Down But Not Out

During the two-hour town hall here on July 27, Christie fielded questions on topics ranging from the obvious (Obamacare, veterans’ affairs, illegal immigration, Iran) to the odd (whether he had, in fact, dozed off at a Bruce Springsteen concert last spring). Christie reported that he opposes Obamacare, favors better care for veterans, wants tighter border security, and thinks the Iran deal is the worst thing Barack Obama has done as president. And since you’re curious, no, he had not fallen asleep; he was simply caught having a “spiritual” moment at his “124th” Springsteen show.

Paulson was here for another reason. She wanted to ask her second-favorite candidate about her favorite. “I have a question for you,” she began, noting in her preamble that America is a “capitalistic society” struggling to match its historical success. “Why do you and all the other presidential candidates think you can do better than a gentleman named Donald Trump, who has been extremely successful and understands what capitalism is about and has done extremely well? And,” she said, picking up steam, “don’t tell me it’s because you have political experience. .  .  . I don’t really want to hear that.”

“Well, I love the fact that you asked the question and tell me what I can answer,” Christie replied to audience laughter.

“I’m like that,” Paulson responded, resolutely. “That’s the way I am.”

“Now I understand exactly why you like Donald.”

Christie, who said he’s been a friend of Trump for 13 years, offered a long explanation of why Trump’s business skills are not “transferable” to government. It’s not possible to shout “You’re fired!” at a congressional leader who tells you he doesn’t have the votes, Christie explained. “You can do that on a reality TV show but you cannot fire the speaker of the House or the Senate majority leader because you don’t get what you want.”

Paulson wasn’t satisfied. “In other words, you’re saying that you have to be a politician?”

“No, what I’m saying is you have to have some experience in knowing how to deal with people in that way. And he has not shown that over the course of his career.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Then we have a fundamental disagreement about—”

“That’s right.”

“That’s okay,” Christie said with a smile. “Then vote for Donald Trump. It’s fine. It’s a free country. You can vote for whoever you want who’s on the ballot here on February 9.”

Christie then mocked a popular Trump talking point. “When he says that he’s going to build a wall across the entire 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico, and he’s going to make Mexico pay for it—that’s a great line, right? Everybody loves that! Great! We’re going to get the wall and we don’t have to pay for it!”

“He got a lot of attention for it,” Paulson interjected.

“If the goal here is to find the person to be president of the United States who can get the most attention—he’s gonna win hands-down. If it is the person who can most effectively govern our nation and deal with the world, I’d suggest to you that I’m in this race because I’d be better than him. You have a different opinion? Then vote for him. That’s fine by me. I don’t need to get every vote. I just gotta get more than anybody else.”

It wasn’t the kind of testy Christie exchange that would become an instant YouTube classic, but Paulson appreciated his candor. “That was a damn good answer,” she said to a friend as she sat down.

Christie spoke to her after the town hall. “You’re voting for me in February,” he said, as he threw his arm around her shoulder. “You know it and I know it. You’re not voting for him, you’re voting for me.”

If he’s right, she doesn’t know it yet. “Before Trump came on the scene, Christie was my favorite,” she told me later. But for now she’s not budging. “No, nothing changed my mind.”

And this is Christie’s problem. He used to be the favorite of a lot of people. Now, not so much.

In a Monmouth poll of New Hampshire Republicans released hours after Christie’s event in Keene, Trump leads with 24 percent of those surveyed, while Christie, at 4 percent, is in 8th place. If Trump were not in the race, however, Christie would benefit more than any other candidate, with 15 percent of Trump’s voters choosing the New Jersey governor as their second pick—enough to put Christie in a strong third place in a Trump-less field.

Christie isn’t panicking. In an interview at Lindy’s Diner, Christie told me about a conversation with a confidant he wouldn’t name. “He said to me: ‘Listen, the hardest thing in the world for you in all of this is going to be to be patient. Just be patient. It’s going to come to you. Just remain patient and do what you do. You’re going to be fine. That’s the conversation I have with myself every day.”

Although it was just past 10 a.m., Christie, who is notably thinner since weight-loss surgery in 2013, was sipping on a milkshake. He was pensive, but there was no sign that he’s lost any confidence in himself or his prospects.

In January 2014, shortly after he was reelected overwhelmingly to his second term as New Jersey governor, the Washington Post placed Christie at the top of its ranking of the 2016 GOP field. Christie is “best positioned to build the coalition of major donors, party activists and GOP elites necessary to win the nomination.”

Today, Christie is in danger of becoming an also-ran. In national polls released in the last two weeks by ABC News, CNN, and Quinnipiac, Christie is, respectively, in 10th place, 8th place and 10th place. The Fox News debate on August 6 will include only those candidates in the top 10 in national polling. Christie is more likely than not to make the cut, but the fact that it’s even possible he’d be excluded indicates just how far he’s fallen.

What happened? “Bridgegate happened,” Christie says. In September 2013, three top Christie aides conspired to create a mammoth traffic jam in Fort Lee, New Jersey, by restricting rush hour access to the George Washington Bridge. Prosecutors alleged that the lane closures were political payback for the town’s mayor, who refused to endorse Christie’s reelection bid. Christie has long maintained he had no knowledge of the plan, and none of the various investigations has accused him directly of wrongdoing. But the political toll has been significant. 

“There was an onslaught of media coverage that was hyperbolic and untrue. There’s really no other explanation for it,” he says.

“The other piece of it is that Jeb got in the race and he’s another person who is viewed, rightly or wrongly, as kind of an establishment candidate. And so .  .  . now you’re competing with another person for that slice of the pie.”

Bush’s entry squeezed Christie’s fundraising, too. Christie has a strong national network of donors from his tenure as head of the Republican Governors Association. He hasn’t yet filed an FEC report for his campaign, since he announced the day the second quarter came to a close, but contributions to outside groups supporting Jeb Bush are beating those to a pro-Christie super-PAC by a factor of 10-to-1.

On this, too, Christie’s approach combines patience and confidence. In his pitch to donors, Christie reminds them of flash-in-the-pan candidates in previous cycles and notes that the eventual winners were sometimes asterisks in the early polling. “Bet on talent,” he tells them.

This confidence is what Christie calls the “operating premise” of his campaign. “We have better ideas. We communicate them better. And we’re going to try to force everybody else to come out with their ideas and communicate them. And then, when we’re standing up on that stage, and everyone is standing next to each other, people are going to go: ‘He’s the most credible choice.’ ”

The key to this strategy, he says, is placing the most challenging set of issues at the center of his campaign. And that means entitlements, which he talked about at length at Lab ’n Lager, standing in front of a red-white-and-blue sign touting his campaign’s slogan: “Telling It Like It Is.”

While Christie has offered detailed plans for reforming Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, rival campaigns argue that he’s an imperfect messenger. True, Christie has called for bold entitlement reform for years and in a 2011 speech chastised congressional Republicans for cowardice. Failure to reform Medicare and Medicaid, he said, would lead the country to “ruin.”

But Obamacare presented a dilemma. The federal government offered to cover most of the additional costs incurred by states that expanded Medicaid—at least initially. But the federal support diminishes over time, meaning state taxpayers will have to fund the difference. When the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that states could not be compelled to participate in expanding Medicaid, Christie was blunt, calling the scheme “extortion.” He said: “It was in a whole bunch of nice words in a bill, but it was extortion. So I’m really glad that a majority of the Supreme Court still supports the proposition .  .  . that extortion is still illegal in the country, even when it’s done by the president of the United States.”

Despite this strong language, Christie opted to expand Medicaid in New Jersey. He said at the time that he saw few other options. Refusing to expand it, he argued, would mean choosing to pass on money available to other states. And as a governor facing a challenging fiscal situation, he couldn’t say no.

New Jersey, he says, already subsidized health care for its citizens living up to 200 percent of the poverty line—well above the 133 percent covered by the federal government. “Expansion was a misnomer,” he says. “My point is—if you’re governor of New Jersey and you’re being offered a deal where you’re going to get net additional revenue to you of $200-$220 million annually, for doing something that essentially you’re already doing,” you have to do it.

Phil Kerpen, a conservative activist who runs American Commitment and has worked in New Jersey, doesn’t buy it. “Like [Ohio governor John] Kasich and unlike the rest of the field, Christie took federal tax dollars to add able-bodied working-age adults to the Medicaid rolls, despite the evidence expansion makes people less likely to work and does not improve health outcomes. In my judgment, a politician who is unwilling or unable to communicate why able-bodied working-age adults should not be on welfare programs is not well equipped to be a Republican standard-bearer.”

Christie says that he will, eventually, call out fellow Republicans by name if they fail to offer serious solutions to the entitlement crisis. But he’s not going to do it in the first couple of debates. “You don’t want to do it now. Then they get 30 seconds to respond! In a timed debate with 10 people on there, you’re not going to hear me mention names.”

If he won’t do it in the debates, Christie isn’t afraid to criticize his opponents off the stage. Last week, Jeb Bush ran into trouble when he said that it was time to “phase out” Medicare “and move to a new system” that is sustainable. Democrats naturally seized on his call to “phase out” the program and Bush later clarified his position. Christie isn’t sympathetic.

“Jeb’s saying, ‘I think we should, you know, raise the retirement age maybe.’ And now he’s complaining that people are mischaracterizing his position on entitlement reform? I said the other day that if you’re going to be vague about it, you allow people to mischaracterize it. I got a 12-point plan. They can’t mischaracterize it.”

Christie believes that he can explain his decision to expand Medicaid and hopes that straight talk on entitlement reform will allow him to replicate the kind of resurgence that won John McCain the Republican nomination in 2008, a year after the pundit class had declared him toast. And, like McCain, he is all-in for New Hampshire.

“The way you win up here is to come up here the most, spend the most time, you meet people face to face,” Christie explained. “And then when they decide in the last 10 days, which is when most people in New Hampshire decide, they’re going to remember that time they saw you here at this place in July.” 

And what then?

“I come in first or second in New Hampshire. Your biggest problem then is going to be to make sure your server doesn’t crash from all the donations you’re going to be getting. So you’ve won one of the first two real important races where people vote. So you’re going to get a lot of money. We’ve seen South Carolina can often be dictated to in terms of momentum based on what’s happened in Iowa and New Hampshire. So I think if you come in first or second in New Hampshire, and especially me, where it’ll be called ‘The Great Comeback’ ”—and here Christie slips into newscaster voice—“Where’d he come from? It’s amazing! And all this stuff. So you’ll get a lot of momentum going into South Carolina and then you gotta build a national campaign.”

Can you do it that quickly?

“Sure you can. .  .  . It’s not like I don’t have friends in every state. I’ve got sitting governors in states—some of them are already supporting me and others of them will support me in the next few months. And so, yeah—you just adopt their organizations.”

It’s not an easy path, to be sure, but Christie is confident that it’s a path. “This game has always gone to the patient person. Always.”

Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.