"Christie Is Toast." New Yorker Afterthought

Whatever else you do this week, carve out half an hour to read my colleague Ryan Lizza’s piece about Chris Christie and New Jersey politics. It’s Robert Penn Warren meets Carl Hiaasen on the west bank of the Hudson. By the time you get to the end of it, I bet you’ll find yourself asking the same question I did: How could we ever have taken this bully seriously as a Presidential candidate?

In an era when elected officials are about as popular as burglars and bank C.E.O.s, the answer is that Christie cleverly created a public persona as a plain-talking, non-ideological Honest Joe—an anti-politician, almost—and the media, or much of it, went along with the spin. Even President Obama, by embracing Christie on the Jersey Shore shortly after Hurricane Sandy struck, contributed to Christie’s image as a decent man stuck in a bad profession and a nutty party. (Obama had his own motivations, of course; in the last stages of a Presidential race, he was eager to be seen reaching across partisan lines and dealing with the storm.)

Thanks to the Bridgegate scandal, and the torrent of e-mails, internal documents, and unvarnished interviews it unleashed, we have been able to see the real Christie, and it isn’t an edifying sight. It’s so ugly, in fact, that Christie will almost certainly not survive its public display. “I really don’t know about the Presidency,” Joy Behar, the former co-host of “The View,” said to Christie at a recent political roast in Newark, which Ryan recounts in his piece. “Let me put it to you this way, in a way that you’d appreciate: You’re toast.” Behar may have been joking: she is a comedienne. But, with a federal grand jury busy hauling in Christie’s aides to explain what they know about the Bridgegate scandal, there can’t be many people who disagree with her analysis.

On the basis of what we’ve seen over the past few weeks, what we have here is not some tribune of the common man with a sharp political brain. It’s a dark, Nixonian character who plots and rages, who ruthlessly exploits his office for political ends, who intimidates opponents and colleagues alike, who publicly trashes his former aides when he deems it necessary, and who even double-crosses his oldest allies.

When the bridge scandal broke, Christie’s response was to stonewall. That strategy outlived its usefulness once a state assembly committee got hold of a batch of e-mails between the Governor’s staff and officials at the Port Authority, one of which said, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” Switching to Plan B, Christie turned against some of his closest aides and allies, including the author of the infamous e-mail, his former deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, and David Wildstein, the former Port Authority official and Christie’s childhood friend, who received Kelly’s e-mail and ordered the lane closures.

Firing Kelly and fingering Wildstein, who had already resigned, were predictable moves, but Christie didn’t stop there. First, the Governor trashed Wildstein’s character, suggesting, among other things, that he was a nobody in high school. His office circulated a statement describing Wildstein as an unscrupulous person who was even accused of deceptive behavior by his social-studies teacher. A couple of weeks ago, it was Kelly’s turn to receive the Christie treatment. A supposedly independent report—commissioned by the Governor at the taxpayers’ expense—claimed that she and Wildstein acted alone, revealed embarrassing details about her personal life, and even raised questions about her mental state.

These were low, low moves, and it’s not even clear they worked to Christie’s advantage. The report that slimed Kelly and cleared Christie was so obviously a whitewash that it was subjected to widespread ridicule. An attorney acting for Kelly, Michael Critchley, aptly described it as venomous, gratuitous, and sexist, noting, “Ms. Kelly’s evidence could be critical to verifying either of the two competing versions of events. A pre-emptive strike to isolate Ms. Kelly and impugn her credibility is not surprising.”

There have been reports that Kelly is seeking immunity from prosecution in order to coöperate with Paul Fishman, the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, whose staff is looking into the scandal. It looks like Wildstein is already singing to the Feds. An article on the Web site Main Justice says he spent much of last week “camped” at Fishman’s office, talking to investigators. Wildstein has reportedly claimed that he told Christie about the lane closures way back in September, when traffic on the George Washington Bridge was still snarled. The Governor’s aides have intimated that he doesn’t recall any such conversation.

On Friday, one of Christie’s longtime aides, Michael Drewniak, gave testimony to the grand jury. (He is not a target, his attorney told ABC News.) According to some reports, the criminal investigation could take up to eighteen months. With all this hanging over the Governor, it seems almost inconceivable that he would plunge into a Presidential campaign. If he did, he would be inviting attacks not just from Democrats but from some Republicans as well, and particularly from Thomas Kean, Sr., the former Republican Governor of the state, who for many years served as Christie’s mentor and close adviser.

Last year, for reasons that remain murky, Christie turned against Kean’s son, Thomas Kean, Jr., who was running for reëlection as the minority leader in the New Jersey state senate. Despite the Governor’s opposition, Kean, Jr., won the vote, but he and his father did not forgive and forget. In January, after Christie, in a two-hour press conference, denied knowing anything about the lane closures, the senior Kean went on MSNBC and said that, while he believed Christie, “I think there are still unanswered questions” about why his appointees did what they did. In an interview with Ryan, Kean went further, asking whether Christie had “created an atmosphere in which some of those people thought they were doing his will because they were getting back at people.” He added, “If you cross Christie, he’ll come back at you, even years later. So his people might have picked up that kind of thing.”

This, remember, is Christie’s former friend and sponsor—a man who has known him since he was a teen-ager, who gave him his start in politics, and who wrote to President George W. Bush to support his 2002 appointment as the United States Attorney for New Jersey, the post he used as a springboard to the governorship. If Christie can’t get Kean and others who know him well to vouch for him, how is he going to get the support of his fellow Republicans, let alone independents and Democrats? He isn’t. And that, I would guess, is what Behar was trying to explain to him.