By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
Ryan Lizza is out with a brutal new piece today on Governor Christie over at The New Yorker, Save Jerseyans, one to which his mentor-turned-chief N.J. GOP critic Tom Kean, Sr. contributed:
“He doesn’t always try to persuade you with reason,” Kean said. “He makes you feel that your life’s going to be very unhappy if you don’t do what he says.” He added that one of Christie’s flaws “is that he makes enemies and keeps them. As long as you’re riding high, they’ll stay in the weeds, because they don’t want to get in your way. But you get in trouble, they’ll all come out of the weeds, and come at you.” Although I didn’t ask, Kean told me that if Christie ran for President he wouldn’t necessarily endorse him. “I haven’t decided whether I’m going to support him or not,” Kean said. “There are a lot of people I don’t know that well”—he mentioned John Kasich, Scott Walker, and Jeb Bush, among other potential 2016 Republican Presidential nominees—“and I’d like to get to know them better.”
This isn’t the first time that the elder Kean expressed icy displeasure with the current chief executive in Trenton.
The Kean/Christie family relationship soured during Election 2013 over strategic differences and came to a head last November when Governor Christie supported an unsuccessful attempt by Senator Kevin O’Toole to replace Kean’s son, Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean, Jr., as the top Republican in the upper chamber.
Lizza’s article doesn’t get any sunnier from there. Click here to read the whole thing. You may not agree with his complete description of the Governor, but it’s hard to dispute the obvious: for many people, Bridgegate upended the post-partisan Christie myth and, in so doing, damaged the strongest pillar of the presidential aspirants’ future campaign.
Bovine Excrement! Please NOT Jeb Bush, we want Rand Paul or Ted Cruz.
Matt, I thought better of you. A conservative blog referring in a positive light to any penned-on-demand manure printed by New Yakker?
I really don’t think “Bridgegate” makes that big a difference outside of New Jersey. But I also don’t think Christie was ever going to be the 2016 Republican Presidential nominee. Why would any non-NJ Republicans support a candidate who could not add a single State Senate or Assembly seat to his 20+ point victory in 2013? Is 2016 just a Presidential election or do we have the House and 1/3 of the Senate up as well? If we want to repeal Obamacare, we need all three entities!