West Orange Patch has a headline this morning, “Around West Orange: Political Scandal.” The headline suggests that a scandal has taken place in West Orange. Has it? No, the scandal Patch has in mind is the recent resignation from office of New Jersey Lieutenant Governor Dale Caldwell. Caldwell lives and works in New Brunswick. He answered to Governor Mikie Sherrill, who lives in Princeton and works in Trenton. It’s not clear exactly where the malfeasances alleged against him took place, but it’s clear that none took place in West Orange.
In other words, Caldwell’s resignation has nothing to do with West Orange. Yet it’s being covered in a headline “About West Orange” in a paper called West Orange Patch that demands that readers writing comments on its website keep their comments “local” and go elsewhere if they want to do otherwise. It all makes sense if we’re meant to do what they say but ignore what they do.
Meanwhile, in a year and a half, West Orange Patch has yet to cover the Justin Goldsman scandal–a scandal about West Orange, in West Orange, by a resident of West Orange, concerning an ongoing election to West Orange Council. In fact, it’s gone out of its way to avoid mentioning the scandal even when it’s gone out of its way to mention Justin Goldsman. I guess there’s a fine line between journalistic selectivity and bad faith.
Denial is not just a river in West Orange, of course. Dale Caldwell (or Dr. Dale Caldwell, as everybody insisted on calling him) is a Princeton alum, Class of 1982. What Princeton-area publication has discreetly declined to mention his scandal? Why, Princeton Alumni Weekly, the world’s one-stop resource for the glorious doings of Princeton alumni.
PAW’s coverage as of the afternoon of Saturday, September 26, 2026
Naturally, PAW gave flattering, no-tough-questions-asked coverage of Caldwell’s career of wonderfulness en route to state office. What a great guy! What a splendid alum! So authentically black, yet so unthreateningly white: “Black Guy Who Plays Tennis.” “Black Guy Who Worked for Deloitte,” “Black Guy with Strong Ties to Israel,” “Black Guy with a Soft Spot for Positive Psychology,” “Black Methodist Pastor With a Long History of Government Service.” The stories practically wrote themselves, all Chicken Soup for the White Liberal Soul. Did we mention that Dr Caldwell was a Black Guy with a doctorate?
To find reality-based coverage of Caldwell’s bullying, asshole behavior over the past decade, you’d have to consult the work of New Brunswick Today editor Charlie Kratovil, whom I’ve previously mentioned here. What that work reveals is that Caldwell’s unscrupulous, fact-challenged approach to political discourse was known to everyone who ever dealt with him for almost a decade before his short stint as Lieutenant Governor. In other words, Caldwell was a dick, and everyone had reason to know it. But he was black, and the Democrats needed a black guy–and we had to elect a Democrat–so character didn’t matter.
Charlie Kratovil (on stairs) at a Memorial Vigil for Deborah Terrell in New Brunswick, June 2026
Sherrill had to know this when she picked Caldwell as a running mate. It simply isn’t credible to think that Ms former U.S. Attorney and former Navy helicopter pilot, with her vaunted legal credentials and vaunted attention to detail, could have missed eight or nine solid years of New Brunswick-based reporting about a long-standing New Brunswick housing official after vetting him for one of the most scrutinized political campaigns in the country. I mean, if she missed that, what the fuck did she look at? Either way, she obviously didn’t care. Her feigned indignation now about Caldwell’s behavior is another helping of bad faith in a milieu that’s fully marinated in it.
What Sherrill wanted was a black running mate, and with that imperative in place, any black Democratic face would do. Having won office, she can now throw Caldwell overboard with all of the dudgeon required of her and move on. Sherrill’s own documented penchant for lying her way out of her self-created problems–concealed by her reflexive resort to Soccer Mom Sainthood–is something that hasn’t gotten enough attention in the local press, and probably never will. That’s how she gets away with it. In one way or the other, that’s how they all do.
This is how we find ourselves in the odd situation where one white asshole is forgiven his use of the n-word, and one black asshole finds his way into state office through sheer, obvious tokenization. We live in a world where gestures have taken the place of principles, and image has taken the place of character. Make a big deal about an actual matter of principle, and you become the bad guy. Shit on everyone, double down and make excuses about it, and if you play your cards right, you’ll do OK.
We’re surrounded by assholes like this because there’s no one around to hold anyone to any kind of accountability. The people who avert their eyes are given the honorific of “journalist”; the people who speak truth to power are dismissed as troublemakers and cranks. The very idea of speaking truth to power is derided by people who have no idea what it means or requires. A society that inverts moral reality in this way tends to get what it deserves. The question is how long that will persist. Hard to tell, but the good news, to paraphrase both Iron Maiden and Aristotle, is that the truth of all such predictions is always in our hands.
