By Matt Rooney
Bonnie Watson Coleman’s 55 year career in New Jersey politics will end in January 2027, Save Jerseyans, and she’s being hailed as a trailblazer by the legacy media and allies online. Her claim to fame? Watson Coleman became the first black resident to serve on what was then called the Mercer County Board of Freeholders back in 1970.
It’s entirely unclear what Watson Coleman accomplished with her history-making triumph over the ensuing five-and-a-half decades in Mercer, state, and national politics.
Sorry; it needs to be said.
I tried to find something aside from her sons’s infamous brush with the law and that Delaney Hall incident. I really did! But a simple Google search reveals that Watson Coleman’s only “signature” legislation in a House career that spans a decade – the 2021 “CROWN” Act – never made it past the U.S. Senate. What was the bill’s intended purpose? Prohibiting “hair discrimination.” Weighty, groundbreaking stuff!
The truth: Watson Coleman is nothing special. She’s actually decidedly ordinary and distressingly typical for the Garden State which tends to elect its leaders on the basis of partisan ID and bio rather than actual qualifications for the job. The outgoing Congresswoman’s profile is a dime a dozen across all 21 counties. Hell, we just made one governor!
Not a single New Jersey resident – black or otherwise – can sincerely say their respective lives were improved by Bonnie’s time in the public arena.
So I wish her a very happy and long retirement, but I’ll never stop hoping that my fellow New Jerseyans decide to be a little more scrutinizing in selecting representatives for high office. At some point, it’d be awfully nice to see a New Jersey elected official do something to make us all freer and more prosperous. Watson Coleman never even tried, and I can’t pretend to be optimistic that her successor in gerrymandered NJ-12 will prove any more effective.
