The Weighty Governor Of New Jersey


Grudgingly- without admitting he had done wrong or wouldn't do the same in the future- Chris Christie has agreed to join the state Republican Party in reimbursing New Jersey $3,383.79 for two personal trips he recently took.

Nevertheless, reports The Wall Street Journal

The Christie administration will not release complete flight records for State Police helicopter trips taken by the governor, logs that were routinely released upon request by past administrations – including earlier in Gov. Chris Christie’s term, his spokeswoman said.

The New Jersey governor and his wife, Mary Pat Christie, had been flown the 102 miles to their son's baseball game in northern New Jersey by a state police helicopter, which landed in a nearby football field. Then, reports the Star Ledger, "Christie disembarked from the helicopter and got into a black car with tinted windows that drove him about a 100 yards to the baseball field."

Notwithstanding the Governor's excuse that he just had to make the trip to fulfill his "responsibility as a father," the Christies left the game in the fifth inning. The luxury automobile ferried them the 100 yards to the helicopter so they could be returned to the governor's mansion in Princeton, NJ to meet with campaign donors from Iowa trying to get the governor to jump into the presidential race.

The entire report, though, must be a figment of the imagination of the liberal press or at least a vicious distortion. For it was in October, 2009, during Christie's gubernatorial campaign against the incumbent Democrat, Jon Corzine, that The New York Times informed us:

It is about as subtle as a playground taunt: a television ad for Gov. Jon S. Corzine shows his challenger, Christopher J. Christie, stepping out of an S.U.V. in extreme slow motion, his extra girth moving, just as slowly, in several different directions at once.

In case viewers missed the point, a narrator snidely intones that Mr. Christie “threw his weight around” to avoid getting traffic tickets.

In the ugly New Jersey contest for governor, Mr. Corzine and Mr. Christie have traded all sorts of shots, over mothers and mammograms, loans and lying. But now, Mr. Corzine’s campaign is calling attention to his rival’s corpulence in increasingly overt ways.

Mr. Corzine’s television commercials and Web videos feature unattractive images of Mr. Christie, sometimes shot from the side or backside, highlighting his heft, jowls and double chin.

Meanwhile, Mr. Corzine, 62, is conspicuously running in 5- and 10-kilometer races almost every weekend, as he did last Saturday and Sunday, underscoring his athleticism and readiness for the physical demands of another term — and raising doubts about Mr. Christie’s.

Next, he and a fellow fitness buff, Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark, will run through the streets of that city together next Tuesday.

The governor denies that he is deliberately ridiculing Mr. Christie’s weight, and tries to make light of such suggestions. “There isn’t a candidate in the world that likes how they’re depicted in their opponent’s ads,” Mr. Corzine said on Friday, smiling as he lamented that some have shown his bald pate. “Seems to be some sensitivity going on here.”

Well, now we have our answer. First, the question of figuratively throwing weight around was settled after Christie threw his weight around to get out of traffic tickets; twice turned down federal money for women's health services with a 9:1 federal:state match; took federal money for a transportation project and after nixing the project, refused to return the funding; and at least twice (here and here) publicly humiliated teachers-constituents.... and proudly puts some of this stuff up on his own YouTube channel.

But we have the answer also to the charge that Christie literally throws his weight around- or at least is hampered by it. Having a chance to walk a mere 10http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif0 yards, the New Jersey governor instead has his security detail drive him there in grandiose style, notwithstanding the inevitable embarrassment to his teen-age son, the pitcher.

Is it really too difficult to walk 100 yards? Apparently, it is if you're Chris Christie, a man who whines that those big, bad Democrats are making fun of his weight (although, ironically, they probably were not) but decides not to make the tiniest effort New Jerseyans, and all Americans, routinely do. Chris Christie: a man who views himself as a weighty individual, figuratively and literally.

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