In defense of Jon Corzine

MF Global may have gone down on the Democrat's watch. But first, Jon Corzine was a proud progressive who made New Jersey proud

Friendship has its claims; so does fairness. And in the wake of the bankruptcy of brokerage firm MF Global, the media's portrayal of Jon Corzine, MF's ex-CEO and a former Democratic senator and governor in New Jersey, strikes me as profoundly unfair — and not just because he's a friend. 

Corzine, one of the most principled and capable people I met in 40 years in politics, is a genuine progressive who ran for office for all the right reasons. He did so many right things. And now he's been turned into a poster boy for all that's wrong with Wall Street. Jon Stewart called Corzine "the one man [who] could embody the corporate-government-industrial complex in all its clusterf***-itude." 

The Murdoch press was eager to join in. What could be better for the propaganda machine than to hold up Corzine as the proof point for right-wing populism. One typical New York Post story led with a phrase — "Screw you, Jon Corzine" — that revealed as much about the paper's inveterate hostility to his politics as it did to his company's fate.

Jon Corzine is one of the most principled and capable people I met in 40 years in politics.

Politics is how I came to know Corzine — as the strategist and media consultant in his 2000 Senate race and his race for governor in 2005. The first time I met him, he was handed a poll that positioned him as an almost blue dog Democrat, a businessman and a cautious agent of small-bore change. Maybe that was the predictable assumption about someone who'd risen to the top of Goldman Sachs. But he'd come from modest beginnings. His father was a small-time farmer, his mother a teacher. He'd worked his way through college and business school with the help of student aid. As he told me, he had always hoped he was smart, but he knew he was lucky, too — and he wanted others to have the same chances he'd had. So he bridled at the poll: If he was going to run, he said, it would be to fight for big and progressive ideas. This guy, I thought, has character, the kind that isn't all that common in candidates.

He was criticized for spending his own money in the race; the critics presumably preferred someone in hock to PACs and special interest money. The New York Times endorsed his Republican opponent even as Corzine, ahead of his time, campaigned for universal health coverage and, still today ahead of his time, for universal access to college.

Just as he was no ordinary candidate, he was no ordinary senator. As a freshman in a body that enshrined seniority, he was a principle architect of the Sarbanes-Oxley bill that reformed corporate accounting practices after the Enron scandal. Corzine was a major force in expanding children's health care and coverage for pregnant women. He fought to outlaw racial profiling — and with conservative Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, was the lead sponsor of legislation to stop genocide in the Sudan. 

Corzine was one of just 23 senators who voted against giving George W. Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq. I talked with him about it at the time. The case for war simply hadn't been made, he insisted; he didn't care what the polls said — and this war could become a quagmire. He was plainspoken and eloquent in his opposition. That wasn't the politically expedient course. Many of his Democratic colleagues, including his fellow New Jersey Sen. Bob Torricelli, went the other way. Some of them agonized; all of them faced political pressure, and at least some of them believed they were right. But what I saw in Corzine was the courage to follow his conscience.