His White House ambitions over, Christie slouching toward end of term
The television show “Everybody Hates Chris” had no new episodes after 2009, but New Jersey voters are embracing a revived version whose working title could be “Just About Everybody Hates Chris.” This Chris is Chris Christie, the most unpopular New Jersey governor in modern history, according to opinion surveys.
The polling institutes of Quinnipiac and Monmouth Universities are barely able to detect his political pulse. In recent weeks, both put his approval rating in the state at a meager 15 percent and his disapproval rating at 80 percent or higher. Even fellow Republicans are holding their noses, with less than a third of them offering approval. And a Morning Consult poll on Tuesday found him to be the least popular governor in the entire country.
It is a stunning reversal for a man who, having won re-election in 2013 with more than 60 percent of the vote, dreamed the White House could be next. Now, with his statehouse days dwindling down, he is slouching toward the exit.
He even spent two days last week auditioning for a host job on WFAN, the sports talk radio station. What passes for Christie charm came through on air, as when he dismissed an unfriendly caller as “a bum” and one of those “communists” from Montclair, N.J., or when he pronounced Hillary Clinton “a criminal.” A week earlier, he offended many New Jerseyans by sunbathing with his family on a state beach that he had put off-limits to everyone else while he fought with lawmakers over the budget.
There’s no question, though, Chris loves Chris. Whatever the issue, Christie manages to make it about himself. His constituents have obviously wearied of it, including the 500-plus days he spent out of state in his fruitless pursuit of higher office. They’re tired of feeling like the backdrop to his ambition. Many also remain appalled by the 2013 George Washington Bridge lane closings — payback to the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee for not supporting Christie’s re-election campaign.
The governor insists he had no hand in that scandal. Nonetheless, his underlings plainly thought that making the daily commute a misery for thousands of people would ingratiate themselves with the boss — a point reinforced recently in a federal courtroom in Newark, where David Wildstein, a “Bridgegate” plotter, was sentenced to three years’ probation. Wildstein told the judge that he so wanted to please the governor that “I thoughtlessly followed his hubris.”
There are more substantive reasons for New Jerseyans to be upset with Christie, not the least of them being his 2010 decision to block a desperately needed train tunnel under the Hudson River to Manhattan. In this summer of regional transit torment, the possibility that the tunnel could have now been nearing completion has to gall many of the state’s commuters. A new tunnel project, Gateway, is on the drawing board, and the governor supports this one. But whether the Trump administration will provide the federal money to make it happen is unclear.
Christie can’t even be sure he will make it as a radio host. After his tryout, he grumbled that he had been given “the two worst sports days of the year,” with no regular baseball games scheduled because of the All-star break. As with most things Christie these days, the audition ended not with a bang but a whimper.