Christie Takes a Swing at His Party, Possibly Hurting His Political Future

Gov. Chris Christie admirably threw himself upon the shoals of national Republican Party politics this week.

The governor, who is a blustery weather front all his own, lashed his party in unrelenting, not to mention thoroughly entertaining, fashion Wednesday.

“The House of Representatives failed the most basic test of public service,” he told the press. “It was disappointing and disgusting to watch.”

He was just warming up.

“New York deserves better than the selfishness we displayed last night; New Jersey deserves better than the duplicity we saw last night,” he said. “There's only one group to blame for the continued suffering: The House majority and their speaker, John Boehner.”

So he firmly planted a tomahawk in the forehead of his national party.

New Jersey's Big Ma n is a complicated political animal. He can be rude and petty and play a mean game of politics. And he engages in more than a touch of magic realism on, say, the subject of his state's flagging economic performance. But he prides himself on being the Jersey guy who speaks his mind. All politicians create, fabricate, a persona, and this is his.

And to give him credit, in big moments he as often stays remarkably true to his belief in pathological candor. He did this with the disaster aid, with gun control after Sandy Hook. And he embraced President Obama during a visit to hurricane-ravaged New Jersey during the home stretch of the presidential campaign.

As Mr. Christie's political appetites are great, liberal commentators are quick to suggest that such moments make him a formidable figure in 2016. Maybe. For all the cheering locally, his national prospects could prove tenuous.

The Republican Party, nationally, continues to edge further and further right, its ideologues dancing and prancing toward the cliff wall of national unelectability. (One Republican congressman from New Jersey, Scott Garrett, could not even decide as of Tuesday if he would vote for the disaster package for his own state - give him credit for perverse consistency, as he voted against the rescue package in the deeply Republican south after Hurricane Katrina).

The Democratic Party had its own near-death experience in the 1970s and 1980s, as the party moved inexorably leftward. The Democratic Leadership Council and such prominent neo-liberal sorts as Senator Al Gore and Gov. Bill Clinton played no small role in taking on the party's liberal lions.

This is not to argue that the council was invariably correct in its policy prescriptions. That subject can spark an ideological barroom brawl in Democratic precincts to this day. But Mr. Clinton and his brethren succeeded in refashionin g their party as one that occupied a perch slightly to the liberal side of center.

Republicans display few signs they are ready for their own night of the political soul. If they are, however, Mr. Christie could play a role. He's no liberal. On fiscal matters, he talks like a Reagan Republican. But he has proved adept at compromising with Democratic leaders, and so siphoning off critical votes.

Mitt Romney displayed a similar dexterity in the Northeast precincts where Mr. Christie has fashioned a career. But he ran a Sybil-like presidential campaign, denouncing the policy positions he had championed as the governor of Massachusetts.

Once Republican governors and senators sat sprinkled across this region, from New York to New Jersey to Connecticut. New Hampshire was hidebound in its allegiance to the Party of the Elephant, and Vermont and Maine weren't far behind.

Now the Northeast is as resolutely blue as Dixie is barnyard red. And it played a critica l role in President Obama's two victories.

All of which has us circling back to the battle over disaster aid, and Mr. Christie's well-earned apoplexy. For decades, Dixiecrats voted to rebuild Rhode Island after northeasters and Northern Brahmins voted to rebuild barrier islands of the Gulf and the Outer Banks.

That sense of the commonweal, and of workaday political horse-trading, is near extinct. A revealing portent came after a tornado nearly leveled Joplin, Mo. Missouri is a Republican-leaning state. Yet Republican leaders began to threaten they would not vote through a full aid package without offsetting cuts.

In this context, House Republicans set to grumbling about Hurricane Sandy aid to the Northeast. Republican ideologues â€" including Congressman Steve Scalise of Louisiana, whose district benefited from a billion-dollar rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina - argued that the $60-plus-billion package in the House was pork encrusted (I would defy anyone to find a public works project, from Pharaoh Cheops and his pyramids to the present, that comes pared of all pork).

House Republican leaders also complain that our rescue package is too heavy on mitigation.

Mitigation is a bureaucratic word for a rather simple concept: If we're going to rebuild, we probably want to think about the future before we start slapping brick on mortar. So in the South and Midwest, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is building quite expensive and quite sensible hurricane shelters. After Hurricane Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers built stronger levees, which prevented a more recent hurricane from re-drowning neighborhoods.

In New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, governors and mayors have in mind an array of measures to assure that the next globally warmed torrent does not again drown their region. This is anathema to House Republicans, particularly as many take the view that the scientific reality of global warming is so much liberal hogwash.

Bob Hardt, the political director for NY1, lives on the Rockaways peninsula, as wonderfully diverse a set of neighborhoods as you'll find in New York, harboring quite a few Republicans. Hurricane Sandy ran over it like a rough rake.

Mr. Hardt wrote recently in his blog of his thoughts as the Republicans in the House turned their backs on his neighborhood: “The peninsula serves as home to firefighters and surf freaks, millionaires and people on welfare, idiots and geniuses. These are people who in one way or another have served their country well and now deserve some help in return.”

It is to Governor Christie's credit that he has given impassioned voice to that disappointment. Whether such honesty carries a political reward for him in the Republican Party is more uncertain.