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Jim McGreevey needs to eat. He’s just charmed a barking pit bull, danced with strangers to Missy Elliott, fawned over a caretaker of stray cats and posed for photos with teenage girls. Now he makes a beeline through stopped traffic, a tornado of enthusiasm in a crisp, white button down and a pair of well-traveled gray Sauconys. “Hey guys!” he shouts, approaching a blue and yellow umbrella on a frenetic Friday evening. “You want any hot dogs? They’re nasty!” It’s late summer. Jersey City’s gritty Bergen-Lafayette neighborhood. McGreevey, the scandalous early-aughts governor, is in his natural habitat, canvassing the streets — and anyone who happens to pass by. An NJ Transit bus pulls up across from the food cart, and the driver opens her window, points at McGreevey and shimmies. A woman in a white SUV stops at the red light, declares “We love McGreevey” and smacks her lips in a kissing noise. Then a voice from the sidewalk asks: “Jimmy, what’s happening, man? What’s going on wit’ you?” I’m running for mayor, McGreevey, 68, tells him, still trying to grab food. “Oh really?” the man responds in a deadly serious tone. Yes. Really. Two decades after blowing up his life by coming out as gay, admitting to cheating on his wife and resigning from office — all in the same explosive press conference — New Jersey’s self-proclaimed “gay American” governor is back on the campaign trail seeking a political resurrection. Hair white, voice weathered, forehead wrinkled, the Garden State’s political whiz kid has returned as its prodigal son. McGreevey once authored the juiciest sex scandal in the state’s rich history of political shame. Then he disappeared from politics. His career was left for dead, his name stained at a time when same-sex marriage was still illegal in 49 states. But McGreevey isn’t seeking forgiveness. The Democrat just wants the keys to the state’s second largest city. “I’m not asking folks to judge my soul. That’s for God,” McGreevey tells me. “What I would ask people to ask is, “Will I be a good mayor?’” So far, he likes the answer. Gov. Phil Murphy has endorsed him in the seven-way nonpartisan race. Donors have supplied him with a massive $4.7 million war chest. Even McGreevey’s ex-wife, Dina Matos — once seemingly a sworn enemy — has given her stamp of approval. “I am confident that he’s absolutely the best person for the job,” Matos says. “I think the voters can absolutely trust him.” Any good politician is a shape shifter, capable of becoming exactly who voters want exactly when they want it. But McGreevey lived a double life as governor, campaigning on his blue-collar roots and all-American family while gifting a government job to his male paramour. He resigned in disgrace, admitting his very public life was all but a facade. Now he presents as a wise and altruistic statesman. The patron saint of second chances. A complex man who yells on street corners one minute and whispers softly the next, who reads biographies, takes long walks along a cemetery and intervenes when a man appears to overdose on the sidewalk. But who is the real Jim McGreevey? And what does he want? We caught up with his ex-wife and daughter, his sister and his friends, and even the man who investigated his administration, former Gov. Chris Christie, to ask who this political lion in winter has become 21 years after leaving the spotlight he once craved. Some say he’s changed. Others argue he’s exactly the same. And McGreevey? He says he’s finally his authentic self, still the right man for the job — just for completely different reasons than those that drove him when he was the face of Jersey politics. “I am who I am,” he tells me one morning over a bran muffin. “Perfectly imperfect.” McGreevey is not merely a good politician, but “a tremendous political talent,” one insider says. But in truth, it wasn’t the politician who came crashing down in 2004. It was the man behind the polished artifice. The last time voters trusted McGreevey, he became a late-night punchline for a scandal that burned down his administration, birthed two tell-all books and became awkward fodder on Oprah Winfrey’s couch. He didn’t just cheat on Matos with his male crush. He cheated on her in her own bed while she was in the hospital after giving birth to their newborn daughter, Jacqueline. McGreevey didn’t just hire that man, Golan Cipel, for a $110,000 state job he was unqualified for. He hired him as special counsel on homeland security when first responders were still pulling body parts from the World Trade Center rubble. Cipel accused McGreevey of sexual assault and said the ex-governor was “incapable of controlling his urges.” And McGreevey wrote in his autobiography — “The Confession” — that he was addicted to adoration from strangers. But that was then. “Hey, McGreevey,” grunts another man walking down the sidewalk. “Listen, you gotta do a lot s— out here, bro.” “I know,” McGreevey says soberly. “You know I’m serious.” He walks to the middle of the intersection, turns back to his half-dozen volunteers — some as young 16 and others as gray as he is — and raises both hands in the air like Rocky at the top of the steps. “Thank you, everybodyyyyyyyyy!” he roars. “God is great! All the time!” Then he crams into the back of an old, tan minivan, his elbow bumping mine. He suddenly transforms into a different McGreevey, speaking so softly it’s difficult to hear him, all traces of the performer gone. “It’s all about trust, though,” he says, the smell of hot dogs lingering. “Are you going to follow up? Are you real?” Is McGreevey real? That’s the question, encompassing not just his candidacy, but the man himself. There’s a point in every person’s life “when one has to look deeply into the mirror of one’s soul and decide one’s unique truth in the world. Not as we may want to see it. Or hope to see it. But as it is.” McGreevey stood at a lectern on Aug. 12, 2004, read those words out loud and announced “my truth is that I am a gay American.” Then he watched the first 47 years of his life implode. McGreevey’s truth now is he’s pushing 70. His beloved parents, who stood behind him that day, are gone. His two daughters are grown. He is single, he says, and lives alone with two cats. “How many more biographies can I read?” he half-jokes. But in a state where seemingly every politician is a cautionary tale of corruption, McGreevey looms especially large in our collective memory. The nation’s first openly gay governor understood journalists and opponents would rehash the scandals of his past. He knew putting his name back on the ballot could reopen wounds, potentially hurt his daughters and damage the reputation he spent two decades repairing. But he’s seen firsthand how the government fails the vulnerable families he’s helped as executive director of the nonprofit NJ Reentry Corporation, he says. And he sees himself as the person to fix it, despite no shortage of other candidates, including two city council members, a Hudson County commissioner, a city police officer and former school board president. McGreevey, long known for loving publicity, was initially skeptical about participating in this article. But he softened when I told him I’m not a political reporter. And he let down his guard even more when I said I have no preconceived notions about him because I was a teenager in another state when he resigned. He welcomed me into his orbit, invited me into his home, spent countless hours with me, and gave family and friends his blessing to speak about his controversial life and winding path back to politics. “Is it something that will make you happy?’” his sister Sharon McGreevey recalls asking when he broached running for mayor. “If that’s what you want, go for it.” And so he is, repeating “every day is a blessed day” as he dodges piles of dog poop and shards of broken glass on the sidewalks of Jersey City. The lying, cheating, strip-club frequenting McGreevey you might remember has rehabilitated his image, becoming a bridge between the powerful and the powerless through his work with NJ Reentry. He has transformed the lives of hundreds of veterans and men and women released from prison by finding them jobs or housing or helping them beat addiction — or more often, all three. “I don’t think this was some kind of, you know, plan your work and work your plan thing,” says Christie, a Republican who doggedly investigated McGreevey’s administration during his time as a U.S. state’s attorney before becoming governor himself. “I think what happened was Jim McGreevey got on with his life to deal with the issues that he really cares about. And because he’s handled those things so well — and I think he has — it’s now giving him an opportunity to have a comeback.” When Mayor Steven Fulop launched an unsuccessful bid for governor, McGreevey saw an opportunity to expand his work in Jersey City, the epicenter of McGreevey family lore. It’s the city where his grandparents settled after immigrating from Ireland, where his parents fell in love and where he was born. Now, for the first time in his life, he is running a campaign as what he calls the authentic Jim McGreevey. A man with nothing to hide. Nothing to fear. And nothing to lose except the election itself. He talks ad nauseam about his old-school platform. Better schools. Safer streets. Affordability. Yet the former governor struggles to find words when I repeatedly ask how I should reconcile the McGreevey in front of me with the McGreevey I’ve read about, the one Cipel characterized as “drunk with his own success and power.” “Being human is messy,” McGreevey says, shrugging his shoulders during one conversation. “Hopefully, I’m a better person. I think I am.” He ascended to power, in his own words, by inventing “contrived backstories that played better not just in the ballot box but my own mind.” He performed those roles, like the loving husband, so well that he became a rising star — with obligatory White House buzz — despite living a lie. He’s no longer the quintessential family man with the blonde, baby-toting wife. He’s moved past his “gay American” governor chapter, learning to overcome his shame. He could have lived the rest of his days as the champion of second chances. But he chose to thrust himself back into the spotlight. There are core elements of McGreevey’s identity that transcend every iteration. His obsessive work ethic. His thirst for human interaction. His deeply held religious faith. But what’s changed? He tells me he has become more grounded and less insecure. “We’re not electing a spiritual leader,” he says. “We’re electing someone who’s going to, you know, control taxes, control rents, make sure the streets are clean.” But in an age when truth has become like beauty — left to the eye of the beholder — McGreevey is not just a candidate but a walking Rorschach test for cynicism and forgiveness, trust and authenticity. Will the people of Jersey City buy the new and improved Jim McGreevey? “I think people can judge sincerity,” he tells me in an introspective moment on a street corner. “I mean, hope.” Jim McGreevey turns through the labyrinth of statehouse corridors like he never left. “We’re just going to take a quick tour,” he tells the state trooper stationed outside the governor’s office. He doesn’t wait for an OK. McGreevey catches a double door before it swings shut, fist bumps a secretary he addresses as “Gorgeous,” and slips into a large foyer surrounded by offices and conference rooms. We stare at the high walls lined with portraits of New Jersey governors past. Whitman. Florio. Kean. “I love Brendan,” McGreevey whispers, referring to the late Democratic Gov. Brendan Byrne. “I still have his tie clip.” He points to the faded letters spelling Byrne’s name on the gold clip he’s wearing. “He gave it to me before he died,” he says. But I’m more interested in a different ghost. They called him the Robocandidate. Blue-collar Catholic. Conservative Democrat. Son of a charge nurse and Marine drill instructor. Before TikTok or YouTube or phones that fit into pockets, the future of New Jersey politics was Jimmy McGreevey. State assemblyman at 32. Mayor of Woodbridge at 34. State senator at 36. By the time McGreevey nearly upset the incumbent Whitman in 1997, the 40-year-old had established himself as the Energizer Bunny of Garden State politics. “He was absolutely tireless,” says Ben Dworkin, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Citizenship at Rowan University. “He was everywhere.” But it was more than that. McGreevey was charming. Charismatic. Capable of walking into any room with any group, connecting with voters on a human level and making them feel seen. He could empathize with salt-of-the-earth voters or sway powerbrokers with his Ivy League intellect (he holds a master’s degree from Harvard.) He carried the state with 56% of the vote on Election Night 2001 and became governor at 44. Matos held baby Jacqueline in her arms at his swearing in, projecting the image of a perfect American family. For a moment, McGreevey felt invincible. But his world was already unraveling. He knew he was different in elementary school — before Stonewall or Harvey Milk, when doctors still considered being gay a psychiatric disorder. In public, McGreevey was a Nixon-loving altar boy, eager to chat with the Catholic priests who joined his devout family for dinner. In private, he fantasized about other boys and tried masturbating to Playboy to turn himself straight. He grew up thinking he was diseased, a threat to society and a scourge, he later wrote. He didn’t feel free until law school at Georgetown University, he says, when he secretly hooked up with men in gardens behind an abandoned synagogue in Washington D.C. Too scared to face the truth, McGreevey fabricated a new one. He married, divorced and married again. He conceived two children, one with each wife. He embraced the seedy underbelly of the political world, hoping no one would think twice about him as long as he appreciated strippers. “When I met Jim, I had no idea,” says Curtis Bashaw, McGreevey’s longtime friend. “It wasn’t like there was a big click, click, click, this guy’s gay.” But rumors swirled in political circles for more than a decade before McGreevey came out. The secret was a ticking time bomb. Later, he was drawn to a young Israeli man he met on a trip to Rishon Lezion with hundreds of other elected leaders. McGreevey offered Cipel a job on his campaign, then a job in his administration, drawing scrutiny from the statehouse press corps, which noted their close friendship as rumors intensified. The physical relationship — which McGreevey says was consensual and Cipel said then was harassment — was short lived. But the damage was irreversible. When Cipel threatened a lawsuit three years later and McGreevey saw no way out, he called the bombshell press conference that changed everything. “I remember when this was going down, I just said, ‘Governor, the truth will set you free,’” says Bashaw, who is also gay. “To watch the weight lift off of him … it was a very difficult time after that. But he was lighter from the beginning.” Cipel, who could not be reached for comment, faded from public view. The two men never spoke again, McGreevey says. After resigning, he spent more than a month at an addiction and mental health treatment center in the Arizona desert. There, he says, he came to the conclusion that God didn’t want him to be straight. God wanted him to find joy. “Accepting that core aspect of yourself is important and healthy,” McGreevey tells me. A few years later, he began dating wealthy financier Mark O’Donnell. McGreevey finally let his guard down. He became comfortable kissing another man in public. He lost his old life and career but found himself, according to his telling, even if he and O’Donnell broke up in the early 2010s. O’Donnell declined to comment. Gay teenagers across the country wrote letters to McGreevey. He felt pride instead of shame. “Oh my gosh,” McGreevey says. “It was magical.” Standing under his portrait in the same building where he delivered his famous speech, I wonder if he will reminisce about what could have been. Instead, McGreevey keeps whispering about the other governors as we stand in the foyer, mentioning that Gov. Jon Corzine’s portrait is the only one with a postmodern touch. “The person who did it was a friend of his,” he says, his voice barely audible. “My painting was done by the same artist who did Gov. Whitman’s.” “It’s quite the club,” I say as we walk away. “Yeah,” he whispers, pride in his voice. The door clicks shut behind him. Jim McGreevey sits in the darkness, staring up at his likeness. He’s among his people, dozens of men and women he’s helped. He’s wearing a white shirt and blue and yellow striped tie, just like the massive McGreevey on the movie screen. The big McGreevey speaks. “We have a system that keeps people locked up in a cage, destroys their sense of agency, their sense of productivity,” he begins. He says we let people out of prison without technical job skills or a path to secure sober housing and the means to maintain sobriety. “It’s nuts,” the McGreevey on screen says. “And nobody gives a s—. Nobody cares.” It’s a scene from “A Penitent Thief,” a documentary on life after incarceration. When the lights come up that March evening, McGreevey moves to the front of the Newark theater to deliver a speech. He occupies a strange place in society. He’s prominent enough to be on a first name basis with Bill (as in Clinton), yet obscure enough that they ask for his last name when I tag along to pick up his laundry. But in moments like this, he is known as Gov. McGreevey. The VIP. The man whose attention, praise and time mean everything to the small audience. He has helped build the NJ Reentry Corporation into a nonprofit force with 11 offices and nearly 90 employees that has helped more than 25,000 people, he says. “When this country was just in its formation in colonial America, we thought of crimes as sins,” says McGreevey who makes $157,334, according to its most recent tax documents. “People would go into the stockades, do their time, but then return to the community as full members.” Like so many McGreevey speeches, he is talking about others, but the parallels to his own life are obvious. He saw firsthand how hard it was to rebuild himself despite the advantages of being a former governor. “The day after you resign, nobody picks up the phone and calls you. You realize you’ve got five good friends in the world, and you realize you’ve got your family … that’s it,” he tells me later. But in April, McGreevey stood beside some of the most powerful and influential leaders in New Jersey. State Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin. State Senate Majority Leader Teresa Ruiz. U.S. District Judge Madeline Cox-Arleo. They all came to St. Peter’s University because of McGreevey, attending the annual NJ Reentry Corporation Conference. “If it wasn’t for that man, we wouldn’t even be talking about women and domestic violence and incarceration,” state Assemblywoman Eliana Pintor Marin tells the crowd of more than 200. “Because he’s really the person that really started these hard conversations about people that are being incarcerated and coming out.” His work with NJ Reentry Corporation has helped redeem McGreevey, whose political legacy was mixed even before the Cipel scandal. His administration had successes such as bringing down obscene car insurance rates and fixing the state’s broken E-ZPass system. But it was also rocked by a series of mini scandals. Two aides accused of using political connections to profit off a billboard company. A so-called “trade mission” to Ireland that critics lambasted as a tax-funded McGreevey family reunion. Then there was the wire-tapped conversation that recorded McGreevey saying “Machiavelli” to allegedly confirm that a farm owner would get special treatment in a land deal in exchange for political donations. Those infamous chapters had nothing to do with being gay or cheating on his wife. Christie thinks McGreevey was blinded by ambition and rationalized everything he did through the belief that he would accomplish great things as governor. “When he got to Trenton, he got swallowed by the Trenton culture and the Trenton bureaucracy,” Christie said, “and he became one of them.” McGreevey disagrees. Hiding his secret since his playground days led to a life of deceit long before he was politically ambitious, he admits. “I think at some level I probably thought I was doing what was right,” he says of staying in the closet. “But it was wrong.” His NJ Reentry work is “far more authentic, far more immediate” than anything he would have accomplished if he continued as governor, according to McGreevey. “I’ve had more people come up to me through my life telling me about how much my dad has helped them with NJRC than ever talking about being governor,” Jacqueline says. “Like, those are the people that I hear from. ‘Your dad changed my life.’ ‘Your dad got me a job.’ ‘Your dad found me a house.’” But it was a long journey to get here. McGreevey and Matos fought in very bitter and public divorce proceedings in the years following his exit from politics. He admitted to marrying her for political gain and accused her of knowing he was gay. She blasted him as controlling, self-absorbed and showing little remorse. There was even a former driver who claimed he participated in threesomes with the couple, which Matos denied and McGreevey acknowledged. “I think he’s lived in a state of denial for so many years, he doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not,” Matos said in a 2007 appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” McGreevey later converted to the Episcopal Church in an attempt to become a priest. He spent three years in the seminary, but the Episcopal Diocese of Newark opted not to ordain him for reasons never explained to him, he says. He eventually converted back to Catholicism. But “life heals,” McGreevey says. He rebuilt the relationship with his family by being a father who showed up, Matos says. He was the dad who danced while Jacqueline practiced piano to make it more fun. The dad willing to leave work to go get the school folder she forgot at home. That dad who took her on countless road trips to museums and to see plays. “He texted me this morning at 5:20 and sent me, like, an affirmation,” says Jacqueline, 23, who wears a “Good Trouble” friendship bracelet and has her mom’s big, brown eyes. ”I was like, ‘You need to go back to bed.’” Matos, who remarried in 2017, and McGreevey agree they are “in a good place.” Her mother recently sewed the buttons back onto McGreevey’s suit jacket, he tells me, his face lighting up. He praises Matos as “a tremendous mother.” And she calls him “a terrific father.” “My parents were always, always there for me,” Jacqueline says. “Of course there’s this history, but it’s like … I was never raised to know anything other than unconditional love. And no matter what has happened, when that is your foundation, it’s very hard to shake that.” Matos acknowledges the divorce was difficult. But she’s had two decades to reflect on how living in the closet affected McGreevey. “Do I excuse the way he handled things and what he did? No, absolutely not,” she says. “But I understand why he did what he did and how he did it, because it was a different world.” When I tell McGreevey that Matos is on the record supporting his campaign, he immediately tears up. “That means a lot,” he says. The door to the neglected apartment building is wide open. “That’s a place I wouldn’t go in,” Gloria Walton warns me. Walton, a city council candidate on McGreevey’s slate, worked these Jersey City streets for more than 30 years for New Jersey’s Division of Child Protection & Permanency. “There’s gangs. There’s guns,” Walton says, adding she’s been hit on the head, knocked down stairs and attacked by chickens. “This was my strip. I know these people.” But McGreevey is already inside the Seidler Street property. “Yo, yo! Hey brother!” he yells up the staircase. “How you doing, man?” calls a voice from out of sight. McGreevey spots another man coming down the hallway and greets him as he does so many familiar faces. “Sheeeeeeeeit,” he says in a homage to “The Wire” character Sen. Clay Davis. Putting McGreevey back on the campaign trail is like putting a fish back into water. He’s walked the entire city twice, he tells me, and promises to walk through every neighborhood on an advertised schedule as mayor so residents don’t have to track him down to raise concerns. “People want somebody to give a s—,” McGreevey whispers to me as he walks. “Every person you meet, it’s saying something. I’m in front of your home, and I value who you are, where you live and that you’re part of the Jersey City community.” Interactions with everyday people is McGreevey’s oxygen, his former press secretary Micah Rasmussen tells me. Bashaw likens campaigning to McGreevey’s “natural habitat.” “Famously, he loves people,” Jacqueline says. “He will talk to anyone … He will be talking to someone and he’ll be like, ‘You should talk to my daughter.’ And calls me and I’m in bed and I’m, like, ‘Hello? Like, what?’” McGreevey is at times corny or “super dad” as Jacqueline describes him. But at 68, he has aged into his natural personality, allowing him to lean into his McGreeveyness even more. “He’s a bundle of energy,” Christie says. “Before I knew him, I figured that was fake. But it turns out it’s not. That’s who he is.” McGreevey’s reentry work has made him a celebrity in Jersey City’s low-income neighborhoods. He is far more likely to see someone he knows on a scrappy street corner with pigeons drinking out of puddles than he is outside the downtown Whole Foods. “He’s a pop star in the hood,” Walton tells me. His campaign has also inspired a new generation of disciples, like Anthony Cavaliere, 23, a Hudson County College student and McGreevey volunteer. Cavaliere calls McGreevey “a man for the people,” and other volunteers tell me they care more about what McGreevey is doing for vulnerable communities now than what he did as governor 20 years ago. But it’s difficult for anyone to change who they are, especially after nearly five decades of craving attention. And it’s easy to be skeptical of McGreevey when I ask him what it means to see his campaign posters throughout the city and he says, “I almost don’t even notice it.” Yet he contends his need for admiration died when he resigned as governor. He’s “changed profoundly” and realized that life is not about his ego or his needs, but making the world a better place. Christie, a self-styled B.S. detector, insists that this McGreevey is for real, a “liberated” and “complete Jim McGreevey.” “Unfortunately for him, he chose to live a good portion of his life acting like he was someone that he wasn’t,” Christie says. “And what I find about him now is that this is a guy who is who he is. He’s very comfortable with who he is. And he has a lot of really endearing qualities.” Politics have changed dramatically since the 1990s, but walking the streets reminds McGreevey of his days in Woodbridge, when he went house to house, sometimes spending an hour listening to families’ needs, he says. “What I love is the people,” he tells me one evening as he drives in his gray Toyota Camry with a New Jersey State Police magnet on the rear bumper. Twenty seconds of silence pass, and he waves at a man crossing the street. “People are good,” he says softly. As he walks Bergen-Lafayette in August with volunteers and members of his slate, the group finds a thin, young man facedown on the sidewalk, tan pants pulled down around his knees and his black underwear exposed. McGreevey is still a few houses away, chatting up a woman named Tammy who takes care of stray cats. His volunteers try to roll the man over, but he is only semiconscious and unresponsive. “That’s Billy,” Walton says, recognizing him as one of the kids she worked with during her time with the state children’s agency. “Hey, Billy,” she says. “What’s the matter?” He moans, but says nothing. Walton has Narcan in her car, but it’s parked several blocks away. McGreevey comes down the sidewalk, helps pull Billy off the ground and props him up against a porch. “Billy, you’re good. Just stay there,” he says. He asks for the phone and takes over the 911 call — “Get the ambulance here as quickly as possible,” he says. A woman comes out of her house and says she once heard a scream at 4:30 in the morning and saw a man bleeding out, right near where Billy is. She had to call 911 four times before the ambulance came, she tells McGreevey. He listens, but focuses on Billy. “Here it comes right now,” he says as the ambulance arrives. An 11-year-old boy from across the street runs over and asks for a photo with McGreevey. “My mother just told me he was the mayor,” he says. Jim McGreevey pushes open the door to his row home, a short walk from Journal Square. “This is our little world,” he tells me as his cat, Bailey, comes running down the steps to greet him. The first floor is filled with bookcases of neatly organized biographies, souvenirs from McGreevey’s travels and cherished family artifacts. He shows me his father’s sword from the Marine Corps, then a photograph of the Jersey City Police Department taken in 1937. “This is my grandfather,” he says, proudly pointing out Michael McGreevey from a crowd of faces. What strikes me most is that it’s late April, and there’s a Christmas nutcracker on top of McGreevey’s dining room hutch. He laughs and claims he keeps it up year round, but I’m not sure he would even be aware it’s there if I didn’t point it out. I know McGreevey lives here, but this doesn’t feel like his home. His doctors at the Arizona treatment center once noted his “inability to abstain from compulsive work, impulse control difficulties and moderation issues.” The one constant in McGreevey’s life has always been he lived for his work and become whoever he needed to be to accomplish his goals. Now he is looking to run a city of 300,000 when most men his age are retiring. There’s no doubt the old McGreevey would want one last political run, one final hit of dopamine to feed his ego and rewrite the ending to his story. “He hasn’t changed one iota,” says former state Sen. Ray Lesniak, McGreevey’s friend and mentor who stood by him and tried to persuade him not to resign. “He admitted to me once that he was addicted to politics, and this proves him right.” But McGreevey had pledged in televised interviews over the years to never again run for office, saying, “I realize in my heart that’s not healthy for me.” That version of McGreevey said seeking office would be about “ego.” But this version says he chose to put himself back in the arena simply for the sake of public good. “That sense of ambition or that sense of adulation was in part fueled by my inability or unwillingness to accept me for who I am,” McGreevey says. “That significantly changes upon self-acceptance.” But bare-knuckle Hudson County doesn’t care about his self-worth. “I have never had the experience of having to resign in disgrace,” Mussab Ali, the former Jersey City School Board president, says while standing next to McGreevey at a candidate forum in October. Ali, born the same year McGreevey first ran for governor, later pushes the clip out to his 82,900 Instagram followers. McGreevey is running on affordability, but Woodbridge didn’t build the affordable housing units it was required to when McGreevey was mayor, according to city councilman and mayoral candidate James Solomon. (McGreevey says Woodbridge was already affordable.) And another candidate — Hudson County Commissioner Bill O’Dea — accuses McGreevey of using a four-month “low show” job in 2015 to reach the 25-year threshold to get lifetime benefits from the state pension system. McGreevey served as an attorney helping Hudson County develop a countywide prisoner reentry center. (McGreevey says he earned those benefits over a long career.) Several candidates have also criticized McGreevey for again accepting donations from Charles Kushner, the developer of Jersey City properties and father of Jared Kushner. Kushner — now the U.S. ambassador to France — went to prison in 2005 for tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions and witness tampering after becoming McGreevey’s biggest donor. “It’s such a clear narrative between the future and the past,” Solomon says, “and change versus the status quo.” Viewed in the worst light, McGreevey just can’t help himself. His ego is too big, and his need for validation too large. He’s followed the only road he’s ever known back to politics for one final shot. Viewed in the best light, McGreevey finally accepted who he is and doesn’t care if you like it. He’s serious about helping Jersey City, but also seems to mean it when he says “if I win or I lose, life goes on.” But reality is almost always somewhere in between. I’m not sure if McGreevey has truly changed. But I’ve come to see him as a natural shepherd who is incomplete without a flock. For better or worse, he thrives with an audience and a cause. Do Jersey City voters want McGreevey? The old McGreevey, the new McGreevey or any version of him? He’s about to find out. And this time, he can’t dictate the truth.
