Garden(ing) leave

The first super-group The Traveling Wilburys [American spelling of Travelling] with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne are often maligned, usually on the back of a fairly awful second album (called Vol. 3) - Orbison had died almost immediately after the first album and his influence was missed.  But that first album was musicality distilled.
One of the non-singles was 'Tweeter and the Monkey Man', a near psychadelic story of New Jersey low-lifes and gangsters.  It was the complete opposite of the 'filler' cliché and written largely by Dylan, in Bruce Springsteen-baiting mode.  One of the last verse lines has it, with Tweeter being held as a hostage on a bridge by the Monkey Man, "Jan said up to the Monkey Man, I'm not fooled by Tweeter's cool, I knew him long before he ever became a Jersey Girl."  This seems a distinct reference to the mafia in the Garden State, rather than a stubborn, if good-time girl.
So when Hillary Clinton, campaigning in New Jersey for the Democratic nomination that is all but hers, says she wants to be a Jersey Girl, it seems a little incongruous (unless you sign up to Trump's 'Crooked Clinton' mantra).  Maybe she's thinking of the hit musical Jersey Boys and trying to transpose herself into that popularity, by hook or by crook (actually, let's not go there, Trump needs to lose).