Christie At The Schadenfreude Ranch, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #354 | @MDWorld

January 13, 2014 Mike Gold 3 Comments

There’s a reason why Chris Christie’s fat is in the fire, and it’s not just because he and/or his minions seriously screwed up traffic on the world’s busiest bridge for four solid days.

Oh, sure, Christie’s troubles have achieved international recognition, partially because so much of our media occupy so much space in metropolitan New York City. Some of the attention comes in the positioning of this story as an American remake of the Rob Ford saga: “big boned” chief executive acts like a childish bully. But just as Letterman and Ferguson and Stuart and Leno and Cobert and Fallon and Kimmel were running out of fat jokes, Christie and his crew came barreling down the turnpike – obviously, not I-95, I-80, I-87 or the other highways that were incapacitated while Christie’s henchmen henched about the George Washington Bridge.

Some of the attention comes from the perception by the pundits (and we’re always right, right?) that if the Tea Party would just go away the Republicans would come to their senses and nominate Christie for president in 2016. That’s one portly “if.” We haven’t even had the 2014 mid-terms yet. In political years, 34 months is about 19.9 Earth years. Anything can happen.

One might think the media is perpetuating all this well-upholstered brouhaha. Christie has treated the press like shit, even by Republican standards. He’s screamed at reporters at press conferences, called them names, ridiculed their veracity, and generally acted like a bully. Whereas those clips (Republicans do not understand the concept of video recording) are being recycled these days, that’s not the reason Christie’s in trouble. The Republicans have been running against their wholly contrived media conspiracy for decades when, in fact, the press has been covering this story exactly the same way if the miscreant spelled his name “Mahatma Gandhi.”

No, that’s not why Chris Christie’s in trouble.

There was a time when the Republican Party stuck together like Peeps in cellophane. Then the Tea Party happened and they turned on each other. For a man who is perceived as the only Republican who has a chance of defeating Hillary Clinton, hardly any Republicans have come to Christie’s defense. Many – including Rudy Giuliani – have limited their “support” to “well, if nothing else comes out tying him to the conspiracy, he’ll merely look like an unknowing fool.” Unfortunately, he’s made his bones by crafting the reputation as a hand’s on control freak. Christie can’t have it both ways.

That’s one problem. Here’s a bigger one: in order to run for president, you pretty much have to start an hour after the polls close on November 4, 2014. That requires a corpulent amount of money. These days most of that money is controlled by the upper one-tenth of the one-percenters who finance the GOP and its catalytic converter, News Corp. Christie wasn’t going to get a lot of that; those guys virtually are all Tea Partiers. Now, he won’t get enough to cover his Iowa caucus bar tab.

It takes a lot of money to raise a lot of money. Being backburnered in these early days will cripple Christie. Can he overcome this? Assuming he’s not tied any further into “Bridgegate” (and will somebody please stop this “gate” shit?), the response is “well, maybe, perhaps.”

Today, it’s more likely Rob Ford will win reelection in Toronto than Christie will be our next president. New Jersey’s oleaginous governor has his teats in the wringer.

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.