Christie in the Crosshairs

by G. Murphy Donovan (February 2014)

The 2016 US Presidential Campaign is underway. Not underway officially of course, but interest groups and pundits are already taking sides and stirring the political pot. Presumptive front runners seem to be former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Democrats and New Jersey governor Chris Christie for the Republicans. There are no third party spoilers on the horizon for the moment.

lionizing of Hillary as a seasoned statesman and the demonization of Christy as a loud, rude, thug from New Jersey. Mitt Romney was portrayed as the insensitive, rich, business mogul in the 2012 campaign with effect. Seems Romney was way too genteel to win a Chicago street fight.

Hillary has few significant policy or program accomplishments to her credit. Her time at the Senate and the State Department seem to have been a kind of resume burnishing. “What does it matter?” might well be her campaign theme song. 

prospects on the Left – or the iconic status she enjoys with major Media outlets.

cultural milestone; a woman in the Oval Office. Hillary is the woman of the Left at the right moment. Her time is now – or never.

The smartest Clinton move to date was to put Foggy Bottom in the rearview mirror. Hillary has three years now to burnish her image, cultivate the like-minded, and let any previous missteps fade from public memory. Any mess that Obama leaves will be difficult to pin on Hillary.

In contrast, Christie’s every public move and spoken word as governor will be sifted for ammunition for the next three years. The pot shots have already begun.

arm twisting in any New Jersey borough populated by Democrats.

Fallujah with a compass, a map, and GPS. American national security fiascos are background noise, sponsored traffic jams are real traumas in places like New Jersey and New York.

performances before the Select Committees on Intelligence provide any evidence, male politicians have to change their knickers after any encounter with Hillary.

And Republicans seem to have learned nothing from the last presidential election. They seem to be using the same playbook that led to the Romney defeat. Take the Robert Gates book tour as an example. Robert Gates, moderate Republican and former Secretary of Defense, is doing for Mrs. Clinton what Chris Christie did for Mister Obama just before the 2012 voting.

Now we see Bob Gates doing a similar favor for Hillary. Not just in the book, Duty, where Hillary is celebrated as a strong and effective on national security, but high praise is repeated for television audiences on the various chat shows whenever the Hillary presidential prospect is predictably discussed. Gates, like Christie, is too savvy not to know that such televised moments will be replayed like endorsements in the voting season. If we assume that Christie and Gates act from conviction, we might also assume that they believe that Democrats are putting up better candidates.

Democrats and other liberals should be celebrating conservative affection for the Second Amendment. Republican leaders, like no other political party, seem to have a generational propensity for self-inflicted wounds, shooting themselves in the foot.

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G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of national security.

 

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