstract -- had been bothering him for a while. He first started souring on his party when the Bush team smeared John McCain during the 2000 primaries; he was outraged by the 2002 attacks against Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, who was tarred as a traitorous ally of Osama bin Laden despite the fact that he lost three limbs serving in Vietnam.

Brozak changed his party registration shortly after he returned from Iraq last year, but he didn't speak out against the Bush administration until he retired from the Marines this spring. The fact that he waited until he'd left the military didn't stop his old party from going after him. A Republican operative, he says, filed a complaint against him under the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from partisan political activity.

It's likely to get a lot uglier. Ferguson recently paid $20,000 to Benjamin Ginsberg, the Washington lawyer who resigned from the Bush campaign this summer after revelations about his ties to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The congressman's ties to the right-wing attack machine are well known in New Jersey. "When the political mud starts flying, it seems that U.S. Rep. Mike Ferguson is always in the right place at the right time," Tom Moran, a columnist for the New Jersey Star Ledger, wrote on Sept. 7. "His opponents get smeared. And he has enough distance from the action to claim he knew nothing about it."

Brozak, meanwhile, is going on the offensive. He recently hired one of the state's high-profile election attorneys, Angelo Genova, to ask the state's department of elections to review whether Ferguson is even eligible to run for Congress in New Jersey. As Brozak revealed on Tuesday, Ferguson claims his primary residence in Bethesda, Md., on his Maryland tax forms, thus qualifying for a tax rebate. The Constitution, though, requires that congressmen live in the states they represent. The Web site PoliticsNJ.com has already speculated on possible last-minute replacements, should Ferguson be thrown off the ballot, saying, "This is New Jersey, where anything can happen."

Meanwhile, Brozak continually pounds away at Ferguson's integrity. He notes over and over that earlier this year Ferguson was fined $210,000 by the Federal Election Commission for illegally financing his 2000 campaign with money borrowed from a trust fund set up by his father. Brozak also points out that Ferguson has received $10,000 from House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's ARMPAC, which is at the center of several money-laundering indictments.

When he's not bashing the incumbent for corruption, Brozak is attacking him for fanaticism. Ferguson opposes both abortion and, more controversially, stem-cell research. With his background in biotechnology, Brozak is a zealous advocate of such research and accuses Ferguson of endangering his constituents' heath by backing Bush's ban. "Mike Ferguson's special interests are a few religious fundamentalists that would impede scientific progress in the name of a misguided ideology, rather than the thousands of his constituents suffering from debilitating disease," Brozak says in a press release.

Brozak's strategy, says political analyst Rebovich, is to label Ferguson "an ideologue who doesn't really think for himself and doesn't advocate for the district. Brozak is saying, 'What do you think, I'm a liberal? I'm a friggin' Marine, and on top of that I'm a businessman. Ferguson is a guy who inherited Daddy's money.'"

Ferguson did not return Salon's calls seeking comment.

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