If you’re a worker, a gay or lesbian couple, a teacher or a woman, Christie isn’t your boyfriend
Charisma is a powerful thing, especially in politics.
It can give you the appearance that you’re always trying to do the right thing, even when you’re just trying to save your ass or do your donors’ bidding.
Governors Scott Walker and Rick Perry have some degree of charisma. They’ve charmed the highest echelons of the conservative movement and voters and their state. But when Perry was given the chance to lay the charm on a GOP base dying to nominate anyone but Mitt Romney, he ended up somewhere in the pack behind Michele Bachmann. Walker’s dour demeanor hasn’t yet been tested on a national scale, but his main achievement thus far — because it certainly isn’t creating jobs — is polarizing the right and the left.
Chris Christie is something the GOP sorely lacks — a good politician with genuine charisma.
He knows how to consistently act as if he is always acting in the interest of his constituents, especially when he is not. He said he was calling special election that will waste $12 million in taxpayers’ money because he wanted the voters’ will to be heard. He didn’t say that he could have waited three weeks and saved the money if he didn’t think having Cory Booker on the ballot would cost him a lot of votes.
$12 million is about double the amount the Christie cut from Planned Parenthood because he said the state couldn’t afford it. This is the power of charisma, it can be used to cost women basic health care and justify cowardliness. This is what Chris Christie has.
Christie may not be trying to literally ban oral and anal sex as Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia would like to do. But on every issue that matters directly in voters lives, Christie is as extreme as Cuccinelli, Walker or Perry.
He cut $1 billion from education and gave $2.3 billion in tax breaks to corporations. He bashes unions, virtually the only group in America fighting America’s wage crisis, continually.
But there’s no better example of Christie’s self-righteous hypocrisy than his stand on same-sex marriage. He vetoed a bill that would legalize marriage equality in New Jersey and says he would do it again, saying that the voters should decide–as if that’s how civil rights should work. And he blasted the Supreme Court for overturning the Defense of Marriage Act because the national legislature had put it into effect.
There’s no consistency because he’s not just posturing for the 2016 GOP primary, he’s using the government to enforce his religious beliefs.
Chris Christie is dangerous because he could actually win the presidency.
He could be the man who appoints Justices to overturn Roe v. Wade and make this Court, which is already the most corporation-friendly bench in history, even more plutocratic. He would return us to the trickle-down economics that have created untenable inequality and he would likely repeal Obamacare and de-fund Planned Parenthood on a national level, depriving millions right as we were finally on the path to universal health care.
Christie takes Walker and Perry’s extremism and packages it for blue-state moderates. And if we don’t start calling this out, we’re just helping him.
Update: New Jersey has temporarily accepted Medicaid expansion; Christie vetoed a bill that would make it permanent.
