I am trying to avoid writing political posts, but this article caught my eye.
The Republican Estblishment is just like the French Bourbons, they neither forget anything, nor learn anything. Despite going 1-6 in the popular vote and the GOP just becoming a shrinking rural based party, the GOP’s elites are still commiting the same mistakes. Just like they supported Bush in 2000, McCain in 08 and Romney in 12, they are now lining up behind the Obese Bully Chris Christie. As with the Bush, McCain and Romney, the Progressive media is hyping up Chris Christie. They claim he is formidable and will have mass appeal. Just like with Bush, McCain and Romney, you best bet as soon as Christie is the nominee, they media will carve him up like a pig.
Governor Chris Christie’s darkest moment, at least in the eyes of some members of the Republican establishment, came on a chilly Sunday night in early November of last year, just days before the presidential election. What Christie and his team did that evening, in a series of terse e-mails and calls with the pleading Romney camp, remains murky. On Capitol Hill, insiders still treat the episode like the Zapruder film, analyzing it and trying to discern, from limited context, what exactly happened.
But what didn’t happen is indisputable: Christie didn’t attend Mitt Romney’s rally at Shady Brook Farm in Lower Makefield, Pa., an affluent township in the Philadelphia suburbs. Christie’s aides insist he was busy working on Hurricane Sandy relief, but to this day many of Romney’s donors and former advisers suspect the governor coolly abandoned them at the eleventh hour. They note that Trenton, New Jersey’s state capital, was only a 15-minute drive away, a short hop over the Calhoun Street Bridge, and that Christie made no effort. Two days later, Romney would lose deeply purple Pennsylvania and the election.
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Christie’s inner circle has taken the complaints seriously, fearing their implications ahead of the 2016 presidential election. For the past nine months, they have quietly labored behind the scenes to woo the party’s skeptical power brokers. Their maneuvers have included huddles with Republican moneymen, off-the-record powwows with conservative journalists, and late-night conversations with past backers.
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Later this month, Christie will be in the Hamptons, chatting up Republican donors at the home of Clifford Sobel, a former ambassador in the George W. Bush administration. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, erstwhile darling of the Big Apple’s GOP set, will host the event. Palatucci, who is close with both former presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, having led the Garden State campaigns for both, is reportedly taking care to connect the vaunted Bush network, which has been friendly to Christie in the past, with his Jersey boss.
“The group is there, believe me, and it’s growing by the day, maybe by a factor of 50 times more than what it was in 2011,” Langone tells me. “He’s getting traction with people because people want to win. After 2012, it dawned on a lot of us that we need to have a better candidate, somebody who can connect, and Christie is the person who can do that.”
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Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who encouraged Christie to run last year, agrees. In an interview, he tells me Christie remains a top-tier candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, owing to his willingness to wade into foreign policy and his ability to broaden the Republican coalition. “We’re friendly, and I think extremely highly of him, and he knows I’d be delighted if he became a national candidate,” he says. “Conservatives should recognize his long-term potential.” Christie’s work with Obama during the storm, he acknowledges, “might not have been the high point of his political career, but I was never angry about seeing him do what he needed to do for his state and his reelection.”
The crescendo of Christie’s reemergence as the establishment’s frontrunner came last week in Boston, where, less than a year after the Romney-related recriminations, the members of the Republican National Committee embraced him, for the most part, during their summer meeting. He cast himself as a national leader capable of leading the party out of its political wilderness. He seemed eager to snuff the post-election friction, once and for all, with a charismatic and upbeat performance.
“I’m in this business to win,” Christie told the RNC attendees, to approving cheers. “For our ideas to matter, we have to win, because if we don’t win, we don’t govern, and if we don’t govern, all we do is shout into the wind.” It wasn’t an ideological overture but a pugnacious and pragmatic message directed to a group that’s tired of losing. And they loved it, and Christie, too, since he increasingly looks like the only center-right governor and national star looking hard at a 2016 campaign. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush is widely believed to be leaning against it, and senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, though popular with tea-party activists, are privately viewed with wariness by the Republican donor class.
Many of you on this blog doubt Christie can be the nominee, but history is against that. If the GOP Establishment wants a nominee, they will get it. Some point out that the “base” will never except him. All Christie has to do is go hard Right on one or two social issues and that will be enough for “the base” to reluctantly support him. This is why Christie has not attacked people like Bachmann or Santorum who reprsent the base, but instead went after Rand Paul and Libertarians who are sometimes at odds with the GOP base.
The Establishment is supporting Chris Christie becasue they think he can win. In reality, all they are looking for is a band aid solution to the GOP’s problems. Rand Paul on the other hand has a long term strategy to fix the GOP. He wants it to be an inclusive Party that appeals to a broad swath of Americans. The GOP Establishment perfers that things stay as they are because even if the Party loses an election, they still get invited to thr right parties. In their mind if Christie wins, great but if he loses, it’s all good.