And so we get yet another poll suggesting that the man who could possibly win the Republican Party the White House in 2016 is a man who could have a hard time getting its nomination. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (national, general electorate) political stock continues to rise — with the poll finding he is the country’s “hottest” politician.
This is a poll that literally asks who is the hottest and coldest:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is the “hottest” political figure in the country, according to a new temperature poll.
Voters were asked to give politicians a number from 0-100 representing how they feel about that figure, with 0 being least favorable, or coldest, and 100 being most favorable, or warmest, in the new Quinnipiac survey on Monday.
Christie’s mean score was 53.1, topping the heap. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in a close second, at 52.1 degrees, and third was Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), at 49.2 degrees, although 51 percent of voters did not know enough about her to make a judgment.
President Barack Obama was fourth, at 47.6.
Christie’s next possible 2016 GOP challengers on the list were Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), at 46.8 degrees, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), at 46.5.
And — not surprisingly — the political figures that left the polled voters cold were Congressional leaders:
At the bottom of the list were the four congressional leaders: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi at 38.4; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at 37.5; House Speaker John Boehner at 36.7; and, in last place, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at 33.8.
The irony for Christie continues to be that in a general election he’d be the GOP’s best option against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden or any big name Democrat — but will face an uphill battle in the primaries due to perceptions among Tea Partiers and many in the conservative entertainment media complex that he’s a political traitor for dealing with (and embracing) the political enemy (Democrats and President Barack Obama) and his inability to pass a stringent 21st century conservative litmus test.
Christie has been zooming in the polls throughout the spring, making him one of the country’s most popular Republican governors — a fact that would not stop conservatives from denying him the Republican nomination by branding him a RINO.
You don’t have to be be a crack analyst to conclude Christie is running when you note that a)he got into a war of worlds with Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, the libertarian GOPer who is expected to run for President in 2016, b)he trekked to Las Vegas to be at a fundraiser hosted by casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam.
In fact, you would likely be an analyst on crack if you suggested this was all mere coincidence.
San Diego-based CNN contributor Ruben Navarrette has a column that perfectly captures the GOP battle that is raging — and Christie’s high profile role. You can be excused if you think this sounds like a man who has national aspirations — since a can of catfood on the shelves in Stater Brothers grocery store on Carmel Mountain Road in Rancho Penasquitos, CA would read it and say: “Political aspirations!” And the can of dog food next to it would bark “Yes!” in agreement:
You have Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas vs. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida over immigration; New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie vs. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky over domestic surveillance and the cost of preventing terrorism; Paul vs. Sen. John McCain of Arizona over whether the Kentucky senator would — if he ran for president — be preferable to Hillary Clinton; Rubio vs. the GOP establishment over defunding Obamacare; and Cruz vs. well, just about everybody over just about everything.
Re Christie:
Christie started it when he criticized Paul’s vocal opposition to warrantless federal surveillance programs, saying it hurt efforts to thwart terrorism. He sanctimoniously invited opponents to “come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation.”
Paul wasn’t in the mood for a lecture.
He dismissed the attacks from Christie as “kind of cheap and sad” and suggested that if the governor “cared about protecting this country, maybe he wouldn’t be in this ‘give me, give me, give me all of the money’ (mindset) that you have in Washington.”
Christie wasn’t in the mood to be scolded.He suggested Paul “start cutting the pork barrel spending that he brings home to Kentucky.” Although, Christie said, he doubted that would happen because “most Washington politicians only care about bringing home the bacon so that they can get re-elected.”
Then Paul went for the knockout.
“This is the king of bacon talking about bacon,” he said incredulously during an interview on CNN’s “The Situation Room.” He clarified: “You know, we have two military bases in Kentucky. What does he want to do, shut down military bases in Kentucky?”
I guarantee that given Christie’s struggle to lose weight, most Americans won’t think of military bases when they hear that a fellow Republican dubbed him “the king of bacon.”
CNN gives us this list of five things about the Christie-Paul tiff, including, yes, it’s related to 2016. Here’s the one on Christie:
4. Chris Christie doesn’t pull punches
Yes, we knew this. But this episode reminds us of how blunt Christie can be.
While Paul seemed on Wednesday to be trying to bring the scuffle to an end, Christie held his ground.
“At the end of the day, I didn’t call him any names, yet he called me names,” Christie said in his radio interview Wednesday. “I just have to assume from that that he’s just trying to get attention.”
Christie was talking about his initial comments that sparked the feud, adding: “It really had nothing to do with Senator Paul, but Senator Paul wanted to make it about Senator Paul,” Christie added.
Christie speaks his mind, which appeals to voters, and not just Republicans. While Paul has a higher favorable rating among Republicans than Christie, according to the Pew poll, Christie has crossover appeal with Independents and Democrats that Paul can’t match.
But could Christie somehow get the nomination? Could he take his general appeal and mold it more narrowly so it appeals to conservatives, yet doesn’t make him look like another Mitt Romney who wound up having more positions than the kama sutra?
Christie’s biggest appeal can be discerned by any political junkie (like me) who travels extensively (like me). Republican conservatives consider him a political traitor who’s committing career suicide by many of his pronouncements that are unflattering to his own party and don’t adhere to an ideological total-support-for-the-home-team position. But many independents, Democrats, centrists, moderates and less conservative Republicans will say they don’t agree with all of his positions but he talks “like a real person.” He gets high marks for his seemingly sincere bluntness, willingness to criticize both sides — and for his media appearances on programs such as David Letterman’s.
New York’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells in a must-read-in-full piece titled “What Is Chris Christie Doing Right?” perhaps nails it. The subheadline reads:
He’s hugely popular in a state way to his left. He’s unafraid to take on a national party considerably to his right. And he’s most adored when he’s acting reprehensibly.
In this long piece, this seems to be right on target:
Community has a particular political meaning here. The state has 565 municipalities, most of them small enough to sustain the illusion of classlessness. This proliferation of tiny fiefdoms—distinct, politically isolated—is a quirk of the state’s political history and is kept in place by its system of taxation. New Jersey’s state income tax is the lowest of the 43 states that have an income tax, and its local property taxes are the highest in the nation. (One consequence is that the state taxes fall more heavily on the rich and the local taxes on the lower middle class, and so as Christie has vetoed attempts to reinstate a millionaire’s tax, cut business taxes, and severely diminished a program for property-tax relief, he has shifted the tax burden downward.) The promise of this system is that resources can be kept close to home, where they will be plentiful, and used to build little utopias, and often this has actually happened: The state is filled with superlative school systems.
Because power is concentrated locally, anger can be, too. One Democratic pollster who ran focus groups in the state during the recession told me he’d found less rage than he expected at banks and plutocrats and more directed locally at the schoolteachers and cops whose pensions drove local property taxes higher. “I had one guy in a focus group go on a rant about the pension his father, who was a retired cop, got from the town, that the pension was way too generous,” the pollster told me. “His father.”
We have never had a president as outwardly angry as Christie, but then this country has rarely been as angry as it is now. In the tea-party era, conservative anger has often been channeled by figures such as Michele Bachmann and Ted Cruz into a hysteria over very abstract and inflated threats: health-care death panels, the national debt, the specter of a country overrun by illegal immigrants. Christie’s use of anger is very different: It is much more targeted, and therefore potentially much more useful.
AND:
The contrast was on display last week in the fight he picked with Rand Paul. The senator from Kentucky, having watched Christie denounce libertarianism, called him the “King of Bacon,” presumably referring both to his pleas for immediate federal help after Hurricane Sandy and to his weight. Christie had pointed out that New Jersey is a “donor state,” taking only 61 cents for every dollar it sends to Washington, while Kentucky takes back $1.51. (No acknowledgment from Christie that this is owed not to New Jersey’s superior character but to its good fortune of existing next to the great economic buoy of Wall Street, while Kentucky is near no economic buoy at all.) “So if Senator Paul wants to start looking at where he is going to cut spending to afford defense,” Christie had said, “maybe he should start looking at cutting the pork-barrel spending he brings home to Kentucky.” For Christie, the villain is always specific: not government, not socialism, not impersonal historical forces, but one moron in particular—the teachers union, or Steve Sweeney, or in this case Rand Paul, the libertarian ophthalmologist, high-mindedly denouncing government while his state is on its dole. “He’s not the first politician to try to use me to get attention,” Christie said later, dismissing Paul’s slight. “And I’m sure he won’t be the last.”
What Christie is doing when he starts arguments with other Republicans—and it is telling that what looks very much like a presidential run has begun with a sequence of fights—is offering his party the chance to preserve its anger, while trading in its revolutionaries for a furious institutionalist.
Of course, that would be the politically smart thing for the GOP to do — but when these days has the GOP seemed Einstein-level smart? Too often these days, the GOP politically resembles THIS.
There are two big questions about “the hottest” politician in America.
*If Christie does run (as he seems to be running now) will he so alter his positions to appeal to fundraisers and the base that he becomes more of a cookie-cutter candidate, becoming as distant from Governor Christie as 2012 Republican candidate Mitt Romney was from Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney?
and..
*Unlike with Mitt Romney, conservatives will likely conclude that if Christie becomes President he will NOT be a President who they can turn into a rubber stamp for Congress and who’ll get out of the way.
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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.