Phil Thigpen

East Orange Mayor Robert Bowser says he’s 70% certain he will East Orange Mayor Robert L. Bowserpursue a fourth term in next year’s election.

“It’s early, but there are still a lot of things we need to do here,” said Bowser, who has led the redevelopment of his Essex County city over the past 11 years.

Former Assemblyman Willis Edwards - an ally of East Orange Democratic Party leader Leroy Jones - has expressed an interest in taking on the 74-year old incumbent.

“I saw that,” said Bowser, referring to news of the potential challenge. The mayor doesn’t seem concerned.

Essex County Democratic Party Chairman Phil Thigpen 

NEWARK - Essex County Committee Chairman Phil Thigpen today confirmed to PolitickerNJ.com that he would pursue another term as chair.

"We’re going to go again," he said in his office at the Robert Treat Hotel.

County Executive Joe DiVincenzoNEWARK - The Essex County Executive and Newark’s senior senator today both panned a proposal by North Ward Democratic leader Steve Adubato and a few others to dump County Chairman Phil Thigpen in favor of a longtime member of Adubato’s inner circle.

County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo and state Sen. Ronald Rice (D-Newark) pledged their full support for Thigpen, and denounced Adubato’s attempted power play to deliver the chairmanship to his friend, Adrianne Davis.

"Steve’s a guy who wants his epitaph to be, ‘I controlled everything in my life,’ but he’s just a guy with a big ego, who wants everyone to kiss his behind like we’re out here picking a bunch of cotton bales, black, white and Latino, all of us," Rice said. "To hell with Steve."

Himself a longtime Adubato ally who came up out of the North Ward, DiVincenzo stopped short of Rice’s all-out assault on his friend and political mentor, but was clear in his disapproval.

After failing to secure party line, Terrance Bankston bows out of freeholder raceVanquished by the Essex County Democratic Party machine this week, Terrance Bankston said he regards the leadership’s rejection of his freeholder at-large candidacy as a direct snub of Mayor Cory Booker, and a failure to reward hard campaign work.

But no matter, he says now that his candidacy is over - he means to return to Newark’s South Ward to labor on behalf of district leader candidates as part of an effort to provide an alternative to the machine of U.S. Rep. Donald Payne (D-12) and Payne ally Essex County Chairman Phil Thigpen.

“It was disrespectful to the mayor, and what was even more insulting about the situation was we didn’t just go to the table expecting to get put on the slate, we went out and worked for it,” said the 25-year old employee of the Booker administration.

Robert Kennedy, Jr. in Passaic on Monday night, flanked by U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, left, and Assemblyman Thomas Giblin.

Arguing that his presidential candidate possesses a unique combination of toughness and persuasive power, Robert Kennedy, Jr. electrified a tent-ful of fellow Hillary Clinton supporters on Monday night at a private home in Passaic.

"I was very skeptical at first because I knew she was coming in under the same charges as my father did, which were that she was a carpetbagger," Kennedy, a Westchester, N.Y. resident, said of Clinton’s appeal to him when she first prepared to run for his father’s old Senate seat.

Kennedy said Clinton faced tremendous hostility, especially in traditionally Republican upstate New York - where a Senate candidate must win if he or she is to win the state, in Kennedy’s words.