Republicans are still licking their wounds today, but from the sound of it, some in the Romney campaign aren’t letting go of their vendetta with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. While this Washington Post story centered on Mitt Romney’s efforts to thank and console his supporters and made clear just how decent a guy he is, it also gave a platform for some of his staffers and leading fundraisers to vent their anger at Christie and his role in puffing up President Obama’s handling of Hurricane Sandy:
Although Romney himself stopped short of placing any blame on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who praised President Obama’s leadership during the storm, several Romney supporters privately pointed fingers at the outspoken governor.
“A lot of people feel like Christie hurt, that we definitely lost four or five points between the storm and Chris Christie giving Obama a chance to be bigger than life,” said one of Romney’s biggest fundraisers, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.
Another major Romney fundraiser said Christie’s embrace of Obama after Sandy walloped his state only deepened a rift that opened between the Romney and Christie camps over the summer Christie and his wife were unhappy with Romney’s vice presidential search process, believing they were “led a little bit far down the garden path” without being picked, the fundraiser, said.
Any losing campaign needs scapegoats, and it’s clear that some in the Romney campaign are anxious to divert the focus away from their own failures. The hurricane, and Christie’s embrace of the president, was a setback. Yet a dispassionate look at the returns and the turnout figures shows that even if the weather had stayed nice on the East Coast in the week before the election, Romney would have still lost. To say that Christie lost the election for the GOP is bunk. But even though the attacks on Christie are off base and ought to stop, the controversy still tells us something about the problem with the governor and why those assuming he will succeed where Romney failed are probably wrong.
It’s now apparent that many in Romney’s camp as well as some of us in the media had a mistaken view of the state of the race in the days just before the storm. The belief that Romney was ahead was based on a model of the electorate that assumed that Democratic turnout would not come close to that of 2008. That was wrong. The Obama campaign really did have a massive ground game advantage over Romney’s more amateurish efforts, and the result was another wave of Democratic enthusiasm that swamped the upsurge in Republican enthusiasm. The storm and the adoring press coverage it got certainly aided the president and might have helped turn a more narrow margin for the president into the clear victory he achieved. But even if there were no Sandy and no photo op and gushing praise from Christie, Obama would still be planning a second term today.
Conservatives spent the last two years underestimating President Obama’s political strengths and paid the price for it on Tuesday, and this bout of Christie-bashing is just another instance of them engaging in denial about what really happened. But even though the Romney camp’s shots at Christie are way out of line, the governor has no one to blame but himself for the way this controversy has grown.
Christie built his reputation on his blunt, tough-guy persona that conservatives love because of his refusal to play by liberal rules in public debate about the issues. But the flip side to this is an arrogant disdain for anyone else’s point of view. Christie always operates as if he is in business for himself, and if he allowed his hurt feelings about the vice presidential nomination to affect his behavior during the campaign, that doesn’t speak well for his judgment. His instinct is always to fire back at any criticism, and that has helped keep this minor controversy about the storm alive. The governor has many attributes that recommend him to the country, but the last few months show that being a team player is not one of them.
Though no one should blame Christie for Romney’s loss, this is just another piece of evidence that shows that he might not do as well under the scrutiny of a national campaign as his admirers think. Christie’s temperament is perfect for the maelstrom of New Jersey politics, but might not play as well on the national stage.
Christie does deserve blame for screwing Romney and also I might add screwing the state with his Obama smooch job. As someone who has had to endure Sandy and its aftermath, I've seen rank incompetence on the part of FEMA and other agencies who have behaved as bad if not worse than they did during Katrina, yet there was Christie giving Obama cover and enabling Obama to escape ANY scrutiny for the Feds incompetence in handling this crisis in NJ and especially on Staten Island.
The argument that Christie did not tip the election to Obama, therefor lay off him, is erroneous. That is like saying that in a war, a soldier who commits treason by giving the enemy a battle plan which happens to be obsolete, should not be punished. Christie committed the political equivalent of treason, or at least gross negligence. The fact that Obama would have won anyway is beside the point. Christie did, in fact, stab Romney in the back. Worse: he stabbed America in the back, by making it a little more likely that Obama would win. n nChristie could have and should have handled this in a million other ways that would have completely protected New Jersey and his own political position without helping Obama. Yet he chose, purposely, to go out of his way to help Obama, on the eve of the election. That is unforgivable in politics.
I agree, hopefully Christie is finished in national politics .
The Democrats will repay him by eating him alive come election time( I know thats a big meal) nThe Republicans( outside NJ) will ignore the spectacle. Also get over the Bruce nSpringsteen love affair. It is making you look silly.
Jonathan, the "better ground game" theory is a dodge. It operate from the premise that ground-game is an exogenous factor that could have been dialed up or dialed down, managed like a corporation managing an assembly line, planned like a general planning a war, etc. and that with a little better planning and money, we would have won. n nThis is false. There is a reason that the Republicans had a worse ground game and always will: We are no longer a "center right" country, contra Karl Rove and Peter Wehner. We are, in fact, a pretty damn liberal country. The "better ground game" Democrats enjoy is a direct outgrowth of the political popularity of their policies. Yes, I know, if you ask people if they like Obamacare they say no, but if you ask them if like specific pieces of it, they say yes. Voters now massively favor taxing the rich. It was not always this way. The country has changed (for the worse), but it is logically and politically inadequate to point to the "ground game" because the ground game is actually the effect of a much deeper cause.
Good observations.
Exactly right. n nThey had a better ground game because the electorate was amenable to their message. Poorly if expensively educated 'elites', and government dependents. That's quite a constituency. And the latter group will be even larger in 2016. And Obamacare will be entrenched. We are not what we were, and never will be again. n nThe Taliban and Turkey are writing our foreign policy for us.
On the money. Obama's Balkanized message appealed to every group in the American Political Balkans. n nWhat I find weird is all those reasonably white people voting against their interest. So charitable and enlightened are white folk. Specially them Jews. Never was a softer touch than a Hymie. n n
Edit: "affluent white people" is what was intended
We are still a center right country. What we are not is a Christian Democrat country. The Republicans insist on running nationally as Christian Democrats. If they would only leave the dope wars and the abortion wars behind they might do better.
Tired of Christie. n nHe no doubt cost Romney a few million votes. n nHe wanted to embrace Obama? Fine. n nHe didn't have to add that he didn't care if Romney came to visit NJ. n nHe diminished Romney, and he is too smart to have not done it intentionally. n nAnd for what? n nWhat good did Obama's visit do, besides slow down relief efforts? n nHe is dead to me. n
Chris Christie is the ultimate RINO. Every one of his policies, save fiscal responsibility, could be espoused just as easily as a Democrat. His response to not being picked as Romney's running mate was to silently diss Mitt in the Keynote speech at the Convention and then, worst of all, boost an incompetent narcissist for doing nothing as regards Sandy's devastation. He went out of his way to praise Obama and THAT was completely unnecessary and done intentionally to hurt Mitt. Christie is a very smart man and he knew what the consequences of his actions would be. As a staunch Republican, living in New Jersey, I will not vote for that man in the next gubernatorial election. I simply shall not vote. I am outraged by his actions and, for the first time, disagree with Jonathan's conclusions above.
Most of the posters agree: Christie is dead for the GOP-certainly in presidential politics. I think he may even suffer a backlash in next year's gubernatoral election.He did "diss" Romney in his keynote speech to the convention (not a very good one) and the worst was the inexcusable: literally hugging and praising Obama. He could have thanked him without looking like a love-struck teenage girl. I think Christie is also of Italian ancestry and so, it was an act of revenge worthy of any Mafia boss but two will play at that game and the NY electors will have the last word.
If the help from Obama and the Administration is as bad as I have read in several media, then Christie hugged O too soon. The looting, lack of water, food, trash build up and the people's unhappiness with what Obama thinks was assistance, then Christie was looking for the $$$ for his state…that's a politician.
will serve him right when the New Jersey DEMOCRATs thorw him out of office !
fwiw, I was at a CVS in western Mass yesterday. A mature, articulate woman was at the next cashier. She said she decided to vote for Obama after seeing him hug a woman in NJ after Sandy. She also noted she lives in lower Manhattan. I would have expected her to be an Obama voter, but I am still stunned that she cited that as her reason to actually vote for him. n nAs for Obama's ground game? I got two robo-calls in the Bronx. One from Obama's campaign asking me to vote, one asking me to volunteer in Pennsylvania. What struck me was I got ZERO robocalls from ANY elected NY Democrat asking me to vote for anyone. nWhatever ground game they had was solely focussed on swing states, probably with a dose of intimidation.. n
He did not fight fire with fire because he is a decent, honorable man. Bad enough that the media was in the tank these past 6 years for Obama…but to have the lies and falsehoods he endured made it impossible for him. Decent people don't learn how to street fight, which is dirty, but O comes out of Chicago, a thug city if there ever was one. America may suffer, but at least Mitt and Anne are out of it. What will the media do now? Their noses can't get any browner…right???
As a New Jersey conservative Republican, I take vehement issue with the efforts to blackball Chris Christie. nAs Bill Buckley used to observe, you pick the most conservative candidate who can get elected. Chris Christie is a conservative. For somebody to have vetoed two appropriations for Planned Parenthood, stood up for the March for Life in Trenton, vetoed homosexual marriage, and the NJ version of Lilly Ledbetter — against intense and as organized a Democrat machine as Obama assembled nationally — is not the work of a RINO. You want a conservative who would pass the orthodoxy test of Idaho–fine, except then you would have had Jon Corzine reelected as governor in 2009, presiding over redistricting in 2010, and then I guarantee you that, with the loss of one House seat by New Jersey, a Democrat Legislature with Corzine would have eliminated a Republican seat. Doesn't matter? Folks–if you want to run a country, you need a majority, and that means you do not throw away seats in the House. n nObama was going to come after Hurricane Sandy. The governor had to greet the incumbent President. Maybe not as effusively, but he had to do it. And it is also telling that last weekend, the headline in New Jersey's biggest newspaper read "Romney CONSIDERING Visit to New Jersey." When your citizens are battered, when they are hurting, you don't "consider" that in light of (a) your campaign schedule; (b) photo-ops; and (c) whether the place might be a swing state. You do it because that's what PRESIDENTS do. And if you don't get that, or calculate it in other ways, you are not going to be President. Do I think Obama was cynical? Of course. Do I think he did the right thing? Yes. The GOP, unfortunately, didn't figure that out. n nThe silliness of the anti-Christie campaign reached a low point in the Washington Times, where Decker wrote about "excommunicating" Christie. Sorry boys, but I thought the lesson some people might learn from Tuesday is that, when you lose the Presidency, you generally need MORE supporters (say, about 80,000 in Florida, for example), not FEWER. If you are on the low end of the stick, you might think twice about "excommunicating" people. n nFinally, on Christie's effusiveness: I'm for it! The Republican establishment has kept ethnics at arms' length (witness the shot in one comment about Christie being "Italian" so that it explains him) . As a Polish American Republican, I too feel marginalized by a party that likes to organize photo-ops with Polish costumed kids standing around a rigidly WASP-like candidate. We also kept Hispanics at arms' length (do you really believe if Marco Rubio was VP candidate rather than Paul Ryan we would not have found 100,000 more votes in Florida??? Or more votes in Colorado? New Mexico?) Too many Americans do not identify with the Stoic lack of empathy that generally characterizes most national GOP figures. Call it an unjustified stereotype or not, but people outside our party generally think that the only time one elicits some emotion among our icecube-like GOP establishment is when the Dow drops 500 points. Against that backdrop, I'll take a human (and, yes, dewy-eyed) Chris Christie anyday.