Just as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s political star seems poised to shoot high in the sky incoming missiles come in and score a partial hit. The best summary of how a GOP Governor poised for a landslide re-election in a blue state has hit some bumps in the longer road comes via NBC’s First Read:
*** It was the best of times for Chris Christie; it also was the worst of times: Meanwhile, these have been the best of times for Republican Gov. Chris Christie one day before his re-election bid in New Jersey. A new Rutgers-Eagleton poll shows him leading Democrat Barbara Buono by a whopping 36 points among likely voters, 66%-30%, while a new Quinnipiac poll has him up, 61%-33%. On Friday, his campaign release a memo about “Blue Jersey,” noting how Democratic the state is (“no Republican candidate has earned more than 50% of the vote in 28 years”; “Obama won by 17 percentage points in 2012” in the state). And he told NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell over the weekend that his re-election would have a national message. “I’m not planning for it; I just think it’s inevitable.” But these have also been the worst of times for Christie — with the oppo the Romney campaign gave to the authors of the new “Double Down: Game Change 2012” book. As CNN’s Peter Hamby wrote in a review of the book, “[Authors] Halperin and Heilemann make abundant use of a vice-presidential vetting file dropped into their hands by someone in Romney’s orbit to illuminate secrets about the governor. Delivering the documents to the authors was a stunning breach of political decorum that can only be read as a giant middle finger at Christie and his aides.” Among the oppo: “a Justice Department investigation into his free-spending ways as U.S. attorney, his habit of steering government contracts to friends and political allies, a defamation lawsuit that emerged during a 1994 run for local office, a politically problematic lobbying career that included work on behalf of a financial firm that employed Bernie Madoff.” As one of the “Double Down” authors said this morning on “Morning Joe,” that Madoff nugget is a 30-second TV ad ready to happen.
And so is this latest instance of Christie loosing his cool — this again (again) with a teacher.
Meanwhile, former GOP Presidential nominee Romney was trying to downplay what clearly seems to be payback on the part of some of his staffers for Christie’s becoming the symbol of (a fragile) possibility of bipartisanship, the anthesis of how most Republicans including Mitt Romney appeared during the 2012 Presidential campaign.
*** Romney: “There was nothing new there”: On “Meet the Press” yesterday, Mitt Romney responded to the leaking of the VP dossier. “I know that the vetting people who went through that analysis and put together their report laid everything out. But, frankly, there was nothing they found that wasn’t already part of the public record and that hadn’t already been dealt with effectively by Chris Christie. So there was nothing new there.” That is all true; most of this “oppo” on Christie was litigated in the public record during his 2009 campaign. But Christie was running against ex-Goldman Sachs-er Jon Corzine. And remember, most of the Romney negatives (Bain Capital) were litigated in 1994, but that didn’t stop them from becoming new to voters in states not named Massachusetts.
Yep. It you think Romney’s former staffers who released the info didn’t know about the impact this could have on Christie’s hopes, then I can sell you this for $1.25 (and I’ll throw in a free bag of Jolly Ranchers).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.