Oh New Jersey Republican Primary. Will I ever tire of you? No,
likely not.
Everyone gets one of
these stories, I guess. A puff piece where they talk about
those formative earlier experiences that shape you as a person,
as a candidate, as a policy maker. The title here is, "Christie:
A need to lead, honed by family and success," which, by way of
literary merits, lacks that thing writers refer to as rising
action. I put the article through my fact-finding machine with an
eye toward "actual achievements helpful to New Jerseyans," or
"key elements of his core philosophy."
Which is why I never really get these pieces. John Edwards got
one
heck of one from Matt Bai back in 2007, including such lines
as:
Everything else in the campaign, Edwards seems to think, all
these carefully orchestrated photo ops and drop-bys and van
rides with the media, is the kind of empty political theater
from which he declared himself liberated after his last
presidential run. He gives the impression that he simply
endures it.
Yeah. Okay. We all saw the video of the
combing.
Anyway, back to Christie. What is the message of the Christie
campaign? A fighter against corruption, a man with the management
experience and the political capital necessary to defeat Jon
Corzine. Okay. So let's see where we encounter Chris Christie,
fighter of corruption. Oh. Here:
He has seemed at times to bristle at questions about some of
his decisions as prosecutor -- like the multimillion-dollar
monitoring contracts he gave to former attorney general John
Ashcroft and to the New York prosecutor whose office decided
not to charge Christie's brother, Todd, in a stock fraud
investigation -- but insists he recognizes it's part of the
election gantlet.
That's it. That's all the profile concludes about his time as
attorney. That he has had to suffer through reasonable questions
(that remain pretty unclear) about his record as a U.S. Attorney.
The rest of the profile focuses on Christie's political ambition:
"From the day we all met him, we knew he was a leader," said
Anthony Della Pelle, a classmate and friend of Christie's since
both were boys.
... By his senior year in high school, Christie had been
elected class president six times. Twice that year he was
picked to attend student leadership programs in Washington,
meeting legislators and cabinet members and visiting the White
House.
... It was in his senior year of college that Christie, then
the president of student government, began dating Mary Pat
Foster.
... Bush's decision to nominate Christie as U.S. attorney
stirred unprecedented opposition, particularly from New Jersey
attorneys who considered his appointment the worst kind of
political patronage.
...[T]he principal at Livingston High School while Christie was
there, said he always assumed Christie wanted to run for
governor. ... "Just knowing Chris and his ambition and his love
of politics, I just automatically thought of the top slot --
because he usually aspired to the top slot," Berlin said last
week from his home in New Mexico.
In other words, Christie appears to have been pushing to be in
power for much of his life. His first big break was a nod from
the president for a position for which he wasn't entirely
prepared -- he had never been a prosecutor before. And Christie's
prosecutorial and ethics record must be especially bad,
considering how little of that record gets mentioned.
The puff piece for Lonegan came out
earlier this month, offering insights into how Lonegan's
struggle with his blindness and meager beginnings led to a
passionate drive toward self-improvement, and ultimately, a firm
political philosophy ("The Carter-era economy of stagflation
didn't help, and Lonegan swears he could sense the difference
when Ronald Reagan took office"). While certainly not hard on
Lonegan either, far more time is dedicated to clueing in a reader
to what a Lonegan governership would look like.
Yet the Christie puff piece spends 300 words on high school
baseball as some sort of allegorical closer. We learn that
Christie and his high school baseball team are planning on having
their next reunion at the governor's mansion. A man with a plan,
indeed.
