In the Fox News debate last week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry apparently drove his junker presidential candidate off a cliff after he described tea baggers who don’t want to educate undocumented children who have grown up in the United States as “heartless.”
But if the tea partyists found Perry’s “compassionate conservative” position on undocumented children to be a deal killer, wait’ll they get a load of these five left-leaning positions held by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the latest GOP presidential heartthrob:
- Illegal Immigration: Christie once stated that being in the country without documents or after visas expired is not a crime but rather an “administrative matter.” And it is true. The punishment for overstaying a visa is not jail time, it is deportation. Christie has also supported a “clear path to citizenship,” which tea partyists view as codespeak for “amnesty.” (Shh. Don’t tell them that St. Ronnie of Reagan gave amnesty to about 3 million mostly Mexican undocumented residents in 1986.)
- Gun Control: During an interview with Sean Hannity, Christie upset the GOP propagandist by asserting that he was in favor of “common-sense gun-control laws.” Hannity called New Jersey’s control laws a “bad idea.”
- Climate Change: “Climate change is real,” Christie has said, and “human activity plays a role in it.” This is a deal killer in today’s GOP-T.
- Race to the Top: Under Gov. Christie, New Jersey applied for education funds under the Obama program, which Gov. Perry recently declared to be “not conservative.”
- Muslims: The Bush administration’s success in inflaming fear about Islam lives on in the Republican Party. But in an insult much worse than Perry’s calling his party’s base “heartless,” Chris Christie referred to the anti-Muslim hysterics in his party as “just crazy, and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies.”
Even with all that, Christie has an even bigger political liability than these positions, some of which might even help him were he to survive the Republican primary and become the GOP nominee: His personality.
He is a walking-talking personification of the stereotypical pugnacious, in-your-face stereotype Northerner — a personality type that does not travel well. In fact, one of the very few things liberals and conservatives in the South can agree on is their distaste for Yankees who come off like he does as a swaggering bully.
It’s a personality type that also does not play well in California, despite the fact that every third person here is originally from the Tri-State Area, or so it seems. In fact, Christie’s endorsement California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman may have contributed to hobbling her campaign last year, especially after Christie left the stage at an event and went into the audience to confront a heckler nose to nose.
The nicest thing I can say about Christie is that he is a rude, ignorant fat slob and he should be ashamed of appearing on TV in a country where so many people are going to bed hungry, I am sure they would no need a fat slob lecturing them.