Chris Christie is someone I can never quite pull the lever on for “Never Going to Be President”.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, I can list the reasons he can’t.\u00c2\u00a0 And we can see the way his political virtue will prove to be a double edged sword, and what his downfall will be.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”<\/p>\n
And currently we see this classic image motif in the media.\u00c2\u00a0 The photograph of the politician.\u00c2\u00a0 Under Fire.\u00c2\u00a0 Close up at his press conference.\u00c2\u00a0 Lips tightly parsed.\u00c2\u00a0 In the middle of some serious shifting of speech.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 This image is next to either a bullet point of various messages, a time line of events, or a pull quote.\u00c2\u00a0 And the pull quote that jumps out at me here is…<\/p>\n
“Christie: ‘I Am Not A Bully”…<\/p>\n
Memo to all politicians under fire: do not use this sentence construction.\u00c2\u00a0 You are evoking Richard Nixon.\u00c2\u00a0 You do not want to evoke Richard Nixon.\u00c2\u00a0 (Unless maybe you do?)<\/a><\/p>\n Leaf through the letters section of the major national papers.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Two classic tropes jump out<\/a>… One:<\/p>\n The medium more interesting than the message. No, sorry.\u00c2\u00a0 Too clever by half.\u00c2\u00a0 The real scandal is the scandal.\u00c2\u00a0 If they were able to hide it better that would be a kind of “hm”.<\/p>\n And then there’s the “Equivalence” or “Realpolitik at work”:<\/p>\n Isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t this the way of politics: reward friends and punish enemies? It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how the world works. Are you shocked? Is anyone?<\/em><\/p>\n He hedges a bit here with the “IRS-gate”, perhaps not knowing if he should admit there was no there there.\u00c2\u00a0 The ambassadorships line is a little amusing.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/em> Funny thing:\u00c2\u00a0 There weren’t all that many Buono voters.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is one of the ways this was an especially amazingly petty act.\u00c2\u00a0 (Not that a close race would make it psychologically more sensical.)\u00c2\u00a0 Then again… what the hell was Nixon doing with George McGovern with Watergate?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Chris Christie is someone I can never quite pull the lever on for “Never Going to Be President”.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, I can list the reasons he can’t.\u00c2\u00a0 And we can see the way his political virtue will prove to be a double edged sword, and what his downfall will be.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s always been a question of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13606"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13610,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13606\/revisions\/13610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nOnce again, a prominent political figure and his staff are undone by malfeasance revealed by email. It is unbelievable to me that in today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sophisticated social media world, people still believe that they can safely communicate \u00e2\u20ac\u201d especially when plotting mayhem \u00e2\u20ac\u201d over the Internet. Perhaps the real scandal here is in the shared stupidity of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bridgegate\u00e2\u20ac\u009d gang<\/em>.<\/p>\n
\n“No,” Wildstein wrote.<\/em>
\n“I feel badly about the kids. I guess,” the person, who is unidentified, texted back.<\/em>
\nWildstein replied, “They are the children of Buono voters<\/a>.”<\/em><\/p>\n