MONROE TOWNSHIP — State Assembly candidate Brian Hackett's youth has worked as a double edged sword over the last two months.
At just 21, the relative novelty of Hackett's 14th District candidacy attracted more media attention than it likely would have otherwise. It also earned him some praise by Republicans anxious to see youth more involved in the party.
"That kind of attention is very positive because it's showing that perhaps it's a bit unusual that a youth has taken this kind of perspective on life and society," he said.
But Hackett's age also caused Republicans in neighboring Mercer County to balk at how a Middlesex County resident barely out of his teenage years, one who lives with his parents and has never paid property taxes, would play in blue collar towns like Hamilton. Rather than go with the traditional arrangement of recruiting one Assembly candidate from Mercer and one from Middlesex, the Mercer GOP drafted a 30-something attorney named Bill Harvey to join a slate with Hamilton restaurateur Rob Calabro. That left Hackett on the Middlesex line, but off the line in Mercer.
"It's some of the attention on the youth by people who don't know me at all and subsequent negative judgments that come from that which are not justified," he said. "Everybody in politics, in both parties, speaks a very good game about youth… But it seems too often — it happens in both parties — that we just want the youth to be interns and campaign volunteers but not take that extra step up."
Hackett decided to take the extra step after hearing that Middlesex Republicans didn't have any candidates to run in the 14th District, even though it was supposed to be one of the most competitive in the state. He got unanimous consent at the party's convention in March before meeting resistance in Mercer.
In a couple months will enter his senior year as a Political Science major at The College of New Jersey, but Hackett said that his involvement in politics over the last year — and especially the last two months — has taught him more than his three years in college.
Even if he wins the party's nomination, Hackett will likely have an uphill battle in the fall. It will set up a match between him and incumbent Linda Greenstein (D-Plainsboro) and freshman Wayne DeAngelo (D-Hamilton).
Residents who make their living working for the state in nearby Trenton are a powerful voting bloc here – one Republicans hoped to capitalize on because of disenfranchisement by Governor Corzine's forced furloughs. But presumed Republican gubernatorial frontrunner Chris Christie's pledge to reduce the state workforce – although vague – may have canceled that out.
Hackett, for his part, neither endorses Christie's plan nor disagrees with it. Instead, he embraces one aspect Christie laid out: getting rid of patronage positions.
"For a sound bite it's hard to elaborate on the different types of state workers," he said. "Generally speaking, we limit the patronage and bureaucrats… Not the state worker who's a secretary making $30,000 a year, who does her job very well."
