If you saw Jim McGreevey’s latest mailer, that’s me on there, obligingly shaking his hand and carrying my kid. I never consented to being part of his ad campaign. In fact, thanks McGreevey, I hate it.About two months ago, my husband and I were at my parents’ house with our twin babies. We hear some mild commotion outside and my dad takes a look. He rushes in saying “Jim McGreevey is coming!” Dad ushers us out of the house to meet McGreevey who is making his procession down our block in the Heights. An entourage of photographers and other business-casual people trail behind him. Our short and bizarre interaction with McGreevey consisted of McGreevey saying “thank you, thank you” repeatedly as my dad recounted a memory of meeting McGreevey years ago. I wondered what he was thanking us for as no one was giving any compliments.I waited for McGreevey to tell us anything, literally anything, about his campaign. I glance at his flyer and see three main bullet points; a point calling for spending cuts in order to curtail the city’s high property taxes and rent, a point implying more money for the JCPD, and another point implying that the Jersey City education budget is too high. Interesting. The photographers began snapping pictures. My husband stepped back to not be in any political advertising, and I figured that so long as I appeared as suspicious as I felt, my image would not be used. I was wrong.Since I learned absolutely nothing about McGreevey from our “conversation” in the Heights, let me tell you what I learned from his flyer and his “listening tour” publicity stunt as a whole. I learned that career politicians will confidently walk down a street taking photos and using your likeness without your permission for their own political gain, despite you never saying a word in their favor.I learned that McGreevey is trying to connect high rents and high property taxes to what he paints as a bloated education budget. This obfuscates the truth. As seen here here, New Jersey schools receive one of the lowest amounts of federal funding in the country. Perhaps this is offset by funding through state and local funding, but that does not mean that NJ’s billion dollar BOE budget is too big. As a Jersey City educator, I’m embarrassed to be on the cover of a flyer for a politician with no clearly or even vaguely stated plan for improving our students’ education nor for allowing teachers to raise a regular middle class family. It’s reasonable to assume from McGreevey’s flyer and from two Jersey City police unions’ endorsement of him that the police will see no budget cuts. In fact, on Jim McGreevey’s website he has a video saying he would instate CompStat in Jersey City, despite its connections with higher levels of racially-biased stop and frisk when implemented in New York City. Nothing else on his website gets as much attention as his support for the police. This is not at all a comment against the officers of the JCPD, but I would appreciate not being a poster mom nor my baby a poster child for something that will directly negatively affect us. I wonder how many others featured on his mailer feel the same.The post Letter: Why am I in McGreevey’s Mailer When I Don’t Support Him? appeared first on Jersey City Times.