Different kind of party time? Dems moved "to the center more"; vulnerable pay for that the most

Post-not enough of a blue wave

Photo by Daniel Herron on Unsplash

By D. Menzies

I just wrote something here after revisiting a piece I did on a mockumentary pilot done by humorist Dan McNamara; in that feature on McNamara, formerly a decade-long Jersey City resident, lamented that new housing units in the city represented a lifestyle primarily out of reach for everyday regular people with roots in the city. But this piece is about the other thing that McNamara that lamented — the state of politics in New Jersey.

Whoever would have won the presidential election, some version of this piece was incoming anyway.

My favorite line in McNamara’s mockumentary is when host Nate Starkey stands across the street from a local mural, saying, “Few people know that most of the Jersey City budget goes toward public works of art like these …”

This was filmed roughly during the early years of this “Make It Yours” era of Jersey City, and the idea that Jersey City’s budget was going to something so cosmetic as opposed to what one might hope most of a city’s budget would go to, like addressing the lack of infrastructure in its most disinvested sections, was funny to me in that tragically comedic way.