We Should All Live So Long

First of all, do I think he will be running in 2016?

You’re damn A-fuckin’ right, as His Rotundity himself might put it.

He will be in consultations with his wife and children and others in his kitchen cabinet over the Christmas weekend, exploring his options. In the next few days he will be giving a Christmas gift to the nation.

His candidacy is the nation’s most poorly kept secret, right up there with Sony’s computer password.

What makes me so cocksure?

The Brontosaurus has been running since he was a lowly one-term county Freeholder, lucky enough to have been discovered by President Bush as a U.S. attorney. Bruce Springsteen may have had his friend in mind when he wrote “Born to Run.”

“In the improbable event of nomination,” as the governor’s role model, William Howard Taft, said in the run up to the 1908 Republican convention, I will support him.

It’s the only way we can get him out of the state, as I’ve previously explained about why we want to see him in the White House.

Now I’m not saying Chris Christie is another Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt or even William Howard Taft.

The only mountain his face will be carved on is in The Meadows, the waste management companies’ contribution to landfill. If you stare at Mount Christie, as we call it, from the New Jersey Turnpike, enroute to Newark International Airport, from time to time it lights up from the garbage converted to methane gas. It’s one of the great natural wonders of the Industrial Revolution, right up there with the Passaic River suddenly bursting into flame.

He hasn’t exactly fulfilled the promises of his election as governor in 2010 and 2014. His legacy will include lowered state credit ratings, underfunded pension systems, a transportation fund without funds. 36% of our bridges and roads are in need of repair. The state unemployment rate is above the nation’s. Not to mention the GWB scandal, which he may have had nothing to do with.

Look, if you think governing New Jersey can be as simple as governing Alabama—well, it’s not.

What presidential aspirant these days doesn’t have some kind of handicap? Republicans, in general, have the Iraq War. Our party has a tradition of heavy baggage.

In the 1920’s, for example, Republicans had the Teapot Dome scandals; compare that swindling of the nation’s oil reserves with a few silly lane closings! And the travesty of 1920-3 went on with Pres. Harding drinking whiskey and playing poker with the swindling cabinet members, while having a tootsie in the closet (Nan Britton). None of this prevented the people from electing Coolidge and Hoover.

Warts and all, the no longer encumbered by false modesty Chris Christie will be the life of the party, come primary time (2015).

I am especially looking forward to the presidential TV debates, the political equivalent of “Dancing with the Stars.” Will candidate Christie stand up and attack the other candidates using his New Jersey approach honed at town hall meetings. Will he tell Cruz to sit down and shut up? Will he call Rand Paul an idiot for some of his Libertarian ideas that are out there where the busses don’t run?

All of that may not play as well in South Carolina as in New Jersey.

Christie’s biggest problem will be winning over conservative states, whose voters seem to live in a delusional parallel universe, where they manage to be out of touch with real people’s problems.

We have to remember the Republican Party is the party that wants to stop people from voting; that still considers Medicare as socialized medicine; that wants to eliminate the safety net, preferring people to starve then take demeaning food stamps, that wants folks to go into bankruptcy paying medical bills rather than using affordable insurance. We are the party against the people, but for the 1%.

All of those things are not what Christie is about.

He will never win over the Republican base, which actually picks our presidential candidate. They think of Christie the way Stalin thought of Trotsky.

And that’s why I am the first to count Christie out in the 2016 race.

Good thing to. Who wants to face Hillary? Eight years of the Hill and Bill Show and the country will be ready for the still younger than Ronald Reagan, even slimmer Chris Christie in 2024.

I for one will be doing everything in my power to ensure the nomination of Chris Christie for President in 2024, so help me, Aristophanes.

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Marvin Kitman
December 23, 2014

Public Domain Photo by National Park Service Photographer Jack E. Boucher.