My question for Carter Eskew is, what is about Chris Christie that causes you to label him a “moderate”? Is it his anti-choice position on reproductive rights? Is it his opposition to gay marriage? His hostility to teachers? Was it his refusal to create a health insurance exchange for ObamaCare?
I don’t think you should label someone as a moderate if the only moderate thing they have done is accept federal emergency relief funding.
Is Chris Christie about to switch parties? Or is that the hope of some in the Democratic establishment?
I tweeted Carter Eskew the link to Boo’s piece and asked him to answer it. Also, this is from Eskew’s Twitter bio:
Opinion blogger @WashingtonPost and managing director at The Glover Park Group
And here is Glover Park’s Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glover_Park_Group
Who’s in their customer list who might have paid for this opinion?
Or does this mean that Hillary wants to face off against Christie?
Yes. An odd calculation conforming to the DC CW that a N/E GOP governor labeled a “moderate” will struggle to win the GOP POTUS nomination and will lose in the general election. Because — well, Romney lost. And, and, McCain was called a moderate and he lost. And, and GWB was from Texas and called himself a conservative and he won.
Overlooking the fact that in five of the last six Presidential elections, the old guy lost and in the other one, the two candidates only differed in age by a year.
I don’t know their current client list. Obviously someone did though. George Norcross and the Stack family?
he can’t switch parties if he plans to stay in politics. he has no democratic views whatsoever.
In an age when any GOPer who isn’t 150% opposed to whatever the President does is a RINO, Christie’s acceptance of Sandy aid and non-hostility to the president just after the hurricane makes him a “moderate.”
Also, when he appointed that Muslim to the bench and then gave a speech (accurately) calling conservatives who criticized him for it a bunch of bigots.
An associated response to these points is a great moment in anticipated 2016 schaudenfreude by Adrastos on the First Draft blog as he christened Christie as his “Malaka Of The Week”:
“Btw, the prospect of Gov Kramden mixing it up with rural yahoos in the Palmetto Bug state (South Carolina) is quite thrilling.”
Or when he turned down federal stimulus money for another tunnel to NY , because Obama. He’s a dick.
Amen to this. He only looks good (sadly) in comparison to the two prior Democratic Governors: Jim “I am a [corrupt] gay American” and the pathetic and despicable Jon Corzine. As a long term Garden-Stater, I can saw we deserve better!
He hugged Obama!
What, that isn’t enough for you?
That’s exactly what I was going to say, so thanks for saying it for me. In this environment, that’s all it takes to be thought moderate. Not a surprise given how insane the Republicans have become.
But not to worry; Christy’s not going anywhere. His own party will cannibalize him and, if they don’t, they’ll force him to run so far right, he’ll underine himself, and if that’s not enough, his own past will just prove too tempting for the press not to go after. They’re building him up now but will turn on him.
Agree that they’ll turn on him. Only a matter of time. He can’t ride that line easily.
The hugging thing is deeper than it looks. The basis of the current republican zeal, especially in the tea party, is virulent racism. That’s one of their most sacred beliefs – perhaps it is their core belief. After all, the modern conservative movement came out of a reaction to the civil rights movement, as well as the expansion of women into the workplace.
So Christie hugging Obama violated the unspoken (or, hell, often spoken) Do-Not-Be-Nice-To-The-Black-Guy rule. That’s how the “true” righties can recognize each other – it’s their not-so-secret handshake.
The hug got him elected, and the hug will bring him down.
I find this argument a lot more plausible than I did even a couple weeks ago. We may well be witnessing Christie’s high-water mark right now. He faces the exact same problem Romney did: how to contort himself enough to get through a GOP primary? The base is already suspicious of him for his Obama love, which means he will have to pander hard to the Crazy to gain any traction.
And while Christie may be a defter politician than RMoney, he will also have stronger opponents. Plus, the base has now had the experience twice in a row of nominating a (VERY) relative moderate Prez candidate, only to see them get crushed in the general. The pressure to nominate a true believer this time around is going to be extremely strong.
The MSM meanwhile is hyping Christie’s theoretical ability to “heal the party” and show that Republicans can win “anywhere”. But that party is about as ready to heal as a junkie who hasn’t hit rock bottom yet. They’re going to need a few more hard doses of reality before that happens, in the form of continued electoral drubbings. There is no other path forward at this point.
I’m in the middle of editing this weeks Piggie at Scrapple TV, and there is an astonishing amount of footage of Chris Christie yelling at people.
He’s like the bastard child of Ralph Kramden and Eric Cartman. His poor wife. She has to listen to him and, presumably, have sex with him.
If you look at the picture from this past weekend, his wife looks like she gets a kick out of Christie kicking the poors.
Enough for neo-liberal Democrats.
Indeed. These days “moderate Republican” = conservative who’s not actively trying to wreck the country.
Really informative article on how Christie got Dem support in NJ:
http://www.northjersey.com/columnists/Stile_Christies_strategy_of_wooing_key_Democrats_pays_off_big.
html
Basically he reached out to Dem mayors and others who were in positions of influence and funded their projects. Not the story making the rounds, and I don’t see how that plays at a national level or whether it can be squared with R orthadoxy. He did expand Medicaid, which is more than most R governors.
Mmmm….good, old-fashioned patronage.
Well Governor Quinn in Illinois didn’t create a state web site either.
yeah but we are running our own exchange just using the Feds website
That explains why I can actually see the plans and prices.
Withdrawing his appeal of the gay marriage ruling now qualifies him as a moderate.
GOP “moderate”: Anyone who has not advocated secession or flirted with birtherism.
“Moderate”-Anyone who doesn’t confront the PermaGov regarding its ongoing list of criminal enterprises..
AG
Because he’s a god damned Yankee.
Repeating “Christie’s a Moderate” will be the scam of 2016.
Because he’s a clever enough politician that he’s been able to cultivate the image of moderation without embracing the policies that would go with it.
He’s a Springsteen fan and hasn’t been photographed with Ted Nugent yet?
He’s called a moderate by the Washington Press Morons because they want him to be President.
Hey! He’s willing to allow others to have doughnuts. He’s all about sharing, unlike that boob Bloomberg who was all about prohibiting large Big Gulps.
Charles P Pierce explains:
31%
If Christie can so easily bamboozle stupid and poorly informed liberals (?), he should have no problem with the equally stupid and poorly informed in his party in 2016. Then it’s on to holding half the “liberals” in NJ and 5% or less of them in PA, VA, and OH.
These are the same type of dems that finally seem to have left New York (who knows, maybe that’s literally true). With nyc and MA both going back to real dems after time in the wilderness with con men from the GOP or GOP lite, perhaps NJ is just further behind in its evolution.
“That’s the percentage of self-identified “liberals” that voted for Chris Christie, essentially endorsing the idea that he should run for president of the United States, since that was the real purpose of the New Jersey gubernatorial election yesterday….”
I love Charlie, and care for you as well, Marie2. Charlie’s other post on this election had me reconsidering some of my response to you on another thread. Nonetheless, this quote above is terrifically unfair. They were voting for Governor yesterday, nothing else. I agree that it was a bad idea for NJ Dem leaders to fail to oppose Christie, and perhaps national leadership could have started to define Christie as the right-wing bully boy he is, but we don’t need to paint a false picture of the whole thing. New Jersey is not equivalent to the U.S.
Yeah, agree that Charlie went a bit too far with “essentially endorsing …” That would suggest that those “liberals” were better informed and more thoughtful than Charlie otherwise gives them credits for.
However, no liberal regardless of how ill-informed would ever vote for someone like Christie unless it were a choice limited to him or someone more regressive, sexist, etc.
I’m with you on the inclination to land pretty hard on NJ Dems, particularly Party leaders. There are plenty of very ill-informed rank-and-file liberals, though. My earlier discussion of Schwarzenegger’s mystifying electoral popularity in my Cali provides evidence that fanboy fever can strike in States coast to coast.
The post BooMan just put up provides further explanation. His documentation that the same voters who created Christie’s landslide said they would prefer Hillary to their Governor in 2016 has some meaning here, doesn’t it?
All three – Schwarzenegger, Christie, and Hillary Clinton – seem to appeal to those that vote for personalities and not policies that they agree with. iirc Arnold played well with Latinos, particularly young males.
Flubbing or giving the impression of flubbing the management of a crisis does have serious consequences. Without the energy crisis in CA, there would have been no recall of Gray Davis and thus, no Gov. Schwarzenegger. That wholly manufactured crisis directly hit more CA residents than Hurricane Sandy did NJ residents. And there was not only no help from DC, but the state was mocked.
California politics much to be desired, but what has never existed here is the deeply entrenched and corrupt political party machines. Democrats didn’t do deals with Arnold that he could use to make himself look good. His re-election may have had more to do with the lack of a DEM bench that could have run a strong candidate, that had been allowed to wither for decades, than general satisfaction with Arnold. Someone as good as Buono could have beat him. Looking forward to seeing a Gov. Kamala Harris (and getting rid of Sen DiFi).
“He can end the “divisiveness” in our politics…”
I have a sneaking suspicion we’re not at peak divisive quite yet.
Remember genius businessman, reality show teevee host, sometime bankrupt and New York through-and-through Donald T Rump? He was the Republican standard-bearer for the duration of one song during the 2012 game of musical chairs that was their presidential primary, believe it or not.
All kinds of otherwise canny folks on the teevee and in the various periodicals got all weak in the knees contemplating a real live presidential run by the short-fingered vulgarian. Until the music stopped again, and T Rump fell right on his money clip. I think the same thing will happen with Gov. Blowhard. He is a phenomenon in a very provincial part of the country (but which absolutely hates being reminded of that).
You don’t have to push Gov. Blowhard very hard or even very much to get an explosive reaction out of him. When he confronted that teacher a few days ago, you may recall that part of his outburst included the rhetorical question of whether the teacher sent her own children to public schools. Oddly enough, when Gov. Blowhard was asked why he sent his own kids to private schools when he was cutting public school funding, he ranted and raved, concluding that it was none of the questioner’s business where his kids went to school.
Blowhard is very adept at dishing it out, but very poor at taking it, a trait he shares with the classic bully types most of us are familiar with.