Chris Christie: More Like Nixon than Giuliani
Why the bridge scandal is so damaging
BY ALEC MACGILLIS, TNR
The assessments of Chris Christie’s 2016 presidential prospects have too often overstated ideology and understated personality. There’s been much said and written about whether the New Jersey governor is too much of a “Northeastern moderate” to be acceptable to Republican primary voters in the Tea Party era. But this, it seemed to me, missed the point about Christie. Yes, he said nice things about President Obama after Hurricane Sandy, accepted the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion and even dared to defend a Muslim he nominated to a judgeship against accusations that he would implement Shariah law. But on plenty other issues, he was further right than many realized. He is no Rudy Giuliani-style apostate on immigration and gun control, having waffled on the former and blocked several gun restrictions passed by the Democratic legislature. He has opposed higher taxes on the wealthy to close the state’s yawning budget gaps. He refused to set up an exchange under the ACA. He cut funding for Planned Parenthood.
More importantly, whatever deviations Christie has made from the party line would, it has long seemed to me, be overcome by his knack for tapping into the conservative id on a visceral level, in ways that Giuliani never could—indeed, in ways that many of the seemingly more conservative 2016 contenders are unable to do. The scorn with which Christie lashes into, say, teachers’ union members lights up an emotional response from many rank-and-file Republicans that no checklist of issue-by-issue orthodoxy ever could.
(More here.)
BY ALEC MACGILLIS, TNR
The assessments of Chris Christie’s 2016 presidential prospects have too often overstated ideology and understated personality. There’s been much said and written about whether the New Jersey governor is too much of a “Northeastern moderate” to be acceptable to Republican primary voters in the Tea Party era. But this, it seemed to me, missed the point about Christie. Yes, he said nice things about President Obama after Hurricane Sandy, accepted the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion and even dared to defend a Muslim he nominated to a judgeship against accusations that he would implement Shariah law. But on plenty other issues, he was further right than many realized. He is no Rudy Giuliani-style apostate on immigration and gun control, having waffled on the former and blocked several gun restrictions passed by the Democratic legislature. He has opposed higher taxes on the wealthy to close the state’s yawning budget gaps. He refused to set up an exchange under the ACA. He cut funding for Planned Parenthood.
More importantly, whatever deviations Christie has made from the party line would, it has long seemed to me, be overcome by his knack for tapping into the conservative id on a visceral level, in ways that Giuliani never could—indeed, in ways that many of the seemingly more conservative 2016 contenders are unable to do. The scorn with which Christie lashes into, say, teachers’ union members lights up an emotional response from many rank-and-file Republicans that no checklist of issue-by-issue orthodoxy ever could.
(More here.)
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