And then there were 14 …

June 30, 2015 JanF Election 2016, News and Opinion 6

Governor Bully to the rescue!! The candidate who exactly no one is clamoring for … except those who are superstitious about having 13 candidates.

From the NY Times Breaking News email:

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, whose meteoric rise as a national Republican in his first term was matched only by his spectacular loss of stature at home in his second, enters the 2016 presidential race on Tuesday morning bearing little resemblance to the candidate he once expected to be.

The economic recovery he promised has turned into a cascade of ugly credit downgrades and anemic job growth. The state pension he vowed to fix has descended into a morass of missed payments and lawsuits. The administration he pledged would be a paragon of ethics has instead conspired to mire an entire town in traffic and the governor’s office in scandal.

Just three and a half years ago, Mr. Christie seemed so popular, compelling and formidable, such an antidote to all that ailed the Republican brand, that senior figures in the party pleaded with him to run for president as a substitute for their eventual nominee, Mitt Romney.

But today, a staggering 55 percent of Republican primary voters say that they cannot envision voting for Mr. Christie, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll, a remarkable deficit from which to embark on a national campaign. The only candidate less palatable: Donald J. Trump, the bombastic developer-turned-reality television star.

With two pillars of his presidential run — his record and his judgment — looking wobblier than ever, Mr. Christie must build a campaign around his most raw and prodigious asset: his personality.

HAHAHAHAHA!!

Raw Christie … PLEASE, NO!!

6 Comments

  1. Ed Kilgore: Christie for President: Ecce Homo!

    You get the impression Christie and his people think he’s going to win the presidency by the sheer force of his personality, an argument that would be a lot more convincing if his approval ratings in New Jersey—the very heart of his electability rationale—hadn’t taken a power-dive. Perhaps the sight and sound of this large man shouting at liberals—in a very large field of politicians shouting at liberals—day after day will be enough to rekindle the Christie Magic that was exaggerated in 2012 into some sort of presidential draft movement. But I’ll believe it when I see it. And indeed, for now, Christie’s Ecce Homo! (Behold! The Man! as Pilate said of Jesus Christ) message is more embarrassing than anything else.

    Behold the Man????

  2. Yahoo Politics: Why Chris Christie has to run for president to stay afloat in New Jersey

    When Christie and his advisors began imagining this day five years ago, they never foresaw that the governor would be running for president as the second-term governor of a state where — at the moment — he doesn’t have many success stories to tell. Bogged down by sagging approval numbers in home state polls which seem to plumb new lows every six to eight weeks, Christie is announcing his run when more than two in three New Jersey voters tell pollsters that they don’t think he has the temperament to lead the country; in one of those polls, even a majority of Republicans say Christie is the wrong person for the job and that he’s put his own political career ahead of his state’s well being. Things are so dicey at home that throughout the weekend Christie had to spend time asking New Jersey Republican state legislators – several of whom have publicly defected to Team Jeb – to stick with him as he finally launches his campaign.

    Christie afloat????

  3. TNR: Who stole Chris Christie’s “mean”?

    Chris Christie, the Republican Party’s latest presidential candidate, is selling himself as the big bold brand who’s not afraid to say what he really thinks. But how can the New Jersey governor run on this real-talk-from-a-loud-jerk platform when Donald Trump has already been performing a wonderful sendup of it for weeks? The parody is supposed to follow the real thing, not preempt it.

    “I get accused a lot of times of being too blunt and too direct and saying what’s on my mind just a little too loudly,” Christie says in a video previewing Tuesday’s campaign launch[…]

    Sure, Christie yells at reporters, occasionally calling them “stupid” or “idiot” or “ignoramus”—but Trump actually prints out reporters’ articles, writes insulting things on them, and then mails them back to newsrooms. It might be refreshing to hear Christie call his opponents clever insults like “numbnuts,” but I actually prefer Trump’s fresher, more nuanced, and less phallocentric phrase “haters and losers.” For the moment, voters agree: nationally, Trump is polling just ahead of Christie in Real Clear Politics polling averages. In New Hampshire, Trump is in third place to Christie’s sixth.

    This is the problem when style is your substance. An actual television star can swoop in and do your bit better than you can.

    Zing!!

  4. Charlie Pierce:

    … now that Chris Christie is out there tellin’ it like it is, taking his 30 percent approval rating in New Jersey out for a spin, it seems a waste of time to point out that Big Chicken’s candidacy is less popular than brucellosis in Iowa, and that, at the moment, he’s pushing in all his chips on New Hampshire …

    He went for informal in his announcement this morning; he wandered the stage and spent much of his time with his back to the pool camera. There was no patriotic pageant — no Pledge of Allegiance and no National Anthem. He did not work from a script. (If he had, he might have mentioned the support his embattled father received from your parents and mine via the G.I. Bill.) But the amazing thing about the Siddown And Shut Up Man was that he said he is running to allay the “anxiety” that he senses we all feel. Yeah, he’s the national glass of warm milk, he is.

  5. WaPo: It’s hard to overstate Chris Christie’s unpopularity problem:


    Christie’s standing in the polls will probably see a bump after his announcement — as basically everyone’s has — but since everyone already knew he was running, it’s hard to imagine it will be that big. He’s also running in the crowded moderate/centrist lane against Jeb Bush and, to a lesser extent, soon-to-be-candidate and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. And he’s starting from fairly far back in the pack.

    His biggest problem, though, is that a lot of people have made up their minds about him, and they don’t like what they see. That can change, as Hillary Clinton can attest. With 15 other candidates to choose from, though, the likelihood that enough people will do so in time for Christie to pull out a victory seems awfully low. His time, indeed, increasingly appears to have passed.

  6. Wonkette: Chris Christie Announces Presidential Campaign By Yelling At America For Its Own Good (A candidate for shouty Americans everywhere):

    Having burned all his bridges in New Jersey – those he didn’t shut down, anyway – Gov. Chris Christie today announced his escape plan: to run for the GOP nomination for president in 2016. There are so many reasons why Christie is likely undertaking this utterly doomed effort: ego, pride, galactically outsized ambition, the fact that everyone in his state hates him so much he might as well spend even less time there than he already does. […]

    Christie is only one of the Republican governors running for president who could be undone by criminal charges before the primary voters start hitting the polls. (Bobby Jindal remains too dumb to so much as successfully tear the tag off a mattress.)

    Welcome to 2016, Governor. We thank you in advance for the laughter.

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