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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

On Chris Christie and Bullying the Right People

All signs point to Gov. Chris Christie cruising to reelection in New Jersey tonight. This is one of those times when personal bias is well nigh overwhelming: Christie—an authentic, half-Italian, New Jerseyan Bruce Springsteen uberfanatic, and a strong conservative by any reasonable standard—is about to rocket to the top tier of 2016 presidential contenders. Judging […]
GovChristie / Flickr.com
GovChristie / Flickr.com

All signs point to Gov. Chris Christie cruising to reelection in New Jersey tonight.

This is one of those times when personal bias is well nigh overwhelming: Christie—an authentic, half-Italian, New Jerseyan Bruce Springsteen uberfanatic, and a strong conservative by any reasonable standard—is about to rocket to the top tier of 2016 presidential contenders.

Judging by a spate of recent posts and on-the-ground reports, Business Insider’s Josh Barro is an unabashed fan of Christie as well. He even brushes aside the one serious reservation I have about the governor: his proclivity for in-your-face confrontations—in a word, “bullying”:

Christie’s confrontational personality can appeal to all sorts of electorates so long as he trains his anger in the right places.

When Christie yelled at that teacher yesterday about how education spending levels will “never be enough” for New Jersey’s teachers’ unions, he was doing so in a state that spent $19,291 per pupil on K-12 education last year — more than any state except New York and Vermont and 74% more than the national average. … So long as Christie keeps training his anger in the right place, Christie will be O.K. What national liberal reporters don’t get is that “towards teachers” can be the right place, politically and substantively, to train that anger.

This is true as far as it goes.

Which I fear is not actually very far.

Back in 2010, I wrote this at U.S. News:

In the short term, the example of New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie is instructive. He has maintained popularity while aggressively pushing an agenda of fiscal austerity. How does he do it? Simple: In teachers unions and state-government employees, Christie has found a juicy, isolatable adversary. This works on the state level, where things like pensions and teacher benefits are significant sources of budget shortfalls—unlike on the national level, where middle-class entitlements are the big driver.

The lesson is this: To the extent that “government” is a sectional entity—an interest group consisting of people who have not had to “sacrifice like the rest of us”—Republicans will find that cutting it is politically popular. To that extent that “government” is Grandma and Grandpa in Boca Raton, Republicans will need to tread carefully and—it’s possible to do both—honestly.

Zoom in on “juicy, isolatable adversary.”

At the presidential level, teachers aren’t going to cut it. Neither are employees of the federal government, whose salaries account for about 5 percent of total federal spending.

Is Chris Christie going to yell at senior citizens about Medicare?

Is he going to yell at beneficiaries of food stamps?

Is he going to yell at families on Medicaid or CHIP?

Is he going to yell at farmers about agribusiness subsidies?

If Christie is a wise and disciplined campaigner, I find it hard to believe he’d do any of those things. And given his recent disparagement of the GOP’s “libertarian strain” in the context of the debate over the national security state, I can’t see Christie getting up in the grill of a Pentagon contractor, either.

Teachers and public-sector employees who don’t want to pay as much for their healthcare as most of the rest of us do are the “right targets” when you’re arguing about state budgets. In fact, they are ridiculously easy targets. They are to Chris Christie what southern reactionaries are to Sacha Baron Cohen.

But I ask Josh: who are the analogously easy marks when you’re talking about the federal budget, and do you honestly think it will do Chris Christie any good to get in their faces?

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