As we predicted, in the wake of Gov. Chris Christie’s blowout reelection win in New Jersey yesterday, the chattering class has anointed him the Republican Party’s frontrunner in the 2016 presidential campaign.
This ignores the fact that Christie’s acerbic bullying style does not travel well outside the Northeast. It also does not take into account the fact that, as John Heilman and Mark Halperin reported in “Double Down: Game Change 2012,” after serious, in-depth vetting by the Romney campaign — during which Christie and his staff refused to supply requested information and “were overbearing and hard to work with” — Romney rejected Christie as his vice presidential nominee because “the dossier on the Garden State governor’s background was littered with potential land mines.”
His early anointment also forgets that, as John McCain and Mitt Romney discovered during their primary campaigns, Christie will have to track to the far right in order to compete in the GOP’s Klown Kar primaries, taking positions on social issues, the economy and foreign affairs that are so extreme that no amount of post-convention reinvention can convince moderate voters — the group that ultimately decides close elections — that he is the reasonable, middle-of-the-road fellow the pundits imagine him to be.
But the clincher last night came in the exit polls in which New Jersey voters were asked how they might vote in the 2016 presidential campaign. The pollsters found that Hillary Clinton would win over Christie, 50 to 43 percent.
