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2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumChris Christie 2016: A Bridge to Nowhere - By Jonathan Chait
:::snip:::
Several things come together to make this scandal especially devastating to Christie. One is that its very easy for voters to understand: He punished a town because its mayor endorsed his rival. There are no complex financial transfers or legal maneuverings to parse. Second, it fits into a broader pattern of behavior, documented by the New York Times, of taking retribution against politicians who cross him in any way. There is, in all likelihood, much more. Mark Halperin and my colleague John Heilemann reported in their book about the 2012 campaign that Mitt Romney wanted to put Christie on his ticket, but his staff was stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record:
There was a 2010 Department of Justice inspector generals investigation of Christies spending patterns in his job prior to the governorship, which criticized him for being the U.S. attorney who most often exceeded the government (travel expense) rate without adequate justification and for offering insufficient, inaccurate, or no justification for stays at swank hotels like the Four Seasons. There was the fact that Christie worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Securities Industry Association at a time when Bernie Madoff was a senior SIA official and sought an exemption from New Jerseys Consumer Fraud Act. There was Christies decision to steer hefty government contracts to donors and political allies like former Attorney General John Ashcroft, which sparked a congressional hearing. There was a defamation lawsuit brought against Christie arising out of his successful 1994 run to oust an incumbent in a local Garden State race. Then there was Todd Christie, the Governors brother, who in 2008 agreed to a settlement of civil charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission in which he acknowledged making hundreds of trades in which customers had been systematically overcharged.
The investigations also raised questions for the vetters about Christies relationship with a top female deputy who accompanied him on many of the trips.
The swirl of potential and already-proven scandals would be enough to sink an ordinary candidate. But Christie, as Ive argued before, is not an ordinary candidate. Hes an unusually vulnerable one, especially in a Republican primary. He suffers from a mix of ideological and regional vulnerabilities. Christies ideological heterodoxies include, but are not limited to, his decision to accept the Medicaid expansion in Obamacare and his fierce advocacy of gun control, either of which could be disqualifying in a contested Republican primary. Whats more, his brash Northeastern personality may play well among conservatives when hes abusing Democrats, but probably wont if and when hes abusing fellow Republicans. A Republican painting Christie as a philosophical and cultural alien would have a very, very easy case to make.
more:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/01/chris-christie-2016-a-bridge-to-nowhere.html?imw=Y&f=most-viewed-24h10
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