{"id":186596,"date":"2013-12-10T21:32:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-11T02:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/12\/10\/why-chris-christie-will-not-be-the-republican-nominee\/"},"modified":"2013-12-10T21:32:00","modified_gmt":"2013-12-11T02:32:00","slug":"why-chris-christie-will-not-be-the-republican-nominee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/12\/10\/why-chris-christie-will-not-be-the-republican-nominee\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Chris Christie Will Not Be the Republican Nominee"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"border: 1px solid black; float: right; margin: 0px 10px; padding: 5px; text-align: center; width: 391px;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" border=\"no\" height=\"300\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"http:\/\/player.theplatform.com\/p\/2E2eJC\/EmbeddedOffSite?guid=n_maddow_1chris_131209\" width=\"381\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>In many ways, Christie&#8217;s putative Presidential campaign reminds me a lot of Rudolph Giuliani&#8217;s in 2008.<\/p>\n<p>Governor Christie&nbsp; he suffers much the same problem as Guiliani,<sup>*<\/sup> which is that the better that people know him, the more that they will dislike him.<\/p>\n<p>He is clearly too liberal for the nut-jobs who caucus in Iowa, and his actions in the rough and tumble of New Jersey Politics show that he is someone who people in New Hampshire will dislike when they see him in person.<\/p>\n<p>Case in point, it now appears that one of his appointees <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/12\/10\/nyregion\/clues-but-no-full-account-of-order-that-turned-a-new-jersey-town-into-a-parking-lot.html\">shut lanes to the George Washington Bridge in order to punish the Democratic Mayor for not endorsing him<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">It would seem a minor whodunit for a small suburb: On the first day of school in September, three access lanes leading from Fort Lee, N.J., streets to the George Washington Bridge were unexpectedly and mysteriously shut down. Cars backed up, the town turned into a parking lot, half-hour bridge commutes stretched into four hours, buses and children were late for school, and emergency workers could not respond quickly to the day\u2019s events, which included a missing toddler, a cardiac arrest and a car driving into a building.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">But the George Washington Bridge is the world\u2019s busiest, and New Jersey is led by one of the nation\u2019s most pugnacious and prominent politicians, Gov. Chris Christie \u2014 who also happens to appoint the people who control the bridge.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">So the unfolding story of the lane closings has become something of a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre, resulting in a hearing before the New Jersey Legislature on Monday, as well as a window into the proudly aggressive and often secretive dealings of Mr. Christie\u2019s team.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">The mayor of Fort Lee, a Democrat, complained in a letter in September that the lane closings were \u201cpunitive\u201d \u2014 Mr. Christie, a Republican, was leaning heavily on Democratic mayors to endorse him for re-election so he could present himself as a presidential candidate with bipartisan appeal, but the mayor was not going along.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">Mr. Christie laughed off the idea that he had been involved in a matter as small as closing bridge lanes, and his chief appointee at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees the bridge, insisted that the lane closings were simply part of a traffic study.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">But on Friday, the man who ordered the closings \u2014 a high school friend of the governor\u2019s who was a small-town mayor and the founder of an anonymous political blog before Mr. Christie\u2019s appointee created a job for him at the Port Authority \u2014 resigned, saying the issue had become \u201ca distraction.\u201d <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The people of New Jersey might understand (though the indications are that they aren&#8217;t, because their commutes were f%$#ed with in a major way), the people of most of the rest of the country (pretty much everyone but New York and New Jersey) won&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p><sup>*<\/sup><span style=\"font-size: xx-small;\">Also, Christie has not been zinged the way that Joe Biden zinged Rudy that, &#8220;There&#8217;s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, and a verb and 9\/11,&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In many ways, Christie&#8217;s putative Presidential campaign reminds me a lot of Rudolph Giuliani&#8217;s in 2008. Governor Christie&nbsp; he suffers much the same problem as Guiliani,* which is that the better that people know him, the more that they will dislike him. He is clearly too liberal for the nut-jobs who caucus in Iowa, and &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,978,982,1035],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-politics","category-stupid","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186596"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186596\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}