Gov. Jon Corzine today said the impact from the recent stock market plunge and credit crisis has yet to be fully realized and will likely bring “rising levels of unemployment,” adding New Jersey may even try to purchase homes to protect residents from foreclosure.

Speaking this morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Corzine proposed the federal government buy the mortgages at market value then restructure them, and possibly buy houses outright.

A short time later, in an appearance on WABC’s “Eyewitness News Up Close,” Corzine indicated he would follow his own advice, suggesting the state would be buying homes.

“We’re going to do some on-the-ground purchases of homes,” he said. He vowed to “protect neighborhoods” from being devastated by large numbers of foreclosures, which lower the values of nearby houses.

Corzine this week is expected to unveil his own broad economic stimulus package to boost the state’s economy. The plan would include help for homeowners in immediate danger of losing their property to foreclosure, possibly in the form of loans to community organizations that would buy the houses and then rent them back to residents.

The Democratic governor, who is supporting Sen. Barack Obama for president, said the country badly needs a kick-start and rejected what he called Republican candidate Sen. John McCain’s recent plans to bail out the banks that made bad loans to homeowners.

“Right now, nobody has confidence to do things,” Corzine told “Meet the Press” moderator Tom Brokaw. “We need to be putting demand into the system. That means infrastructure. Build highways, build schools, build our energy system so that we can actually create jobs, get people back to work.”

Otherwise, he added, states like New Jersey will end up having to slash jobs and spending on education.

Appearing with Corzine on the television program was Republican Rob Portman, a former Ohio congressman and former director of the Office of Management and Budget.

“We need to be really careful here,” Portman said. “We have a $10 trillion debt now, and Senator Obama is very good at coming up with new ideas of ways to spend the taxpayers’ money, when in fact it’s the spending that is partly responsible for getting us into this situation.”

When the topic of conversation switched to the tone of the presidential campaign, Portman said the McCain camp was justified in focusing on Obama’s “judgment and truthfulness.” He was referring to Obama’s association with William Ayers, who founded the radical Weather Underground in the 1960s and went on to become a college professor.

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said in a recent speech that Obama was “palling around with terrorists,” referring to Ayers.

But Corzine called the attacks on Obama “a distraction” from the real issue, which is the state of the economy. Republican strategists, the governor said, “want to turn the page on economics because it’s not working … The most fundamental debate we should be having in this country is how are we going to put people to work, how are we going to keep people in their homes, how are we going to raise the income of the middle class in this country.”