Chris Christie and a bridge
Chris Christie is someone I can never quite pull the lever on for “Never Going to Be President”. Oh, I can list the reasons he can’t. And we can see the way his political virtue will prove to be a double edged sword, and what his downfall will be. It’s always been a question of when that will happen, and if there would be enough of it to fall out before an election.
“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”
And currently we see this classic image motif in the media. The photograph of the politician. Under Fire. Close up at his press conference. Lips tightly parsed. In the middle of some serious shifting of speech.  This image is next to either a bullet point of various messages, a time line of events, or a pull quote. And the pull quote that jumps out at me here is…
“Christie: ‘I Am Not A Bully”…
Memo to all politicians under fire: do not use this sentence construction. You are evoking Richard Nixon. You do not want to evoke Richard Nixon. (Unless maybe you do?)
Leaf through the letters section of the major national papers.  Two classic tropes jump out… One:
The medium more interesting than the message.
Once again, a prominent political figure and his staff are undone by malfeasance revealed by email. It is unbelievable to me that in today’s sophisticated social media world, people still believe that they can safely communicate — especially when plotting mayhem — over the Internet. Perhaps the real scandal here is in the shared stupidity of the “Bridgegate†gang.
No, sorry. Too clever by half. The real scandal is the scandal. If they were able to hide it better that would be a kind of “hm”.
And then there’s the “Equivalence” or “Realpolitik at work”:
Isn’t this the way of politics: reward friends and punish enemies? It’s old hat, whether it be a New Jersey governor or the president of the United States, who has been known to hand out plum ambassadorships and other goodies to top fund-raisers, while perhaps using the Internal Revenue Service as his bludgeon on political foes, as some Republican critics have charged. That’s how the world works. Are you shocked? Is anyone?
He hedges a bit here with the “IRS-gate”, perhaps not knowing if he should admit there was no there there. The ambassadorships line is a little amusing.
Of course, the other two reasons Chris Christie might not be President — Henry Kissinger tried to push him to run in 2012, and since when is Henry Kissinger a King maker? … and … Republicans blame him for Obama winning because he was overly complimentary to him during Hurricane Sandy.
One text message sent to Wildstein on the day of the lane closures referenced mass school bus delays. “Is it wrong that I’m smiling?” the message read.
“No,” Wildstein wrote.
“I feel badly about the kids. I guess,” the person, who is unidentified, texted back.
Wildstein replied, “They are the children of Buono voters.”
Funny thing: There weren’t all that many Buono voters. Which is one of the ways this was an especially amazingly petty act. (Not that a close race would make it psychologically more sensical.) Then again… what the hell was Nixon doing with George McGovern with Watergate?