Which is surely, surely, surely true. But then Dave ends his piece with the following:
Christie is telling crowds that they really should consider voting for more Republicans, if only to send a message. “If you reward bad behavior, just like what happens with kids, you’ll get more bad behavior,” he says in Somers Point. “If you reward good behavior, you’ll get more good behavior. You know, Tuesday night, America’s watching. America’s watching and they want a new signal of hope for the country’s future, after all the dysfunction in Washington, D.C. They’re gonna look to New Jersey for that hope, and we’re gonna provide it to them on Tuesday.”
I look around the room and see more than one grown man daubing away tears at what Christie’s just said about their state. Voter Jim Logan pulls me aside.
“Only Ronald Reagan could have given a speech like that,” he says. “That last sentence? Yeah, he’s running.”
Didn’t Dave see at least one grown man laughing his ass off at such self-promoting crap? Perhaps even more to the point, hasn’t Dave read all the advance chatter from Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s sure to be best-selling campaign pot boiler Double Down about the “garish controversies” swirling about the big guy’s big butt?
According to Peter Hamby’s review of DD, when Team Romney began to consider, unenthusiastically, to be sure, the possibility of choosing Christie as Romney’s running mate, they came up with a serious can of worms: “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.”
There’s no doubt that Christie’s “Who’s Your Daddy?” shtick is box office in Jersey, but how’s it going to sell in South Carolina? What about that Muslim judge he appointed? What’s his stand on immigration, or, as they like to call it down south, furriners? How good are the odds that Chris Christie is just the latest in the long line of Great Moderate Republican Hopes who get their asses handed to them when they come up against the true believers who own the Republican Party? I’d say, pretty damned good.
