Maureen on Christie

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/opinion/dowd-man-in-the-mirror.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

Man in the Mirror
By MAUREEN DOWD


WASHINGTON

The unlikely femme fatale from Jersey sashayed into a Trenton news conference and broke a lot of hearts. (Not Snooki’s or Barry’s, of course.)

Watching Chris Christie hold forth for an hour, it’s hard to know whether you want to hug him or slap him. There’s something both lovable and irritating about the man.

It’s not the puffed up body that’s off-putting. It’s the puffed up ego.

He skipped the line that he was not ready to be president and made it clear that, oh, yeah, he’s tremendous and just the right guy to make sure Obama is “a one-termer,” but he can’t be in a romance with mooning Republicans and back-on-the-market independents just now.

He’s still involved with his state — “New Jersey, whether you like it or not, you’re stuck with me” — and doesn’t want to be a dilettante quitter like Sarah Palin.

The Uncontained Christie asserted that Contained Obama has “failed the leadership test.” But the feet-of-clay president benefits from Republican erotomania about the New Jersey governor; all that unfulfilled longing underscores the inadequacy of the G.O.P. field.

Tuesday’s show was designed to be a humble bow off the larger stage for the large governor. But it bristled with his large ego.

Asked about criticism that’s he’s too liberal for his party, he shot back: “That’s when I knew that I could actually win, when all these people started shooting at me before I even got in the race.”

Some pundits and Obama advisers suggested that Christie’s weight made him undisciplined. But he was disciplined enough to resist the siren song of a premature presidential bid. “When you get in this whirlwind a little bit,” he said, you begin to “lose your bearings a little bit.”

We’re fated to yearn for qualities in presidents that we found missing in the last one, so Americans are intrigued by unpolished, unvarnished, impolitic, knock-some-heads-together, passionate, chesty, even hefty.

When Barack Obama burst onto the scene, his lithe frame signaled youth and energy and modernity. He seemed well-read and well-briefed, yet he traveled light, with an airy gait and a sleek look. He nibbled at food and drank Black Forest Berry Honest Tea, avoiding all the campaign junk the rest of us inhaled.

But now his asceticism seems more like a reflection of his cherished membership in the technocratic priesthood — and an unnerving mirror of our starving economy. He’s an egghead who surrounds himself with eggheads, even when they have helped wreck the economy he’s trying to save.

Christie looks less interested in eggheads than eggs Benedict with a side of hash browns and bacon. The Republican’s girth seems reassuring in lean times.Studies have shown that during slumping economies, men may find plumper women more attractive. So why shouldn’t financially stressed voters find plumper pols more appealing?

The message from new books by Ron Suskind and Jeffrey Sachs, and from the proliferating Wall Street protesters, seems to be that President Obama is a captive of the banks who pursued policies that helped the very richest people in the country.

Americans who have been hurt want to identify the villains, and Obama is loath to target villains.

Christie can be a bully, but that may seem better than the alternative: a president who lets himself be bullied, and who lets the bullies run wild.

The Jersey governor loves to identify villains, from state legislators resisting his will (“drunks”) to teachers resisting a pay freeze (“using children for political purposes”) to pundits criticizing his weight (“just ignorant”).

Like W., he teases reporters in a sort of humiliating way. When one reporter at Tuesday’s press conference said he wanted to ask a question on another topic, Christie did his lighthearted, pistol-whipping thing: “No, no, you screwed around, and now you’re out,” before returning to the reporter later.

As Andrew Romano wrote in Newsweek last year, Christie’s background as a prosecutor instilled a Manichaean instinct: “Christie’s strategy is to use the power of the bully pulpit to make his opponents look foolish. They are the villains; he is the hero.”

People are longing for a president who can understand their pain, mix it up and get action — not one who averts his gaze, avoids conflict, delegates to Congress, wastes time hunting for common ground, cedes the moon to opponents and fails to get anywhere.

Our nuanced president sticks to gray, while the no-nonsense governor, as Joe Scarborough noted, “paints in primary colors.”

Christie said he spent the weekend trying to “see whether I could look in the mirror and make that call.” Now that he has opted out, he says he’s going to “tear off the rearview mirror.”

The same can’t be said for jilted, lovesick Republicans, scraping the bottom of the barrel and turning their lonely eyes to Eric Cantor.