In N.J., Tom Kean Jr.’s smear campaign takes an especially ugly turn — and he might get away with it

Tom Moran is the author of the Substack Jersey Lowdown and the former editorial page editor of the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.

No, Rebecca Bennett did not enable a child sex abuser to commit his crimes.

Tom Kean Jr. is using the final few weeks of his campaign to saturate the airwaves with a TV advertisement that wins the prize for the most vicious and dishonest political attack I’ve seen this year.

It begins with a grainy TV news report about a Pennsylvania pediatrician who was convicted of sexually abusing dozens of children. It then suggests that Bennett was complicit because she worked for a company that had a partnership with a healthcare firm that owned one of the hospitals where the pediatrician worked.

“Liberal Rebecca Bennett brags about partnering with the same company putting profits over patients,” an ominous voice-over tells viewers. “Bennett became a millionaire while patients were maimed, sexually abused, and even killed because Rebecca Bennett is no middle-class moderate. She’s a greedy liberal millionaire who doesn’t care about you.”

The core charge is easy to disprove. The abuser, Jack Barto, pleaded guilty in 2019, the year Bennett ended 15 years of active service in the U.S. Navy. Are we supposed to believe she had a side gig helping child abusers in Pennsylvania while she was flying helicopters in the Persian Gulf?

And the sinister partnership the ad refers to? It was formed in 2023, four years after the abusive doctor was sentenced to life in prison. So the partnership could not possibly have enabled the abuse.

But this is not a column about another dishonest ad from Kean. This is how the man rolls. He was shamelessly dishonest in his attacks against his last Democratic opponent, Tom Malinowski, in 2022.

I’m asking a bigger question: How can Kean think he’ll get away with it? Why is he pushing a smear campaign that is so easy to disprove? Brace yourself, because the answers to that question are beyond depressing.

One problem is the abundance of low-information voters in America — people who pay little attention to politics and can be easily fooled. A 2023 survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania found that one-third of Americans couldn’t name all three branches of government. A separate Pew Research Center survey that year found that one-third couldn’t identify which party controlled the House of Representatives.

I know, Americans are busy. But we manage to watch TV for nearly three hours a day, on average, so that’s not the whole story. We have a citizenship problem.

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As Thomas Jefferson put it: “If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be.”

Another problem: Where are the watchdogs?

The remnants of the traditional news media in New Jersey have let this advertisement get by them, as have the promising digital outlets that have filled at least part of the gap.

As far as I could determine, even with AI help, no New Jersey news outlet has reported on the chronology that makes the ad’s core charge so absurd. The New Jersey Globe published a short piece on the ad, and the New Jersey Monitor mentioned the ad in a campaign story. But neither noted that Bennett was on active duty when the pediatrician committed many of his crimes, or that the partnership Kean is targeting was formed four years after the doctor reported to prison.

The remnants of the traditional news media in New Jersey have let this advertisement get by them.

Let me be clear: The surviving media outlets in New Jersey have plenty of talented people doing the best they can. But newsrooms are a shell of what they were. They lack the staff to keep close track of the state’s slippery characters. And out of desperation, they often lean toward stories that will bring them the most clicks and the fastest turnaround. By those standards, exposing Kean’s lies doesn’t compete with Donald Trump’s latest tantrum on social media.

So, what’s the remedy? How can we build a political environment where dishonest ads like this find no traction?

If you can suggest a way to get low-information voters to stop voting for hucksters, let me know. If you have a formula to revive the media, you’re a lot smarter than me.

I’m afraid that we must hope for now that politicians like Kean listen to what Abe Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” And that’s not as naive as it may sound. Most politicians don’t stoop this low. Bennett hasn’t, at least not so far.

And while the race is close, Bennett is leading in the polls, and is favored by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Perhaps that’s reason for hope. Perhaps voters are better at recognizing a smear than politicians like Kean think.