Why It's Ludicrous—Despite What the Pundits Say—to Call Christie a Moderate

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http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/why-its-ludicrous-despite-what-pundits-say-call-christie-moderate



In the wake of his landslide reelection to the governorship of New Jersey, Chris Christie has got to be feeling good — or as he’d be more likely to put it, he’s got to be feeling damngood. Not only did “The Governor,” as his campaign portentously called him, manage to secure a second term, but he did it by an almost comically large margin. With men, women, whites, blacks, latinos, asians — across the board, Christie matched or surpassed the levels of support a generic Republican would otherwise have received. One wonders, in fact, if anyone in the state of New Jersey knows what Christie’s Democratic challenger, Barbara Buono, even looks like. Without the aid of Google, I sure wouldn’t.

Compare Christie’s landslide to another Republican running to be governor of his state, Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, and the list of reasons for “The Governor” to smile grows longer. Unlike Cuccinelli, Christie managed to transcend his party’s national image and overcome the stigma of being a Republican in a deep-blue state like New Jersey. And unlike Cuccinelli, no one associates Chris Christie with the now seriously unpopular Tea Party, or sees the New Jersey governor as a chief architect of the Republican Party’s so-called War on Women. In a nutshell: Chris Christie, unlike Cuccinelli, doesn’t have to waste his time disassociating himself from Ted Cruz.

Now, in the coming days, weeks, and indeed years, a lot of pundits are going to look at Christie’s feat and conclude that he’s some kind of moderate. How else could he win in New Jersey? Nurturing that impression is certainly part of the reason why Christie’s team decided to run up the score, waging a vigorous reelection campaign despite the fact that Christie’s triumph was never in doubt. Yet while it’s true that Christie has at times shown an admirable willingness to buck the most extreme elements of his party’s base, it’d be going too far — much too far — to call the man a moderate.

What Christie is extremely good at is implementing what my colleague Blake Zeff previously described as the GOP’s “blue-state playbook.” It’s pretty simple, really. To stay alive in these politically hazardous environs, blue-state Republicans make a show of breaking with the rest of their party — on issues that may be prominent in terms of media attention, but are actually of secondary or tertiary importance from a policy perspective. So, for example, you get the once omnipresent images of Christie walking side-by-side with President Obama in the wake of Hurricane Sandy’s devastation; or you get Christie’s decision to drop a clearly doomed appeal to a judge’s ruling ushering in gay marriage in his state.