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[INSPRATIONAL MUSIC] - Hi everyone.

I'm Steve Adubato for Remember Them, with my colleague, Jacqui Tricarico, our co-anchor and executive producer.

Today, Jacqui, we look at the recently deceased Governor of New Jersey, former Governor of New Jersey, Jim Florio, a very important figure in New Jersey, in American history.

We talked to people who knew Florio well.

Who did we talk to?

- Yeah, we're speaking with David Wildstein with NJ Globe.

and then also Dale Florio, not related, same last name.

- No relationship.

- But knows about, Dale knows a lot about Jim Florio, and gives us a little bit about him.

But then we also then get some, we're gonna look at some clips from an interview you did with him from 1998.

This is after.

- When Jim was Governor Florio.

- With Governor Florio, yep.

This is after he was governor, and kinda of recapping some of the highlights from his career, some of the things he learned along the way.

And also he talks about what he was doing after his governorship.

And Steve, I know you had an interesting relationship with Governor Florio.

This was one interview you did with him, but there were so many before that as well, right?

- You know, you're gonna see an interview, Jacquie said, from 1998, but I remember an interview I did with Governor Florio, 19, he was elected in 19, excuse me, 1989.

Lost the governorship in 1993 to Christie Whitman.

But during that time, during Florio's firm, excuse me, term, now, remember, he pushed for an income tax, not just an income tax increase, but a tax increase of $2.8 billion back in the day, they increased tax on toilet paper.

They were throwing toilet paper at the State House.

People were so angry at Jim Florio across the state, but he risked political capital to do that.

He thought it would be unpopular.

And in a series of interviews, I remember asking him, Jacqui, "Now Governor, didn't you realize that it would be unpopular?"

And he said, "Well, I didn't realize it would be that unpopular.

And then we had a whole back and forth about the importance of personality, and smiling, and having an ability to connect with people on a human level and communication.

And he used to argue with me, telling me it was overrated, that if you do your job, that's all your job is as a leader.

Governor Florio and I had contentious interviews.

I respected him tremendously, but we did not see the world in the same way, particularly public life, Jacqui.

- And I think he does.

He hits upon that a little bit in this 1998 interview that you did with him, about not having enough of a pulse on what is actually going on with people in the state of New Jersey during that time, working class, lower class people.

And he did admit that he didn't have a total understanding of what was really happening, and just how significant that tax increase was for everyone.

So he does talk a lot, a little bit about that during your interview with him.

- Yeah, Florio's view is that you do the right thing.

You tell people what you're doing.

And I thought, again, I would argue with Florio, not argue, because it wasn't my job to debate him, but we did see the need to communicate and connect with people differently.

But Governor Florio, at the end of this, we have a really important interview, and I'm glad we got to do that because so many of the interviews before that were, let's just say contentious, but right now you're gonna see Dale Florio, no relation, and David Wildstein from NJ Globe.

So for Jacqui, myself, friendly.

Remember Them team, we remember the Honorable Governor, Jim Florio.

We're now joined by David Wildstein, New Jersey Globe, the editor, check out their website.

Hey David.

I say Jim Florio, you say?

- You know what, what I say today is different than what I said when he was governor.

When he was governor, I thought what he did was, in raising taxes 2.8 million.

I mean.. - That would be a billion, not million - Billion, billion, billion dollars.

Yeah.

You know, that's a problem in politics.

They all start to look, the numbers, but you're absolutely right.

And, but it cost a lot of people their political careers.

Now that I've gotten older, now that I've had a chance to really think about Governor Florio I've gotten to know Governor Florio over the years.

I mean this man had incredible bravery in terms of doing what he thought he had to do.

This was a governor who got into office and refused to kick the can down the road.

He said, we've got some problems.

We need to fix them.

We need to fix them now.

If it cost me the governorship, then so be it.

He did what he believed in.

He was entirely comfortable in his own skin.

- And, and Florio again, raising taxes 2.8 billion, largely to fund the schools to provide state aid to local school districts to create a greater degree of parity, if you will, or fairness within our public school systems with poorer districts.

But, and also the Supreme Supreme Court very involved in the Abbott versus Burke decision, later Robinson versus Burke.

But I gotta ask you something.

I interviewed Governor Florio many times and the clip we're gonna show will be a very congenial, respectful interview.

They weren't all like that.

And to be super candid about this, some of them were incredibly contentious.

And I used to debate with him and say, governor, doesn't personality matter?

Doesn't it matter that you don't smile very much.

You, you don't seem very nice.

And you're always peeved in media interviews when you get asked questions you don't like?

Am I overstating that, David?

- No, no.

I mean, you know, you have to remember the origins of Jim Florio.

He grew up in a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn.

He was a boxer, dropped outta high school, went into the Navy, and then went to college and then went to law school.

And then he was a prosecutor, and he was a tough prosecutor.

And he was a, he was a congressman working on, I mean - Superfund.

- Dove into the superfund, right?

I mean.. - Was everything fight for Florio?

- Everything, everything.

I mean, remember the battle to become governor.

He ran against Brendan Byrne in a primary.

Byrne, was the sitting incumbent.

- I think 1977.

- 77.

Florio challenged him, ran for governor in 81.

And it was the closest race in the history of the state.

You know fractions of a, you know, couple tenths of a point where he would've been Governor.

Waits, goes back to Congress, does the job, not as a consolation prize, but just throws himself in to environmental issues and gun issues.

Comes back in 89, wins in a landslide.

And then he raises taxes and all of a sudden the political world around him began to unravel.

Republicans won both houses of the legislature.

But, I hope it doesn't sound corny, but New Jersey is the state of Frank Sinatra.

Jim Florio did it his way.

- So does David Wildstein and New Jersey Globe.

He does it his way and check it out on a regular basis.

David, talking about the honorable, the late Jim Florio, thank you, David.

- Thanks Steve.

- We continue talking about former governor the late Jim Florio with Dale Florio, no relation.

Dale J. Florio, Republican strategist and managing partner Princeton Public Affairs Group.

Hey Dale, let me ask you, you had the same last name, different parties, not related.

What, if any, impact did that have on your relationship and interaction with the late governor Jim Florio?

- It it was always a positive one.

I mean, when he came onto the scene, I was just a young, when he was coming to the state level, I was just starting out.

So we kind of started together and through a few of his people, he heard about me and I just remember the first time that we connected and he just leaned over to me and said, just don't abuse the name.

And I-- - Wait a minute, so hold on.

Even though he was never that chatty with me in interviews usually peeved at me for something I asked, he was friendly and light with you.

- It was whimsical.

Right.

Which was unusual for the governor.

I mean, he, right.

He was always pretty straight laced, very serious guy.

But because I was a lobbyist and that's all he knew about me.

He just, he didn't want things to get confused.

But so he just said, just don't abuse it.

And, you know, I took that to heart and we had a great relationship ever since.

I mean, it was very very cordial and we would always catch up.

- Even though ideologically, politically different places you come at politics differently.

What would you say his greatest contribution was as governor?

- Purely from a policy standpoint, I mean, whether you agreed with him or not, I'm sure there were some politics buried into some of his decisions, but you knew why he was supporting a particular piece of legislation or you didn't, so I would say it was his, I think he brought a higher level of policy to state government than folks had seen before.

And that's not to discount, obviously Governor Kean, but I'm just saying that at least in my experience since Jim Florio, he was a governor, that, you know, there was a lot of policy behind what he stood for.

- So, even though you were against the income tax increase the significant 2.8 billion tax increase, you weren't alone, Dale.

I covered it.

Believe me.

You weren't alone.

He believed that that was the right thing to do to raise more money to fund the public schools from the state to local government to local school districts.

He believed that whether people thought it was right or wrong or whether he lost or not, and he did lose.

He believed that.

And there's something to be said for that.

- Well, there is.

I mean, and you could argue though that he wasn't the best communicator.

It's one thing.

I mean, I think people will follow if they know that you really believe this is the right way to go.

And when they did that 2.8 billion worth of taxes, right.

And then the toilet paper tax and then the regulation on dealing with runny eggs in public restaurants that people were just like, so he didn't articulate his message despite the fact that money was gonna be used for the environment, despite the fact that money was gonna be-- - Education.

- For the schools.

Right.

Exactly.

So-- - You know what's interesting about this?

Sorry for cutting you off to, I remember I said this before, we did so many interviews and I kept asking, Governor, what about connecting with people and the communication part?

And he always used to tell me that it was overrated.

You're smiling because?

(laughs) - Well, I mean, listen, I think that was part of his problem.

I mean, he only lost the reelection by what?

Right.

That much-- - Very small margin.

- Under 25,000 votes.

- If he had been a better communicator and I don't know, friendlier on the campaign trail, friendlier to others, do you think it would've made a difference?

- Without a doubt.

And the other thing that I noticed in his first run for governor or when he won the first time, Lucinda was at his side at a lot of events.

- His wife.

- Yes.

And she wasn't, at least in the events that I saw and the newspaper stories and the events, I didn't see her around as much.

I'm sure she had other things going on.

- In '93, in '93.

- I think if she had been a bigger part of that campaign 'cause she presented a softer side, right?

She was always smiling.

Very nice person, which would offset his, you know, he had that fighter's mentality all the time.

I mean, he was a serious guy.

- He was a boxer in the Navy from Brooklyn.

- Yeah.

- Came to Jersey.

Camden.

Hey Dale, thank you for sharing your thoughts on the late governor, the Honorable Jim Florio.

Thank you Dale.

- Good to see you.

Take care.

- Good to see you.

(grand music) - [Announcer] To watch more State of Affairs with Steve Adubato, find us online and follow us on social media.

- Governor Jim Florio I wanna thank you so much for joining us.

- Happy to be here.

- Let's put things in perspective.

I can't imagine anyone watching, you don't really need a big intro 'cause everyone knows you served as governor for four years, a few years back, and what they don't know is what you've been doing since then.

So bring us up to speed, what kinds of things has Jim Florio doing?

- Doing a lot of interesting things.

I came out of office, and Lucinda and I have talked about this, without a job, no car for either of us, no real estate, and spent our entire adult life working in the public sector.

- United States Congress, and then governor.

- Legislature for about six years and then congressman for 16 years, and then governor for four years.

So we started out, I mean, which is fine if you are a couple starting at 20 building a life, we were a little bit more than 20 when we started out.

But actually the last four or five years have been very very good for us, satisfying for the two of us.

Started a business of my own, a small law firm, which has been growing and doing reasonably well.

Started the financial consulting company, a management company, which has been very interesting for me, helping small, medium sized businesses access the capital market.

And that's been a very important for me to understand a little bit about, I understand capital from a public sector perspective, but never had the the understanding by virtue of experience on the private sector side, understand it now a little bit better, about the problems that business people have, small business people, especially.

I teach- - The problems with the government?

- And vice versa.

- Right.

- Excuse me, I interrupted you, Talk to me about the impact this lack of civility, this personal kind of politics, the media presenting issues with polar positions, Talk to us about the price we pay as a society, as a state, as a country, as a society in terms of not solving difficult, complex problems.

- I mean, the obvious point is that we will have much less conflict resolution.

We will have perpetual winning and losing situations.

Somebody leaves the field with no prospect of being successful.

And that then means that people will look and say, "Well, the problem that I'm concerned about, or the problem that we collectively as a society are concerned about is not being resolved."

We have mechanisms that are supposed to be problem solving mechanisms.

They're not resolving things, therefore something's not working.

And then there's a human tendency to say, well, if something's not working there's a reason for it.

And then the concern is that someone comes outta the woodwork and says, "Well, I know the reason.

It's them, it's that group, it's whatever."

And so you have perpetual alienation that comes from the failure to have problems resolved in a satisfactory way.

- Let's do this, let's get more specific because you've got strong views on a whole range of issues, not just tax policy, which people know you for, but also environmental policy, deregulation as you talked about before.

Talk to me about Christie Whitman and evaluate her as a governor as she moves into her second term.

- Well, it's interesting.

I mean, you can evaluate someone in a position of authority, particularly an executive, and executive positions are much more easily categorized than our legislative positions, a member of Congress or senator or something of that sort.

But in some respects your success is determined by your goals.

If you have an activist approach to wanting to do something then it is a little more difficult because you are going to have to take the reins and be able to move something in a way to resolve a problem, identify a problem, formulate a process to deal with the problem, and that's somewhat complex.

Build a consensus around the solution and then execute to try to implement the solution and then carry it out.

- Let's get right down to it, Governor Whitman came in saying she wanted to cut taxes and make government smaller, has she succeeded?

- And she has cut taxes.

The question of course is which taxes and for whom?

And I suppose the credit that goes to the governor, she said she was gonna cut the income tax by 30% and she did.

The problem, of course, is that the second part is how it was done and whether it has really advanced the state to a point that we're all sort of benefiting from.

- What are you thinking?

- Well, I think it's fairly clear that the end result of the cutting of the taxes and the failure to reduce expenditures in the state has a resulted in a huge hole.

The hole was filled by not making payments to the state pension fund to the tune of almost $3 billion.

And then of course, when that became a serious problem we had to go float a bond issue to the tune of about 2.8 billion, which is gonna cost us $9 billion to pay back.

- What does that mean to the average person?

Why should they care about that?

- Well, it means that at some point down the road, and the big payments start in the year 2001, that we will have annual payments of the interest on the debt to borrow to pay that of about 1.2 billion per year and up from that point.

So the answer is nothing is for nothing.

And what we've been doing and what we'll continue to do, is defer.

Now again, I will be the devil's advocate on behalf of the administration's position and say, well, that's then, this is now, the economy is doing very well from a national perspective, and we can afford to go spend in the way that we have been spending for the last couple of years.

- [Steve] Isn't that pretty risky?

- Well, it is risky and it will catch up with you.

I suspect you don't wanna be overly cynical about this, but I suspect someone said, well it'll catch up, but we'll be gone by the time it catches up.

- Is that irresponsible?

- Well, I'm not convinced that it's responsible, and therefore it's gonna be for everyone else to make their minds up when the economy turns down.

And obviously it will at some point.

You're gonna have all these interest payments coming due.

You're going to have the increased expenditures that we've had no longer being able to be afforded because the revenues that are coming in now will slow down.

And at that point you're gonna have to have hard, hard decisions.

And the problem of course, is that we have now so poisoned the well of public debate about revenues and expenditures that no one is gonna be able to come forward easily and say, well, you know, it's time to pay the bills.

And that is gonna be the problem that results in sort of almost dissembling of the system.

Now, again, I'm convinced, I'm convinced that people if they're willing to stand up and talk common sense to people.

If you treat people like adults, which they are, you can make the case for hard choices.

People every day, every day of their lives people make hard decisions, they make choices.

Why should we believe that people aren't capable of making hard choices in their public lives?

- But, Governor, excuse me, you make a compelling argument there.

And history is a good teacher in this, and so I ask you, you use the issue, the number of $2.8 billion in terms of floating the bond, that's a number that's obviously familiar in terms of that was the amount of the tax increase that you spearheaded back then.

Common sense, you thought it made sense, you continue to think it made sense, raise the money, I mean, the school funding issue.

Why was it so hard to make that common sense argument to the masses, even though you lost reelection by a very narrow margin, which some people forget.

- No, I mean, you just pointed that out.

I mean, it is not something that's impossible.

It is not an easy thing to do.

Particularly the climate, the public climate, the political climate for the last, oh, 15 years or so, has started out from the premise that government monies are just wasted monies and the government, as President Reagan said, is the problem, not the solution.

And that's a nice somewhat overly simplified approach.

And there's an economic law called Gresham's Law that, you know, bad money pushes good money outta the marketplace.

Well, a bad simple idea will push out of the marketplace a complicated idea.

If there's anything that I've really learned in the last four or five years being out of office that I wish I had known at an earlier point in time, it is the difficulty of communicating with folks in large measure because folks are preoccupied with living their lives.

I, as you know, I mean, I was out working, I fought very hard, trying to get a message out there, and somewhat frustrated that the message didn't seem to be being picked up because I thought, you know, folks do know that you've gotta pay for things.

- All they heard was, Florio's hitting us in the pocketbook.

The media played on that, the Republicans went after it.

And so that played well, but it was more complex than that.

- I guess what my observation is from the last couple of years is that I did not have a really fully developed sense of the difficulties of life that people are experiencing.

You know, people traveling to work, gridlock, road problems, insecurity in their jobs, other types of things.

I was assuming, somewhat arrogantly perhaps, that folks are out there listening to the debate, my version of it, the opponent's version of it, when in fact the vast majority of people are just too preoccupied with their lives to be fully engaged, one side or the other side.

And it is a difficult state to communicate in to start with.

But I just think that for political people in general, from this point forward, Democrats, Republicans, whoever, they have to better understand that people have to be communicated with in the realm of their concerns.

That you've got to go and say, this policy that I'm advocating or that I'm opposing is relevant to your life for this particular purpose.

- And if you can't do that they won't listen.

- And if you can't do that, you will not even be able to hook into people.

Now, there's two parts of it, and we touched on one earlier, taking the complexities of problems, reducing them to understandable but not superficial terms, and then figuring out what the vehicles for communication are.

When I first started in government I ran for Congress in my district and I had the reputation, I was very pleased about that, as the coffee clatch congressman.

And I really did an awful lot of that sort of thing- - Retail politics.

- Retail, going and talking to 20 people in somebody's home, spending an hour or two there, talking issues people understand.

- Can't do that as governor though.

- You can't do that nowadays easily, but I guess what I'm looking for is the electronic alternative to being able to communicate with people in their homes.

And this is a little bit of it, but we've got to do more and more of that.

In the context of campaigns it becomes very difficult and so we rely upon the stupid little 10 second commercial that- - The tax, calls names.

- Compete with each other to be less substantive.

- Let's do this, because even though this isn't a 10 second soundbite, Governor, I cannot believe that a half hour is going by this quickly.

We've got a couple minutes left, let me ask you this.

We're doing a series called "New Jersey: The New Century," looking ahead at some of the challenges, issues, trends that we're facing.

And in just a couple of minutes tell us the key issues you believe the state is facing and we must deal with or we will pay a price.

- Well, you just made my point in terms of, tell me in a couple of minutes the key issues which of course is very, very difficult to do.

And therefore we're gonna have to make the time.

We make the time to be able to talk about these things, which by definition are growing more complex.

Again, to sort of play into the game, but the key thing I would say is that we've got to learn how we bring everybody into an optimistic mode of thinking about opportunity in the future.

Can't leave people behind.

Now to this point, we have left a whole lot of poor people behind and nobody apparently is overly concerned about them.

I'm suggesting that the next big piece is after we deal with that problem, how do you bring middle class folks into an optimistic mode of looking at the future?

That's not gonna be an easy thing because the world is changing and the folks at the top will do very, very well.

And the top is getting broader, and that's good.

But there are still gonna be large chunks of people in the middle, and certainly the residual folks at the bottom who are going to have to be, in a sense brought in to feel good about themselves, have their talents, have their skills that are marketable, and be able to look brightly into the future.

- It's been an honor, Governor.

- [Jim] Thank you.

- We appreciate you taking the time.

- Thank you, Steve.

- Thanks so much.

- [Narrator] State of Affairs with Steve Adubato Is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by Holy Name.

Choose New Jersey.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Newark Board of Education.

The North Ward Center.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

Community FoodBank of New Jersey.

And by Seton Hall University.

Promotional support provided by NJ.Com.

And by ROI-NJ.

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