EDITORIALS

The Jersey Bounce

Chris Christie is heard from

IF THEY ever make a movie of Chris Christie’s political career, it’s a shame that the late, magnetic James Gandolfini is no longer around to play New Jersey’s feisty governor. The star of The Sopranos developed a cult following as that television serial became an American institution on Sunday nights. Chris Christie, too, is a big man-in more than one way. He’s never hesitated to irritate his party’s establishment or anybody else who got in his way when he thought the public interest was at stake.

Governor Christie more than fully cooperated with a Democratic president in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which devastated large swaths of New Jersey, Long Island and New York before setting off damaging storms far inland. He succeeded not just in restoring lives, property, and public services in his part of the country, but thoroughly annoying knee jerk Republicans who objected to his fraternizing with the head of the other party.

Partisan politics be damned, Chris Christie seemed to be saying. He may be interested only in what works, whether it involves recovering from an historic storm or protecting the national security in a post-September 11th world. Which explains why, when he was sharing a stage with other potential GOP presidential hopefuls in Aspen, he wasted no time on ideological fine points. Instead he openly defended those controversial data-mining programs-and others-that have drawn fire from libertarians of both parties.

A tough prosecutor who had to go after terrorist types right after 9-11, he has no time or patience for the Rand Pauls in his party, the sort of sensitive souls given to esoteric debates about the use of drones and the whole panoply of sophisticated new weapons designed to track down and ward off the next terrorist attack. By force if necessary.

Much like Barack Obama, who by now has adopted and even expanded just about every aspect of the war on terror he harshly criticized when George W. Bush was conducting it, Chris Christie is more interested in assuring Americans’ safety than in ideological rectitude.

Here’s how he put it as part of that panel of GOP stars: “We as a country need to decide: Do we have amnesia?” Do we remember September 11th and the heedlessness that preceded it, or do we really believe the danger is past and the country can afford to relapse into the apathy that invited it?

What about those, like Senator Paul, who stage filibusters protesting the use of drones and other new ways to track down and destroy imminent dangers to our security? “I want them to come to New Jersey,” says Governor Christie, “and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation, and they won’t. That’s a tough conversation to have.”

As for all those true believers in his party who are even now preparing to theorize the GOP into losing still another presidential election, they’re part of a long tradition that has pointed the way to political defeat at least since Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign was swamped in 1964.

Chris Christie isn’t having any of it, and he doesn’t mind anybody’s knowing it. His accent may sound strange in these latitudes, and his Joisey manners may come across as brusque for those of us south of Mason-Dixon’s, but what he says-and does-makes a lot more sense than the Rand Pauls do.

Editorial, Pages 16 on 07/31/2013

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