Star Ledger: Kyrillos on U.S. Senate bid: “I felt a sense of duty to run”
State Sen. Joe Kyrillos (R – Monmouth), the Republican challenger to incumbent U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), made a campaign stop in a North Jersey sporting goods store earlier this month that sums up his campaign.
Inside Birkenmeier Sport Shop on Main Street in Hackensack, a store that caters to soccer lovers, Kyrillos was speaking to Hubert Birkenmeier and Andranik Eskandarian, two 1970s-era New York Cosmos professional soccer stars and good friends, who run the store together. According to the two teammates and small businessmen, one hard fact of New Jersey economic life could run them into the ground.
“Taxes are killing us,” Birkenmeier, 63, of Wyckoff, said, a reference to New Jersey’s high property taxes, the highest in the nation. “The [Democrats] don’t make things affordable. Everything is going up – health care, insurance, everything. We want to stay alive. We want to keep business going.”
“[The Democrats] talk about millionaires and billionaires, but there’s just a couple of millionaires and billionaires. They’re going to raise taxes on you,” Kyrillos, 52, of Middletown, said in response. “This is the kind of small business that we’re talking about.”
Kyrillos and his rival Menendez are now traveling Main Streets across the Garden State in the final weeks of the campaign. They are waging rhetorical war over who will best represent New Jersey’s middle class and small business people, beleaguered by a troubled national economy and New Jersey’s onerous property taxes.
As he campaigned for the Senate seat that would take him to Washington, D.C., Kyrillos outlined why he thinks he is the better man for the job, and why he wants to change jobs at all.
According to Kyrillos , “The Corzine economic strategy pursued by Bob Menendez has led to higher gas prices, higher unemployment, and declining incomes,” said Kyrillos Campaign Manager Chapin Fay. “By contrast, Joe has worked with Governor Christie in a bipartisan way to bring New Jersey back from the brink as it was left nearly bankrupt by those same policies. They have passed balanced budgets, instituted teacher tenure reform, and made our pension systems viable for the future. Joe faced our toughest challenges head on. Now it’s time to let him do the same in Washington.”
