The party’s collective spin is this: This is nothing more than a personal spat between Democratic titans still nursing scars from past battles. Any talk of party unity breaking down along the familiar North-South divide is nonsense. It’s just a tempest in the party’s “big tent.”
“What gets lost in the Democratic Party is that … we have a lot of people in that tent with a lot of opinions,” said Assemblyman John Wisniewski, the state’s Democratic Party chairman, carefully choosing his words like a State Department diplomat. “Our process is a little messy.”
That’s a nice try, but the squabble — centered around Governor Christie’s colossal and complicated plan to restructure higher education — has already cleaved the party into factions, roughly along the unofficial Route 195 border that stretches across the state’s midsection.
And this time, there is a new — and for many Democrats troublesome — revision of the North-South separation. A South Jersey block of legislators, marshaled by Norcross and his close ally, Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-Gloucester, has teamed up with the conservative Christie, who controls Republican votes in both houses. On paper at least, this coalition has enough votes to power the controversial higher education overhaul through both houses of the Democratic-controlled Legislature.
But the South Jersey bloc doesn’t have the power to prevent an outbreak of North Jersey dissent — and the questions raised by that dissent.
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