Bridgegate could end Christie’s chances for a shot at the White House, but not in the way you’d think.
It’s been a week since Chris Christie’s Bridgegate scandal, surrounding the closure of lanes on the George Washington Bridge as an act of political revenge, broke as a major national news story. I’d still argue that this ongoing scandal doesn’t automatically doom Chris Christie’s chances at becoming the Republican nominee for president in 2016, but the nature of the 2016 race could make recovery from this scandal harder for Christie to overcome.
Slate’s Matt Yglesias made an excellent point about how Christie could be in trouble over the scandal, but it’s not because of bad press coverage or some sweeping investigation. Instead the reason has to do with the nature of the crowded 2016 Republican field. As Yglesias points out, the race for the Republican nomination is going on right now, and party elites are currently trying to find someone who can both be an effective standard bearing for their party in 2016 and also advance the GOP’s agenda on broad front. Bridgegate may not damage Christie’s position on the later point but it certainly doesn’t help on the former:
And there’s just no way this bridge thing is making any of those people [party elites] more likely to support Christie than they were six months ago. Republican elites are mostly looking to find a candidate who is both conservative, effective, and electable and this makes him look less electable and less effective without making him look more conservative. It’s bad news.
I think that’s precisely right. Bridgegate might not doom Christie via public outrage or federal indictment, but it certainly doesn’t help his case with party elities. And as Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein recently pointed out there is a large number of potential nominees that GOP elites could go to instead of Christie who don’t have the taint of scandal surrounding them, “Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Mike Pence and several others may all have flaws, but every candidate has flaws, and all of these are quite plausible nominees, at least so far.”
In short Bridgegate hasn’t wounded Christie fatally, but it certainly isn’t helping matters.
Photo by aaron.rosales/Flickr
I wonder if this will change the politics of transportation. I bet a lot of Americans will now start to think of traffic jams as products of government conspiracies. A lot of American politics is about anger and blame. Some people stuck in traffic are going to turn their rage from the driver in front of them to politicians.
This seems to assume that nastiness or vindictiveness turns off voters. That’s true for many voters, but it would be naïve to underestimate the power of personality. There are voters out there who are attracted to a candidate who would do something so bold and mean-spirited. Here’s a guy who knows how to get revenge. He knows how to deal out payback. That’s what many angry post-9/11 voters want in American foreign policy…. This is probably my own partisan bias talking, but I get the feeling that Republican voters kind of like people who are gritty, even a little mean-spirited.… Read more »
I’d rather play nice, but when going up against people who weaponize the IRS and other federal agencies for partisan ends, playing nice doesn’t always cut it. Still, if this gets connected directly to Christie, he should leave public life for good.
It’s cliche time: a lot can happen two years. It’s incredibly premature to say who will or won’t be the GOP nominee. In 2016, it will be about the state of the country in 2016, not 2014. There’s an *excellent* chance that the Republican Presidential candidate in 2016 will be someone who no one is talking about in January 2014. He or she will be someone far more obscure than Christie. No, I have no idea who I’m talking about, but no one else does either. I seriously doubt it will be Christie, not because of the bridge scandal, but… Read more »
P.S. By the same token, those others “untainted by scandal” are simply untainted as of January 2014. Will they remain untouched by scandal over the next two years? I doubt all of them will. (I’d say the same thing about any Democratic hopefuls, by the way.)
I’d agree that the dominant factors in the 2016 election will be the state of the economy in 2016, but I don’t know if, “…the Republican Presidential candidate in 2016 will be someone who no one is talking about in January 2014.” That is most voters probably don’t know about people like John Kasich or Mike Pence outside of their home states, but the GOP party actors that are picking candidates to support right now know about them and are talking about them. In other words Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis were pretty obscure to most voters outside their states… Read more »
Fair enough. “No one” was an extreme way for me to put it. More specifically, someone who gets very little press coverage today at a national level.