Our current governor from Goldman Sachs is revealing himself to be every bit as tone-deaf about matters of ethnicity as our former governor from Goldman.
That was Jon Corzine, who in his first run for statewide office in 2000 made some wannabe-witty remarks about Italian-Americans and "cement overshoes." That got him groveling before any proud son of Italy willing to accept his abject apology.
By contrast, Phil Murphy's gone out of his way in the other direction when it comes to courting ethnic groups - too far out of his way.
That became apparent at that hearing Tuesday at which former Murphy campaign worker Katie Brennan gave five hours of testimony about her alleged assault last year by the campaign's then-director of Hispanic/Islamic outreach, Al Alvarez.
Brennan's account of those who ignored her allegations included everyone from the Hudson County Prosecutor's Office to the governor himself, who failed to respond to an email she sent him after her account was ignored on lower levels.
"I wanted to tell him to enact changes," she testified Tuesday. "This is a progressive governor."
Progressive? Perhaps. But "ambitious" might be a better word.
Murphy has a habit of pandering to any and all interest groups that could be of use in forging his image on the national scene.
At least that was the opinion of Assemblywoman Holly Schepisi when I ran into her in the elevator leaving the meeting.
Earlier in the year, Schepisi, a Bergen Republican, was in the middle of the fight over Marcellus Jackson. He's an African-American former Passaic councilman once convicted of bribery who was named to a $70,000-a-year job in the Murphy administration. (Jackson was paid handsomely by Murphy's "non-profit" prior to the election.)
When the bribery conviction became public, Murphy dug in, saying "my breath was taken away" by the public outrage over the hiring.
He also took a veiled shot at critics like Schepisi, she told me. That came when he said that in such cases. "It is invariably a person of color we're talking about."
No, it's not, said Schepisi.
"I come from an Italian-Irish background, so for me that was a silly concept," she said.
She didn't need to add that both the Italian-Americans and my own ethnic group, the Irish-Americans, are no slackers when it comes to this sort of thing.
Murphy grew up in Massachusetts, so perhaps he is unaware that his fellow Irish-Americans in places like Hudson County accomplished feats of corruption that may never be equaled.
As it happens, Hudson is central to this controversy. The Hudson County Prosecutor's Office declined to act on Brennan's complaint for eight months. Then on the day she alerted the Murphy transition team about it, she got a call from the prosecutor saying the case against Alvarez would be dismissed.
"There was nothing presented that would make me question her credibility in any sort of fashion," said Schepisi, who announced earlier in the year that she herself had been a sexual-assault victim. "Even if there had been another side of the story, there was nothing done to follow through on her side of the story."
It wasn't until Brennan told her story to the Wall Street Journal two months ago that Alvarez finally resigned from his plum job at the Schools Development Authority.
At that time the Murphy administration was still maintaining that the matter had been handled properly. If so, why isn't Alvarez still in that job?
That's a question that state Sen. Loretta Weinberg raised when I spoke with her after the session. Like Schepisi, Weinberg, recently gave her own account of being sexually assaulted as a young woman. That led the Bergen Democrat to push for the inquiry into the actions of the Murphy administration.
Weinberg told me the biggest question she wants answered is just what a woman in Brennan's position would have to do to have her case taken seriously.
"She did everything by the book," Weinberg said. "She got a police report. She went to a hospital and got a rape kit, and that triggers the county prosecutor who interviews you. And it goes on for months?"
If Weinberg has her way, it's going to keep going on. The joint legislative committee is going to keep calling witnesses, possibly including the governor himself.
Here's one question I'd like to see them they ask him: Can't you do math?
No single ethnic group makes up more than a small fraction of New Jersey's population. Women make up half.
I suspect they also make up half of the population in Murphy's native Massachusetts.
There's a lesson in that but, like the mythical man on the gallows, the governor seems to be learning it a bit too late.
BELOW: THE ONLY THING MURPHY CAN PASS IS THE BUCK - Watch the video below from Murphy's press conference in Trenton at which he reacted to the news of the Brennan testimony. Even after her description of how every state official she spoke to passed the buck, he was still insisting the complaint went through the proper channels. That includes his ethics chief, who told Brennan that there was no ethical question because the alleged offense took place before he took office.
Unbelievable.