Steve Landfield’s column appears twice a month in NJ Jewish News.

Just when the matter of the state slogan finally seemed resolved it’s come back to repeat on us like a bad meal.

In case you haven’t been following the ins and outs, a bit of history: Last year, New Jersey Senate president Richard Codey, then governor, decided that the state needed a new slogan.

“New Jersey and You, Perfect Together” was popularized by former Gov. Thomas Kean, the less memorable “You Should See Us Now” emerged from the Florio era, and the even more forgettable “What a Difference a State Makes” was the product of the Whitman administration.

Codey decided that these slogans were simply neither memorable enough nor fitting for a state like New Jersey. The state hired a fancy image consulting firm in New York and paid it $260,000 to come up with a new slogan.

So why go out of state for a slogan? There wasn’t enough talent in the state of New Jersey to find someone who was qualified to develop the right turn of phrase? Apparently not.

The New York geniuses came up with the phrase, “New Jersey: We’ll Win You Over.”

Perfect. At a cost of $43,333 per word, this professionally procured slogan should have been the end of the matter. Right? No, not in New Jersey. Gov. Codey decided to scrap that slogan; he said it had too strong a negative connotation.

So Codey did what should have been done in the first place: He held a state contest for a new slogan. This one was free. He set up a Web site and a telephone number so people could submit their ideas.

The first round netted almost 8,000 suggestions. These were narrowed down to five finalists. After more than 11,000 votes, the winning slogan was announced: “Come See for Yourself.”

Brilliant? Not quite. Just five months after the official selection, it turns out that again the slogan is being scrapped. It seems that the phrase already was used by West Virginia.

Adding to the mess: While New Jersey scrapped the slogan because West Virginia had used it, New Jersey officials don’t seem to know that in West Virginia officials say they are not using that phrase at all. “I’m drawing a blank here,” says the public information director for West Virginia tourism. She recalls that maybe she had heard the phrase somewhere, maybe Kentucky or Virginia had used it. Virginia officially denies that, as it has been using “Virginia Is for Lovers” for the past 36 years.

This leads to the obvious question: why didn’t anybody bother to check the phrase before it was adopted? In this age of Google, it would have taken five minutes and saved a lot of time — and embarrassment — to check it out.

In any event, that now leaves New Jersey sloganless and, according to tourism officials, there are no plans to revisit the matter again until the end of the year.

Eventually we might go back to some previously rejected choices like “New Jersey: You Got a Problem With That?” or perhaps the more politically correct “New Jersey: Most of Our Elected Officials Haven’t Been Indicted.” Someone has even suggested that we use a slogan inspired by the wonderful food and dining the Garden State has to offer with “Take a Bite Out of New Jersey.” Or perhaps a slogan inspired by a New Yorker’s point of view: “New Jersey: The Light at the End of the Tunnel,” or the more obligatory Parkway references we have all been exposed to every time we meet a foreigner: “New Jersey: We Have an Exit for You.”

The real question is, who cares if we have a slogan anyway? Would you really visit a place because of the slogan? Would you be more likely to visit Greenland if its slogan was “Greenland Is for Lovers”? Or “Afghanistan: Come See the Mountains”?

New Jersey has been doing quite well, thank you, without a slogan at all. Last year the state’s tourism industry — which includes the beaches, casinos, and other attractions — generated an estimated $34 billion in revenue and $3.7 billion in tax receipts. This year, higher gas prices are likely to keep people closer to home, making 2006 potentially a banner year for NJ tourism.

The state is running great television ads featuring a song by Jersey native Jon Bon Jovi. The ads are so good you have to look twice to see where they are talking about.

Perhaps our best bet is the following, and it doesn’t cost a quarter million dollars: “New Jersey: Our Slogan is Our Best-Kept Secret.”

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