Will the governor who resigned in disgrace become Jersey City’s next mayor?

Jersey City politics often seems a poisonous cocktail of swamp gas and mendacity, but the leading candidate for mayor is a former New Jersey governor who resigned in disgrace amid numerous criminal investigations 21 years ago.

The political contenders are restless, whipped into a frenzy by a carnival of conflicting polls, each one a funhouse mirror reflecting a different grotesque future.

At the center of this maelstrom, this vortex of sheer American madness, stands the grinning specter of a man who should be a cautionary tale, not a contender: James E. McGreevey.

The numbers are a joke told by a madman. Councilman James Solomon’s camp claims a ten-point surge, a statistical dead heat. County Commissioner Bill O’Dea’s people bray about a solid second, a comfortable twelve points behind the leader.

They can’t both be right.

McGreevey also released an internal poll suggesting the mayoral campaign is a two-person race between Solomon and him, but the only thing that emerges from this numerical fog of war with any clarity is the dark, towering figure of McGreevey himself, polling anywhere from 27 to 30 percent.

He is the fixed point in a universe of lies, the black hole of Jersey City politics, pulling all light and reason into his gravitational field of scandal.

And what a field it is.

To even mention McGreevey’s name is to invoke a sepia-toned reel of the most tawdry, corrupt, and brilliantly executed political escape acts in modern history.

We are asked to believe that a man who appointed an ineligible Israeli citizen with no security clearance to be his state’s anti-terrorism czar is now fit to manage municipal parking permits.

We are expected to forget the federal investigators, the secret recordings, the whispered code word “Machiavelli,” the fund-raisers led away in cuffs, the stench of pay-to-play that clung to Trenton like a chemical spill.

This is the man who, when the walls finally closed in, did not confess to corruption. He did not apologize for the breathtaking abuse of power.

No. He stood before the cameras and performed a masterclass in misdirection, spinning a web of tragic self-discovery and sexual oppression. He didn’t resign; he came out. He wasn’t a crooked politician; he was a “gay American.”

It was a con job of such staggering audacity that it should be studied in universities, not rewarded at the ballot box.

McGreevey turned a federal rap sheet into a personal tragedy and walked away a martyr celebrated in the LGBT community, leaving a trail of ruined aides and a state government in shambles.

And now he’s back. A pack of Republican-affiliated lawyers and pay-to-play government contractors associated with corrupt urban Democratic machine politicians are among McGreevey’s donors.

For example, NJ Citizens for Conservatism, Citizens for Integrity PAC, Conservative Impact PAC represent Ocean County Republicans all share the same Toms River address and also gave money to Toms River School Board member Lisa Natale-Contessa, who was accused of making Islamophobic and racist comments on social media; Senator Robert W. Singer, who is in his thirty-second year in the New Jersey State Legislature; and neofascist Bill Spadea.

Colts Neck Republican Chairman John M. Cantalupo heads another PAC that gave $3,000 to McGreevey.

Solomon says corruption erodes public trust in the city’s government and imposes a tax on all residents, who face higher property taxes but receive worse services, so he has offered a plan to “end the corruption tax.”

Solomon did scold McGreevey’s decision to accept thousands of dollars from “MAGA Republican mega donors” for his mayoral campaign.

However, the councilman never quite comes out and identifies McGreevey as the poster boy for political corruption.

Kristen Zadroga-Hart, a council candidate on O’Dea’s slate, noticed Seryl and Charles Kushner were co-sponsors who contributed no less than $250,000 to Trump’s election fund, according to the invitation for a fundraiser held in Deal, New Jersey.

She argued that McGreevey should return Kushner’s money.

McGreevey’s campaign coffers are stuffed with the blood money of Charles Kushner—a man so vile he was pardoned by a president equally versed in the dark arts—and the tarnished silver of Bridgegate’s Bill Baroni.

McGreevey speaks of “gold standards” of public service while aligning himself with the progeny of a mayor best remembered for a drunken, naked porch collapse. The sheer, unadulterated gall of it would be admirable if it weren’t so terrifying.

The question hanging over this sordid race, thicker than the Hudson humidity, is not whether Solomon is surging or if O’Dea has room to grow.

The real question, the one that should cause every decent citizen to wake in a cold sweat, is why? Why is Jim McGreevey, a man who represents the very worst instincts of a political culture we pretend to despise, not only a viable candidate but the one to beat?

The answer is a sickness in the soul of the body politic.

Governor Phil Murphy and Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman endorsed McGreevey in the race to become Jersey City’s next mayor, but he is a millionaire who bought his job, and she is a nepo baby whose family tree is rooted in more than millions of dollars worth of

It is a testament to the power of a famous name, even if that name is synonymous with failure and disgrace. It is a monument to our collective amnesia, our bottomless appetite for spectacle over substance.

We have become a nation of junkies, and our fix is the lurid, the corrupt, the beautifully catastrophic. McGreevey is not running for mayor; he is offering Jersey City a hit from the same old pipe, and judging by the polls, a frightening number of voters are ready to inhale.

So let the polls clash.

Let the campaigns spin their webs of half-truths and manufactured outrage over bike lanes. The real story is not who is winning.

The real story is that we are losing, and we are on the verge of handing the keys to the city back to the very architect of our disgrace.

The circus is in town, with the main attraction being a man who already burned down the big top once before, and the rubes are lining up to buy tickets.