Gary Hart

Eliot Spitzer is just the latest in a long list of political sex scandals that goes back to the Continental Congress. Politicker.com has a list of America’s Top 53 Political Sex Scandals that includes prostitutes, sex with minors, strippers, extramarital affairs, massages, nude swim parties, and even a murder. New Jersey gets three slots on the list.CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE LIST

U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy will be in New Jersey today, joining Barack Obama for a rally in a state that has become a horse race despite Hillary Clinton’s one-time 34-point lead.  The last two times New Jersey was relevant in the presidential nominating process were in 1980 and 1984.  In the 1980 primary, Kennedy won New Jersey 56%-38% over President Jimmy Carter.  In 1984, Walter Mondale won New Jersey by a 45%-30% margin over Gary Hart, with Jesse Jackson winning 24% of the vote.

In 1984, Democrats didn't have a nominee until after the June primaries: Getty Images PhotoWith one more full day before New Jersey’s Democratic Party primary, neither candidate has melted down into the 1984 version of presidential hopeful Sen. Gary Hart, who was leading by double digits in the Garden State when he committed an irrecoverable gaffe.

Speaking about his and his wife’s coastal campaign duties at a fund-raiser in Los Angeles 24 years ago, Hart told an audience that Lee Hart got to campaign in California while he was stuck with, punch line coming up... New Jersey.

According to campaign consultant Robert Shrum, who writes about the incident in his book, "No Excuses," Hart then answered his wife’s cuddly California anecdote about getting to hold a koala bear, by prompting belly laughs from the L.A. crowd with this rejoinder: "I won’t tell you what I got to hold - samples from a toxic waste dump."