Charlie Cook is one of the most hard-nosed — and accurate — political prognosticators around. When my take on political events agrees with his, it’s reassuring. When it doesn’t, it is alarming or worse, depending on the issue at hand. In the case of Chris Christie’s chances of becoming president in 2016, even prior to the Bridgegate scandal, it is reassuring to learn Charlie Cook’s take was similar to mine:
Think for a moment who makes up the Republican Party, and most specifically the part of the GOP base that dominates the presidential nomination process. Think about the people they seriously considered for their party’s presidential nomination last time around. Think Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich. Now, quickly, think Christie. Now think Sesame Street: “One of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn’t belong.” It’s laughable that the party that has previously seriously considered some fairly inconceivable candidates as worthy of the GOP nomination would suddenly reverse course and head over to a center-right candidate such as Christie.
To be sure, parties sometimes reverse course, but not that easily. After the debacle of the 1964 election, when Lyndon Johnson decimated Barry Goldwater 61 percent to 38 percent, Republicans did make a move from hard right to center. Four years later, the GOP nominated Richard Nixon, who went on to win the presidency; but it took hitting rock bottom in 1964 to trigger that shift within the party. Eight years later, Nixon destroyed George McGovern by exactly the same percentages, causing Democrats to move toward the center four years later, nominating a victorious Jimmy Carter. Again, it was a wipeout that enabled each party to tell its base to shut up and sit down, that it was time to win a general election…
I don’t sense that “back to the drawing board” mentality in the Republican Party today, at least not strongly enough to make such a dramatic shift and nominate Christie or a Christie-like candidate. A center-right, as opposed to right-right, candidate would probably have a very good chance of winning, but that would require an attitudinal change that doesn’t seem to have happened yet, and doesn’t look likely, either.
So mark me down in the category of folks who feel that Chris Christie was not the front-runner but that this scandal makes his likelihood of winning the nomination even less likely than before.
My first real impression of Christie occurred when he came here to California in 2010 to campaign for Meg Whitman, the Republican nominee for governor. At a campaign stop, a man in the audience stood up and, in a very California way, demanded that Whitman take questions from the audience. Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had campaigned for office in the 2003 recall election using a tactic of never taking questions from the media or voters. The “heckler” at Whitman’s campaign stop accused her of being “Arnold in a dress.”
Rather than letting the putative next governor of the state of California deal with a California voter, Christie intervened, advancing to the edge of the platform and then delivering a finger-pointing lecture to the heckler with cameras rolling. Meanwhile, Whitman stood in the background wearing a fake “patient mom” smile.
Video of the incident (see a version heavily edited by Los Angeles Fox affiliate above) dominated local news up and down the state for several cycles. Whitman supporters — a dwindling minority of voters at that time — cheered, but supporters of her opponent, then state Attorney General Jerry Brown, found it off-putting that Whitman stood by and allowed a New Jersey bully boy answer for her.
Christie’s rude behavior did not cost Whitman the election, but it also proved to be no help. She ended up losing to Brown by 13 points that November, in what was otherwise a GOP-tea party wave election nationwide.
Christie’s inability to switch off his patented swagger when he’s outside the New Jersey area — his stone-cold tone-deafness about the way people in the rest of the country behave — would make it all but impossible for him to navigate Republican primaries in the South and Midwest, not to mention the Pacific Coast states, without repulsing great swathes of the more independent and moderate voters the GOP frontrunner must have to beat the conservative extremists in the klown kar with him — which was the playbook used successfully by John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney did in 2012.
In fact, the best model for predicting Christie’s chances in the 2016 GOP primaries, should he decide to run — or, more likely, if has not resigned or been impeached in the interim — would be former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s 2008 bid. Before he dropped out during which Giuliani spent $50 million for which he won one (1) delegate before he dropped out on Jan. 30, 2008.
