Byron York: Chris Christie wants to be the last governor standing

That leaves one governor, a candidate who at times in the past looked nearly dead, as the possible lone survivor. After camping out in New Hampshire, Chris Christie is making a play in Iowa, where he is picking up momentum, impressing people with his one-on-one politicking, and also has the friendship of the state’s governor-for-life, Terry Branstad.

Christie is surprised — not to still be standing, but to see nearly all the other governors go by the wayside. Part of their problem, he explained in a conversation before a town hall here in Fort Dodge, Iowa, is a generalized voter hostility against government — not only against Washington D.C., but against all government. But the other cause, Christie told me, is more basic: “A lot of those governors didn’t run very good campaigns.”

Scott Walker “got out ahead of his skis and wound up crashing because of it.” Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal “never caught fire.” Mike Huckabee “was kind of a one-state guy.” And George Pataki and Jeb Bush “have run campaigns from a decade or so ago.”

Ouch. As far as Kasich is concerned — the Ohio governor is nowhere in Iowa but currently third in New Hampshire, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls — “I think John’s campaign has been OK, I don’t think John’s quite as far out of it yet as some people may think.”

The factor that links all the faltering governors, Christie believes, is simple: They just didn’t perform well. “You can have all kinds of strategy and geography, where I’m from and what I’ve done and the resume and all the rest of it, but people want to see you perform,” Christie said. “And either you perform or you don’t.” The governors didn’t.

But Christie is performing. He’s inching upward in Iowa, and is in reasonably good shape in New Hampshire, and some analysts see him in the mix, along with Trump, Cruz, and Rubio, if the GOP race narrows to four candidates. The public’s response to Christie’s debate appearances has been good. The crowds at his events are good. And people have started to ask him who he would pick to be his vice presidential running mate — to Christie, an encouraging sign that some voters see him as a candidate with at least a theoretical chance of winning.

It’s all good. But hovering over it is the Trump Factor, something no one, including Christie, expected to shape this campaign. In our conversation, Christie ran down the factors that have affected the Republican contest. Trump’s presence, along with that anger at government, has “changed the whole face of the race.”

“Why is Trump leading the race now?” I asked.

“Because he’s run the best campaign,” Christie responded.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I think so. I just think he’s connected best with people at the moment. I think he’s done the best job of going out there and connecting with the things that people are really concerned about. Whether that will continue or not, who knows?”

Christie noted, without any noticeable sense of jealousy, that Trump has received an incredible amount of free media coverage. “The media is addicted to him; they can’t stop putting him on television.”

I asked whether Trump’s success has taught Christie anything about the mood of the Republican electorate at the moment.

“I think it’s only taught me about a section of the electorate,” Christie said. “I think most of the Republican primary electorate is very discontented with the role of government right now and the way government has executed its job. But there’s also a section of that Republican primary electorate that is also very, very angry about their own place in life now. The economy has not served them well. They feel as if the laws of the country are rigged for the rich, and they’re angry. And so I think, Donald — ironically, the billionaire — has tapped into that.”

Christie goes back years with Trump. I took the conversation down a side road when I asked how they first met. Christie told me that in 2002, as a new U.S. attorney in New Jersey, he paid a courtesy call on Third Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, Trump’s sister. “At the end of the meeting, she said ‘I’d like you to do me a favor,'” Christie recalled. “And I said, ‘Sure, judge, what’s that?’ And she said, ‘I’d like you to go out to dinner with my little brother.’ And I said, ‘You mean Donald?’ And she said, ‘Yes, he really wants to meet you.'”

A dinner was arranged in one of Trump’s hotels in New York. Christie got the Trump experience.

“He ordered dinner for me,” Christie said.

“You mean he chose what you would eat?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You didn’t ask him to do this?”

“No. The chef came out, who’s the owner of the restaurant, and [Trump] said to him, ‘Jean Georges, remember the appetizer you made for me last week when I was here? We’ll take two of those. And remember that main course you made, the special thing you made for me? We’ll take two of those, too.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll love it.'”

Christie was a little taken aback. But afterward, Christie, Trump, and their wives began to have dinner together maybe a couple of times a year. “We’ve been friends for a long time,” Christie told me.

On the stump, Christie manages to knock Trump in a good-natured way, even doing a reasonably good Trump impression. In the Fort Dodge town hall, Christie, who is proud of his entitlement reform proposal, broke into Trumpese when he described what he said was Trump’s plan to save Social Security: “When I’m president, so many people are going to be so richer. They’re going to be rich, rich, rich. They’re not going to worry about Social Security any more because everyone’s gonna be rich.” People laugh.

At an earlier town hall, in Ames, Christie was more serious, but still without stinging Trump. It’s been a very entertaining campaign, he told the audience, “But we are not electing the entertainer-in-chief. We’re electing the commander-in-chief.” The message: Trump was fun, it’s been a good show, but that’s over now.

“America’s counting on you,” Christie told the audience, “and it’s time to get serious about this.”

Of course, Trump hasn’t hit Christie, presumably because Christie has never been high enough in the polls to be a target. If Christie were to rise, that would certainly change.

But other candidates are going after Christie, in what is perhaps an indication that he is having an impact. At Thursday’s debate in South Carolina, Marco Rubio hit Christie for supporting the nomination of Obama Supreme Court appointee Sonia Sotomayor, and also for “the donation [Christie] made to Planned Parenthood.”

Christie denied both. “First of all, I didn’t support Sonia Sotomayor,” he said onstage. “Secondly, I never wrote a check to Planned Parenthood.”

The rivals (and the factcheckers) pounced, producing a July 17, 2009 statement in which Christie said of Sotomayor, “I support her appointment to the Supreme Court and urge the Senate to keep politics out of the process and confirm her nomination.” At the Christie town hall in Ames, someone passed out a flyer with Christie’s statement, the “support her appointment” highlighted so everyone would get the message.

“What they don’t take into account,” Christie told me, “is what I said in May, before [Sotomayor] had her hearing. I said she’s not my kind of judge, she wouldn’t be who I would choose.” And indeed, in a May 27, 2009 radio interview, Christie said of Sotomayor, “She wouldn’t have been my choice. Absolutely not. Not my kind of judge.”

Yet later, as the nomination worked its way through the Senate, Christie voiced clear support. He told me he was trying to make a point about getting past the George W. Bush years, when Democrats filibustered Bush judicial nominees over partisan and sometimes inconsequential reasons. “My view on this was Sotomayor was nominated by a president who got elected,” Christie told me. “Elections have consequences, and it’s time for those presidents to get the judges they want to get. And I want Republican presidents to be treated in exactly the same way.”

“I would never have nominated someone like Sonia Sotomayor, but Barack Obama had the right to do what he did,” Christie said. “And the Senate should hold an up-or-down vote.”

That clarifies things a little — actually a number of Republicans agree with Christie on that — but Christie still said “I support her appointment” in July 2009, so there’s no way Rubio or any other Christie rivals will stop saying so.

What about Planned Parenthood? There’s no doubt Christie has always opposed taxpayer funding of the group, and he has defunded it as governor. But a report from 1994 has been bouncing around the campaign trail to the effect that Christie made a personal contribution to Planned Parenthood — that’s what Rubio cited at the debate.

Did not happen, Christie told me. That 1994 article (irony of ironies: written by a reporter who is now Christie’s spokesman) got a quote wrong, Christie said.

Christie was running for county office at the time, and there was a debate about taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood. “Now, at this time I was pro-choice,” Christie told me. “It’s 1994. I was arguing against giving county money to Planned Parenthood. And the point I was making was that these kind of organizations should be supported with private donations like I make myself — not to that organization, but to other organizations. Somehow the reporter, who now works for me … got the quote wrong.”

“I never made a contribution, nor did my wife, to Planned Parenthood, ever,” Christie said.

It’s a very, very, very important point to make to Iowa voters, many of whom are strongly pro-life evangelicals. And from there, Christie went on to describe his 1995 conversion from pro-choice to pro-life. His wife Mary Pat was pregnant with their second child, and Christie left work one day to meet her at a doctor’s office for a three-month check. The doctor used a Doppler monitor, and Christie could hear his daughter’s heartbeat.

“It struck me,” Christie said. “I was driving back to my office — I can remember it to this day — thinking to myself, under my position on abortion, that’s not a life. And I heard that heartbeat. It’s alive. And I was uncomfortable with my position and changed it. And it’s been my position ever since.”

So Christie has been pro-life for 21 years, which got him back to Rubio’s attack. “And so part of it is, like, I didn’t make the [Planned Parenthood] contribution, but even if I did, so what? The fact is, those of us who are pro-life, if we want to expand the movement, you better accept people like me. Because that’s what we’re trying to do: We’re trying to bring converts to the cause. And it wasn’t like this was a conversion when I was contemplating running for president of the United States. This was a conversion that happened 21 years ago.”

If Christie continues to rise, there will a lot more attacks; he’s got a long record. But at this point, Christie has to be thankful to be politically alive at all, given the damage he took from the George Washington Bridge affair, which consumed the early months of his campaign and saw him fall from a national front-runner in 2014 to the middle of the pack or below.

I asked Christie whether he thought he would be leading the race if not for the bridge mess. “No, I don’t,” Christie said. “Because I think we’re well past that. No one asks me about it anymore.”

Indeed, at the Ames town hall Friday, Christie actually brought the bridge scandal up himself when a man asked, “Can you give any example of a time you made a mistake, and what you learned from it?” Christie told the man that a few years ago, “I had some people in my employ who appear to have done something really awful concerning the George Washington Bridge. I trusted those people to give them jobs, and they let me down. What I learned from it is that you can’t be too trusting in this business.”

Christie’s New Jersey critics would likely scoff at that one, but that was the entirety of the discussion of the bridge affair.

One measure of how Christie has left the bridge behind: In Ames, I talked to Tom Cooper, of Grinnell, a Trump supporter who was not a big fan of Christie. (Iowans are big on sampling candidate events whether they support the candidate or not.) “I’m still having a hard time dealing with what he did,” Cooper said to me of Christie.

I asked if he meant the bridge thing. “No, it’s when they had that hurricane, and what he did with Obama,” Cooper responded. In this race, pictures of Christie arm-in-arm with the president after Hurricane Sandy are more damaging than that mess on the bridge.

Those pictures will be in plenty of future attack ads, if Christie gets that far. But right now, he’s happy just to be moving in the right direction.

And he’s happy to be a governor. There were nine to start with, and the campaign has been hard on everybody. “My goal here all along was to be the No. 1 governor,” Christie told me. “If I could come out of Iowa as the No. 1 governor, wherever that places me — first, second, third, fourth — wherever that is, then I will think I’ve done well here. And then go to New Hampshire and do better.”

“I think when the race gets smaller, the governor who is left standing will get much greater scrutiny, and as a result much greater opportunity to do better,” Christie continued. “If it really is a four-person race, if that’s what it comes down to, you’ll have a businessman, two first-term senators, and a two-term governor. I like my chances.”