Rival’s Bumbling Helps New Jersey’s Florio Make Comeback : With help from a Clinton aide, the governor is trying to overcome unpopularity engendered by a tax increase. Polls show him even with the Republican candidate.

New Jersey Gov. James J. Florio, given up for politically dead just three years ago, has mounted an impressive comeback in his drive for reelection, thanks to bumbling by his Republican opponent and an aggressive style sharpened by a top adviser from President Clinton’s 1992 campaign.

Although his fiscal policies touched off a statewide taxpayers revolt shortly after his 1989 election, the Democratic incumbent has clawed his way back into the good graces of enough voters so that recent polls show him starting the campaign about even with Republican candidate Christine Whitman.

Florio, 55, is taking advice from James Carville, a Clinton campaign honcho widely regarded as a master of counterattack politics. The strategy: Get voters to forget their anger by worrying about what the challenger might do to them in the future.

Whitman, 46, has taken a zig-zag course on such sensitive issues as tax cuts and a ban on assault weapons. That has raised the level of uneasiness among Republican professionals, who not so long ago took a victory over Florio almost for granted.

Whitman’s latest misstep was to hire the media consultant who produced the notorious Willie Horton commercial used in the 1988 presidential campaign. He was forced to quit within 24 hours amid a storm of criticism.

Her handling of that episode prompted former Ronald Reagan and George Bush campaign aide Roger Ailes, who is not involved in the race, to issue a press release warning: “Christie Whitman is going to hand Florio victory if she keeps confusing and alienating people with her misstatements and misjudgments.”

Whitman partisans point out that the contest is just getting under way. Despite her patrician background--she comes from a wealthy and prominent New Jersey family--they claim she is a fierce competitor and cite as evidence her near-upset of the supposedly invincible Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) in the 1990 Senate race.

And the candidate herself contends the electorate’s lingering distaste for Florio will decide the race in the end. “This campaign is about what the policies of the past three years have done to hurt this state and to alienate the people from their government,” she said in an interview.

But some Republicans say they fear that Florio will transform the nature of the campaign, putting Whitman on the defensive.

“If we make him (Florio) the issue of the fall campaign, then we win,” said Ed Rollins, the former Reagan White House aide who is Carville’s counterpart in the Whitman campaign. “But if he shifts it back to making us and our mistakes the issue, then possibly he wins.”

In Washington, Republican leaders are quick to claim a link between Florio and Clinton because Florio made himself unpopular by raising taxes early in his term.

“New Jersey is the prototype state for us,” sad GOP Chairman Haley Barbour. “Clinton’s tax bill magnifies Florio’s vulnerability.”

Florio advisers here resist any such analogy, and for good reason. Clinton’s most recent approval rating in the state is only 28%, according to a survey by Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute. That is about 10 percentage points below Florio’s.

“This campaign is going to be a lot more about Jim Florio than about Bill Clinton, I guarantee that,” Carville said.

Florio’s difficulties stem not just from the magnitude of the tax hike he pushed through the Legislature in his first months in office--$2.8 billion in income and sales taxes--but in the way he went about it.

Like Clinton, he left himself open to the charge he had misled the voters. Candidate Clinton promised middle-class tax relief; Florio during his 1989 campaign said he saw no reason why a tax hike would be needed.

The former congressman claims he was fooled himself. “I foresaw no difficulties because Tom Kean had predicted a $400-million surplus,” he said, referring to his Republican predecessor, who after two terms was barred by the state constitution from seeking reelection.

Instead of a surplus, Florio soon found he faced a huge deficit, about $600 million by some estimates. Florio contends that most of the impact of his income tax increase was felt by families earning more than $150,000 a year.

But he concedes these points were lost on many voters because “a lot of this happened quickly. There wasn’t a lot of time for analytic explanations.”

“And communication in our state is not easy,” he said. “We have no major television station, and the New York reporters only come here if you’re burning something down. I never deluded myself into thinking this would make me the most popular kid on the block.”

But he could hardly have been prepared for the breadth of voter outrage. Florio united New Jersey as never before--against Florio. Banding together in a statewide organization, some 50,000 people staged a protest rally here in the state capital. Radio talk shows and bumper stickers fanned the fury.

So widespread was the backlash that it almost defeated Bradley in his 1990 bid for a third Senate term. And a year later, in November, 1991, the taxpayer revolt gave Republicans “veto-proof” majorities in both houses of the Legislature.

Strangely enough, some here say they believe that the big GOP victory marked a turning point for Florio. Once in power in the Legislature, the Republicans, who had vowed to roll back Florio’s entire tax hike, settled for chipping away at it. They cut just $600 million from the original $2.8 billion in tax increases. “We have to govern,” Republican Assembly leader Garabed (Chuck) Hayataian said.

Since then, Florio’s poll ratings have slowly but steadily improved. At the same time, some of the economic indicators are improving. Unemployment, for example, recently dropped below 7% from its high last year of nearly 10%.

As the campaign begins, most analysts say that, given the legacy of voter mistrust, Florio can’t defeat Whitman merely by citing his achievements.

“Florio is faced with the question of: ‘How do I become taller than she is by election time?’ ” said Eagleton Institute analyst Cliff Zukin. “It’s hard for any candidate to grow and much easier to chop your opponent down.”

And Whitman, whose experience in politics was limited to service as a county official and head of the state Board of Public Utilities until her campaign against Bradley thrust her into prominence, has left herself open to plenty of chops.

No sooner had she been nominated last June than she denounced Florio as cynical for talking about the possibility of a tax cut in the next fiscal year. But when it was pointed out that Republican legislative leaders were also trying to fashion a tax break, Whitman hedged, saying that if the lawmakers could find the money, “of course I would back them up.”

Next she publicly criticized one of Florio’s widely heralded achievements, a statutory ban on assault weapons, which she called a “lousy piece of legislation.”

When challenged by Florio, she once again seemed to back off, saying she had always supported the ban but wanted to discuss its impact on New Jersey residents who bought such weapons before the ban went into effect.

Certainly the briefest but probably the hottest of the controversies Whitman ignited was over the hiring of media consultant Larry McCarthy.

He had produced the campaign commercial about Willie Horton, the convicted black murderer who raped a woman while on a weekend furlough from prison, granted by Michael S. Dukakis, the former Massachusetts governor who won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988.

The ad showed Horton’s face, and graphically referred to his crimes, leading to charges of racism.

Whitman’s campaign tour was immediately dominated by questions about McCarthy from reporters, and the head of the state NAACP accused Whitman of “a lack of sensitivity.” McCarthy then left.

But there was one byproduct of the incident. Ailes, who was media adviser in Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign, has always sought to separate himself from McCarthy’s ad, which had been sponsored by an independent political committee.

Whitman angered Ailes because he claimed that in defending herself for hiring McCarthy, she said Ailes was responsible for the Horton commercial.

After Ailes issued his statement denouncing Whitman, her campaign formally apologized to Ailes.