Scott Spiegel

Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

Unless Mitch Daniels has an unprecedented change of heart or Rudy Giuliani lives up to rumors he’s planning another run, I’m throwing my support for the 2012 Republican presidential nominee to a candidate who isn’t yet competing.  Here’s why:

1. Republican gubernatorial candidates in 2010 did spectacularly well, mostly by emulating New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s style and substance on the campaign trail.  Christie is on the cutting edge of the Republican Party: Other GOP governors are taking his lead by standing up to public sector unions, refusing to raise taxes, declining to fund unaffordable public works boondoggles, and slashing spending.  Even Democratic governors such as Andrew Cuomo are following Christie’s playbook.

2. Christie has a talent that Donald Trump supporters wrongly insisted would make the latter a uniquely formidable candidate: the ability to take the fight to the enemy.  In Trump’s case, they meant his confronting President Obama over the trivial birth certificate issue, whereas Christie has been battling teachers’ unions in New Jersey.  But Christie’s fearless propensity to confront his current opponents bodes well for his future capacity to face off with a certain big-eared neophyte who stumbles off track without his teleprompter, and always looks nasty and petty when he fights back.

3. Christie is wildly popular as a potential candidate among Republican voters, a fact that gets masked by the fact that his non-candidacy means he’s excluded from many straw polls.  But John Zogby regularly includes Christie as a choice, and Christie took first place in all four of the primary polls Zogby’s run since November 2010.

4. Waiting until the last minute to announce his candidacy, after the current crop of candidates has had its sorry say, is neither a foolish nor an unprecedented strategy.  Confidantes say Christie is still considering running, but might wait to announce until after November 2011, when he may be able to help Republicans take over one or both chambers of the New Jersey Legislature.  Christie may also be waiting until passage of pension reform and other state legislation—i.e., until he has more fully secured his record of accomplishment as governor.  Anyway, in this country it’s always better not to appear to be lusting for power, more charming to be dragged kicking and screaming into office rather than appear to be drooling over the prospect like Gingrich, Pawlenty, or Paul.  I’m perfectly content to be despondent for the next six months by the presence of a weak field if it means Christie will enter the race this fall.

5. Christie has no patience for fools, of which there are plenty in New Jersey, but even more in Washington, where the stakes are higher.

6. Christie is electable.  He won the governor’s race in a heavily Democratic state that went for Obama over McCain by 16 points, despite facing a conservative third-party candidate and being outspent five-to-one by the incumbent opponent.  Though he claims not to be interested in the presidency, Christie has plausibly admitted, “I already know I could win.”  Fundraisers around the country are imploring him to meet with them.  Diverse conservatives from Henry Kissinger to John Boehner to Ann Coulter who know something about electoral politics have been begging him to run.

7. He’s articulate, passionate, and colorful, and makes fewer mistakes when speaking off the cuff than Obama makes when using his teleprompter.  In this amazing video—one of dozens of similar videos floating around YouTube—watch him slowly eviscerate a pro-union audience member’s loaded questions, rhetorical tricks, and sneering tone, to such a degree that by the end of his brilliant answer even she seems to be nodding in agreement.

8. All the other candidates have fatal flaws.  Most are too inexperienced or naïve (e.g., Cain, Paul) or slick and ingratiating (e.g., Pawlenty, Romney).  Cain, for example, is making the rounds of the talk shows bragging about how he has no foreign policy, while Pawlenty is already boring the nation with trite pronouncements such as, “We are going to win it, and it’s going to start right here in Iowa.”  In contrast to others in the field, Christie can use to his advantage the fact that he has a distinguished career as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey and two hugely successful years in executive government, yet is not a typical politician who says things just to make people feel good.

9. The Obama campaign is already investigating Christie’s background and trying to find dirt on him to intimidate him.  Surely we can’t let liberals get away with their lowbrow tactics yet again.

10. Christie has done a fantastic job as governor of New Jersey in his first term, and shows more promise than any of the other GOP presidential candidates.  His failure to run could cost Republicans the White House and hand Obama a second term.

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Related articles

• Listen: Chris Christie Is ‘Thrilled’ People Ask Him To Run In 2012, He ‘Just Doesn’t Want To Do It’ (mediaite.com)
• Obama’s Re-Election Campaign Digging Up Dirt On Potential Opponent, Chris Christie (nicedeb.wordpress.com)
• Mitch Daniels’ decision not to run in 2012 helps ex-governors – DesMoinesRegister.com (news.google.com)
• Chris Christie Reacts To Calls For Him To Run For President (huffingtonpost.com)
• Chris Christie Rebuked By New Jersey Supreme Court Over School Funding (huffingtonpost.com)

The surest sign that Obama’s presidency is going to turn out to like Bill Clinton’s is that he is already becoming a drag on the Democratic ticket, a state of affairs Clinton took a full six years to realize.

Obama followed around Democratic candidates Jon Corzine of New Jersey and Creigh Deeds of Virginia like a puppy for months during their gubernatorial campaigns.  The President made two visits to Virginia to stump for Deeds and three to New Jersey to rally for Corzine, including stops in Newark and Camden two days before the election.  On Sunday, Obama exhorted New Jersey crowds, “I want everybody in this auditorium to make a pledge that in these next 48 hours, you will work just as hard for Jon as you worked for me.”

In yesterday’s off-year elections, both candidates were soundly defeated.

In New Jersey, Obama beat McCain by a 16% margin in 2008; this year, the Republican beat the Democrat by 5%, a 21-point reversal.  This, despite the presence of a third-party candidate who took votes away from the Republican and a five-to-one Corzine-to-Christie spending advantage.

In Virginia, Obama beat McCain by 6% in 2008; this year, the Republican beat the Democrat by 18%, a 24-point reversal.  In both Virginia and New Jersey, independents—who voted heavily for Obama and other Democratic candidates in 2008—voted 2-to-1 for the Republican candidate in 2009.

Meanwhile, Obama never showed his face in upstate New York’s 23rd congressional district, where Democratic candidate Bill Owens squeaked past Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman with a victory in Tuesday’s special election.  Obama didn’t directly endorse liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava, but she received heavily publicized support from ACORN, Obama’s pet community organization, which helped solidify her lack of popularity and set in motion events that led to her withdrawal the weekend before the election.

In New York 23, 52% of the electorate voted for Obama in 2008; 49% voted for the Democrat in 2009.  It is miraculous that Hoffman did as well as he did, given the presence of a Republican on the ballot and the fact that Hoffman doesn’t live there, wasn’t familiar with local issues, and joined the race at the eleventh hour.

Bill Clinton’s pariah status in Al Gore’s presidential run and other Democratic congressional and gubernatorial campaigns in 2000 was based, of course, not on drooping support for his policies, but on his drooping boxers.

George W. Bush became a hindrance in 2008 only partly because he didn’t consistently govern as a conservative, but partly because Republican candidate John McCain ran from conservative positions every chance he got.

It was not Obama’s mere presence that flipped New Jersey and Virginia, or his absence that gave New York 23 to the Democrat.  The elections in New Jersey and Virginia—the former with its link to the New York City metro area, the latter with its proximity to D.C. and increasingly industrialized northern suburbs—were more ideologically focused on Obama’s agenda of taxing, spending, and increasing the size of government than the election in rural, upstate New York.

Hoffman lost, and Christie and McDonnell won, because New York 23 was not a referendum on Obama’s legislative priorities, whereas New Jersey and Virginia were.  The election in New York 23, a district that probably has more cows than people and more soldiers (from Fort Drum) than policemen, was about local issues.  In contrast, exit polling revealed that 62% of Virginia voters cited taxes or the economy as their most important issue.  In New Jersey, which has some of the highest income, sales, and property taxes in the country, and was rated last of all 50 states by the Tax Foundation for its business tax climate, 58% of voters mentioned property taxes or the economy as their most pressing concern.

According to Jay Cost of Real Clear Politics, “I do not think that a special election – any special election – is a particularly good barometer of the political climate of any place outside the district in question.”  He is correct—about New York 23, whose results say almost nothing about the country’s concern with the current administration’s goals.  New Jersey and Virginia—whose populations are 12 to 13 times larger than New York 23’s—are far more attuned to and potentially affected by Obama’s agenda.

As former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers noted, Democrats’ battle in New Jersey “can’t be completely attributed to a bad economy and to an unpopular incumbent in New Jersey.  There is something afoot in the land that people are uncomfortable about and one of the issues is spending.  And that is probably the biggest issue.”

Similarly, John Judis of The New Republic notes, “[I]n early August, the margin between Deeds and McDonnell jumped, and remained high for the rest of the election.  At the very same time, Obama’s approval numbers in Virginia plummeted.”  Even Deeds admitted on the campaign trail that Obama’s policies in conjunction with his support were hurting Deeds.

Obama’s blessing is turning into the kiss of death—as witnessed during the health care debate this summer, when the population turned against Congress’s legislation in precise proportion to Obama’s attempts to “explain” it in his press conferences and Sunday talk show appearances.  Beyond widespread mistrust of his agenda, there is growing distaste for Obama as a political figure as a result of his incessant, narcissistic TV and radio appearances and thin-skinned bullying of critics.

The question is when Obama the politician will start to become synonymous with Obama the purveyor of a hated agenda.