“Christie To CPAC, I’m One Of You”: An Invitation To Mainstream Voters, Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Me
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) carefully cultivated “brand” includes a few key pillars. The first is that he’s a different kind of politician with no use for “politics as usual.” The second is that he’s a tough leader who won’t back down when conditions heat up. And finally, the blue-state Republican has tried to distance himself from much of the extremism that’s come to define contemporary conservatism.
Christie’s multiple, ongoing scandals have effectively destroyed the first pillar. Christie’s approach to governing has knocked down the second, too.
As for the third, the governor threw it out the window with his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) yesterday.
Before digging in, it’s worth appreciating the context. CPAC is generally considered the premier conservative event in the country held every year, and ambitious Republicans are always eager to curry favor with conference attendees. Last year, Christie wasn’t invited – he was deemed insufficiently conservative.
Yesterday, in his first appearance in the national spotlight since his scandals erupted, the governor did his best to make up for lost time. Benjy Sarlin helped capture Christie’s pitch:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie may not always get along with the grassroots right, but he hates the press and thinks President Obama is a failure. Isn’t that enough?
When the governor is making the case for his presidential ambitions, he emphasizes how mainstream he is. When Christie is wooing CPAC, where “mainstream” is a basically a dirty word, he effectively tells the far-right activists that he and they are on the same team.
Mitt Romney’s transition from moderate Republican to conservative champion took a few years. Christie’s trying to play both roles at the same time, hoping audiences don’t notice the contradictions.
The governor’s CPAC message was practically an invitation to mainstream voters to forget everything they thought they knew about him. CPAC Christie wants to take away a woman’s right to choose. CPAC Christie hates the media (which, incidentally, has spent years fawning over the governor and giving him a national profile).
CPAC Christie loves the Koch brothers and considers them “great Americans.” CPAC Christie is certain the United States doesn’t have “an income inequality problem.”
CPAC Christie wants conservatives to believe Democrats are “intolerant” people who refuse to let anti-abortion speakers appear at their national convention (a bizarre claim that is plainly untrue). CPAC Christie got huge applause condemning President Obama for refusing to work with Republicans on debt reduction, which was a rather brazen lie given that Obama has made multiple attempts at a compromise, only to be rebuffed by GOP leaders who refuse to make concessions.
CPAC Christie, in other words, bears no meaningful resemblance to New Jersey Christie.
By most accounts, the governor was well received yesterday, which no doubt gave him a morale boost after months of struggling through several scandals. But in electoral terms, it was a Pyrrhic victory – by moving sharply to the right, Christie satisfied far-right activists and alienated everyone else simultaneously.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 7, 2014
“More Than Traffic Problems”: Chris Christie Having Trouble Moving On From That Bridge Thing
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s plan for getting past “Bridgegate” was to simply get past it. As soon as the emails showing that his aides and allies purposefully created traffic congestion as part of some sort of retribution plot were reported in the press, Christie fired aide Bridget Kelly and Port Authority executive David Wildstein. After taking a day to compose himself (or get his story straight), he held an epic press conference at which he spoke until he could plausibly argue that he had answered every single question reporters had for him. Since then he’s mainly appeared before (suspiciously) friendly town hall audiences. He seems to think he’s done enough to get past the worst of it. Yesterday, Christie told a reporter, “You folks are the only people at the moment who are asking me about this.”
Unfortunately, Kelly and Wildstein are also still talking. They are communicating with us from the distant past (a few months ago) thanks to Wildstein’s very helpful cooperation with New Jersey state legislators investigating the scandal. Wildstein — who has a reputation for being “capable of anything” — looks to be working to undermine his former ally with a steady stream of documents. The most recent batch include a return of the headline-friendly “traffic problems” line.
Kelly and Wildstein were texting last August about prominent New Jersey Rabbi Mendy Carlebach. Carlebach — not exactly a liberal, as he was a chaplain at the 2004 and 2008 Republican National Conventions — had somehow pissed Wildstein off, though it’s unclear how. (Carlebach claims to have no idea what he could’ve done.) And what do Christie’s allies do to people who piss them off? Exactly. Here are the messages, from the Bergen Record (via TPM):
In the texts about the chaplain, Wildstein sent Kelly a picture of Rabbi Mendy Carlebach, later writing: “And he has officially pissed me off.”
“Clearly,” Kelly responded on Aug. 19.
“We cannot cause traffic problems in front of his house, can we?” Kelly wrote.
“Flights to Tel Aviv all mysteriously delayed,” wrote Wildstein, an executive at the bi-state agency that controls the region’s airports.
“Perfect,” Kelly wrote.
These texts took place just a few days after the “time for the traffic problems in Fort Lee” email from Kelly to Wildstein, and a few weeks before the Fort Lee “traffic study” lane closures were carried out. This “traffic problems” suggestion looks to be a joke, and it doesn’t appear that any sort of retribution against Carlebach actually happened, but the fact that the intentional creation of traffic problems was already being treated as a joke between Wildstein and Kelly might indicate that the practice happened more often than just the one time in Fort Lee. (Or else it suggests that they were just so excited about their plan for Fort Lee that they couldn’t shut up about it.)
One thing Chris Christie probably does not want is for text messages like this to continue surfacing in the press weeks after the scandal blew up, while he is in the midst of attempting to convince voters and the press that he and his office have moved past the whole thing. But there is still the threat of more to come. Wildstein’s attorney sent the committee new copies of documents he already disclosed, but with fewer portions redacted, revealing the identities of some of the people he was communicating with. Much is still redacted, but Wildstein could always negotiate to release a bit more. The fact that the target of these messages was a Christie ally, not a small-time Democratic politician, makes them all the more damaging, since part of Christie’s survival strategy rests on having his party and his allies close ranks and declare the investigation a partisan witch-hunt. It’s enough to make a guy wish he hadn’t surrounded himself with incompetent sociopaths.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, February 27, 2014
“GOP’s ‘Damaged-Goods’ Primary”: Why Christie And Walker Are Staring Each Other Down
You’ve got to hand it to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker: He’s enduring his current political troubles defiantly, even going on the offensive this weekend by tweaking New Jersey’s embattled Gov. Chris Christie over Bridgegate. Christie’s troubles are “just beginning,” Walker slyly told reporters at a Republican Governors Association event this weekend, while his own, he claims, are behind him. “A Democrat district attorney looked at it and he’s done. It’s done.” Christie, by contrast, has “ the legislature which is not on his side politically, and they’ll probably drag it out for some time.”
In other words: Scott Walker to big GOP establishment donors: “I’m your guy!”
Typically, though, Walker took his claims a little too far: While one investigation into campaign law violations is closed – after six Walker aides and associates were convicted – another is ongoing. And Walker made a big mistake when he tried to feed his “it’s old news” line about his troubles to Fox News’ Chris Wallace. Wallace shot back: “Because of this dump of 25,000 documents, it’s new news to a lot of the people in the state and it’s been big news in local papers in Wisconsin.” (It was actually 27,000 documents, and they showed, among other things, that Walker’s aides set up a secret email system so campaign workers and Walker’s county employees could coordinate their work.)
Then Wallace set to grilling Walker about details, but it turns out Walker doesn’t do details:
WALLACE: In one email that was released this week, your then chief of staff Thomas Nardelli, let’s put this up on the screen, writes campaign and county workers that you wanted to hold daily conference calls, “to review events of the day or of a previous or future day so we can better coordinate sound timely responses,” and in another e-mail county administrative director Cynthia Archer suggests that colleagues should use a private e-mail account. “I use this private account quite a bit to communicate with SKW,” that’s you, “and Nardelli, the former chief of staff.” Question: if county workers were doing nothing wrong, why should they be using a private e-mail account?
WALKER: Well, but that’s exactly to my point. You had a Democratic district attorney spend almost three years looking at every single one of those communications, interviewing people, talking to people and closed the case.
WALLACE: Did you have your own private e-mail account?
WALKER: It’s one of those where I point out district attorney has reviewed every single one of these issues.
WALLACE: But sir, you’re not answering my question.
WALKER: No, because I’m not going to get into 27,000 different pieces of information.
Maybe Walker can be forgiven for thinking his deflection would be accepted in the friendly confines of Fox, but his dodges were so artless they offended Wallace. Beltway pundits may have declared Walker’s troubles a “snooze,” but Chris Wallace wasn’t snoozing on Sunday.
Still, Walker had a better weekend than his 2016 rival Chris Christie. Although the New Jersey governor has ignored the suggestion that he step down as chair of the Republican Governors Association until his bridge troubles are resolved, he kept an unusually low profile as the nation’s governors gathered in Washington this weekend. He only appeared at a couple of official events, seeming “uncharacteristically quite and reserved,” according to Time magazine, and he ditched the media the whole weekend, as he has since his two-hour pity party/press conference over a month ago.
Christie didn’t attend either Sunday night’s White House dinner or Monday’s meeting with the president. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was slated to lead the Republican delegation visiting Obama as well as the closing press conference. Jindal’s own 2016 hopes have been dashed by his unpopularity in Louisiana, but maybe that’s a sign of Bobbymentum.
So far I’d have to say that Walker is surviving his scandal with more aplomb than Christie, but it’s not over. That other John Doe investigation, into whether Walker’s recall campaign illegally coordinated with outside right-wing groups that flooded the state with money, continues. Reporters and Democratic operatives continue to delve into those 27,000 documents released last week. Walker is brazenly asserting that voters have no right to know more about his staff’s secret email system or other oddities in the new emails, including the racism of his top aides. He seems to think that “unindicted” is the same as “unscathed.” But most people have higher standards than that for their governor and their president.
When even Fox News doesn’t accept that Walker’s troubles are “old news,” that’s bad news for Scott Walker 2016.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, February 24, 2014
“Not Ready For Prime Time”: E-mails, Charges, Probes! Chris Christie? No, Scott Walker
The political and pundit class loves to identify “outsider” candidates for the presidency, looking in particular to governors who have not been tarnished by the compromises and corruptions of Washington. But the trouble with being an “outsider” candidate is that, eventually, you face the same sort of scrutiny as the insiders.
Just as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie suffered a blow when the media started to examine the extent to which he mingled politics and governing, so Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is now taking a hit that will inspire serious doubts—even among his admirers—about whether he is ready for the political prime time.
The release of 27,000 pages of e-mails from the seized computers of a former Walker aide who has since been convicted of political wrongdoing, along with more than 400 documents from the first of two major probes into scandals associated with Walker’s service as Milwaukee County executive and his gubernatorial campaigns, is shining new light on the extent to which the controversial governor’s legal, ethical and political troubles will make his transition to the national stage difficult.
The e-mails offer a powerful sense of how Walker and his aides appeared to have blurred the lines between official duties and campaigning when he was seeking the governorship in 2010—taking actions that would eventually lead to the convictions of key aides. Walker, who has steered hundreds of thousands of dollars from his campaign account into a legal defense fund, has not been charged with wrongdoing himself. But the e-mails and legal documents paint a picture of an elected official who was so focused on political positioning that he felt it necessary to order daily conference calls to “better coordinate” between aides in his Milwaukee County Executive office and campaign staff.
Walker’s county aides used a secret e-mail routing system to coordinate campaign events and fundraising, and to trash the woman who would eventually serve as Walker’s lieutenant governor as “the bane of your existence.” They circulated crude, sometimes racist messages. And as news outlets sifted through the e-mails, they found one from a top Walker appointee, administration director Cynthia Archer, telling another aide who had accessed the secret network that she was now “in the inner circle.” “I use this private account quite a bit to communicate with SKW…” wrote Archer.
Scott Kevin Walker identified himself on e-mails as “SKW.” Indeed, among the thousands of e-mails released Wednesday was one from a top Walker aide—Tim Russell, who has since been convicted and hailed. In it, he forwards a link to video of Chris Christie yelling at a reporter with the line: “skw should talk like this.”
The largest paper in Wisconsin, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which endorsed the governor in the past, featured a banner headline on its Thursday edition that read: “Records Link Walker to Secret Email System.”
Walker—who the e-mails reveal thought “9 out of 10 requests [from reporters] are going to be traps” and ordered his county aides to generate “positive and bold stories”—was scrambling Wednesday to dismiss the download of e-mails and legal documents as “old news.” A particularly defensive governor griped about all the attention to the e-mails and documents, saying, “these people are naysayers who want things bad to happen in Wisconsin so they are going to be circling again today. It’s exactly what’s wrong with the political process that they’re hoping for something bad to happen in Wisconsin. It’s not.”
At the same time, the Republican Governors Association—which is chaired by Christie—made a six-figure television ad buy in Wisconsin to protect the governor’s position in a 2014 re-election race where polls show him leading but with support levels below 50 percent.
The e-mails and documents—which media outlets have sought for months—were released by a judge dealing with ongoing legal wrangling over the conviction of former Walker aide Kelly Rindfleisch for misconduct in public office.
Rindfleisch did not just work for Walker before he was elected governor. She was also associated with him after he took his state post, as a key fund-raiser who traveled with the governor while he raised money nationally. And her name has been linked to a new John Doe probe that reportedly has focused on wrongdoing by individuals and groups that backed the governor’s 2012 campaign to beat a recall vote.
That’s not exactly “old news.” And it comes at a particularly unfortunate moment for Walker, who cannot have been happy with a Wednesday Washington Post headline that read: “Scott Walker, eyeing 2016, faces fallout from probes as ex-aide’s e-mails are released,” and “E-mails may spell trouble for Scott Walker.” Or a Thursday New York Times report that said the emails and documents portray Walker as “having presided over an office where aides used personal computers and email to conceal that they were mixing government and campaign business.”
There’s no question that Walker wants to be considered as a contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Even as he seeks re-election this year, he has been busy touring a new book that conservative commentators say “reads like one gigantic presidential trial balloon,” making the rounds of the same talk shows once frequented by Christie, and maintaining a relentless schedule of national appearances to aid Republican candidates and raise money.
With one-time GOP front-runner Christie mired in scandal, pundits who don’t know much about Walker like to imagine that he might be the next “shiny penny” for Republicans seeking a candidate from outside Washington.
But Walker’s national prospects have never looked as good as his admirers imagine. Even after Christie’s downfall, the Wisconsinite was wrestling with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal for last place in most state and national polls of likely Republican caucus and primary voters.
Now, just as Christie faces fallout from an aide’s revealing e-mails, so Walker faces fallout from an aide’s revealing e-mails. The circumstances may be different, and Walker has certainly tried to present himself as a less politically contentious figure than the governor of New Jersey. But when the headlines in Washington are talking about a governor facing “fallout from probes,” and the governor in question is not Chris Christie, there’s a good chance that even the most ardent Republicans will start noticing the tarnish on their shiny penny.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, February 19, 2014
“Move Over Chris Christie”: Is Yet Another GOP 2016 Contender Flaming Out?
They say that misery loves company, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) may soon have a friend who can sympathize with seeing a 2016 presidential campaign threatened by a tawdry political scandal.
On Wednesday, more than 27,000 emails were released from a now closed investigation into alleged illegal activity by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) 2010 election campaign. Though Walker himself was never charged with anything, the new documents for the first time tie him directly to his staff’s shady campaign dealings, an embarrassing blow that could hinder his re-election bid this year and dampen his appeal as an establishment alternative come 2016.
A quick recap on how we got here.
Back in 2010, when Walker was still the Milwaukee County executive, his staff established a secret wireless network in the county office to coordinate strategy with his political campaign. Because such coordination is illegal in Wisconsin when done on the taxpayers’ dime, a probe into the effort resulted in convictions for six of Walker’s former aides and allies, including his former deputy chief of staff, Kelly Rindfleisch, who pleaded guilty in 2012 to a felony for her role.
Walker, meanwhile, came through unscathed — until now, that is.
According to the newly released emails, the investigation into the Walker campaign’s misconduct widened one day before the 2012 election, with raids targeting Walker’s campaign office, the Milwaukee County executive office, and the homes of some Walker staffers. As for that secret wireless router, the emails provide the first direct indication that Walker knew about it.
From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
“Consider yourself now in the ‘inner circle,'” Walker’s administration director, Cynthia Archer, wrote to Walker aide Kelly Rindfleisch just after the two exchanged a test message.
“I use this private account quite a bit to communicate with SKW and Nardelli. You should be sure you check it throughout the day,” she wrote, referring to Walker by his initials and to Walker’s chief of staff, Tom Nardelli. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]
Now, the emails do not prove that Walker actually used the secret network while on the county clock. And many of the details in the unsealed emails have been known for some time. Still, the negative headlines they’re generating — and the subsequent investigative reports they’re bound to spawn — are a stain on the resume of someone many believed to be the GOP establishment’s next best hope after Bridgegate tarnished Christie’s once-glorious political career.
Christie’s downfall is an apt parallel.
Though Christie hasn’t been tied directly to the politically motivated traffic scandal, his aides and appointees have. That leaves just two conclusions to draw about Christie himself: Either he’s lying or he surrounded himself with devious incompetents over whom he had little control. Neither interpretation reflects favorably on a chief executive’s character.
So while Christie is innocent (so far) of any personal wrongdoing, his popularity has taken a massive hit.
That’s the same problem now facing Walker. The governor could still be found guilty in the court of public opinion of poor judgment for hiring law-skirting staffers. Indeed, the Democratic National Committee and local Democratic operatives are now lumping the two governors together under one big umbrella of shame.
“This wasn’t the work of a few rogue staffers,” Michael Czin, a DNC spokesman, said in a statement, “this was a coordinated effort that goes right to the top.”
“Just like in New Jersey, top aides used taxpayer resources to push a political agenda,” he added. “And just like Chris Christie, Scott Walker has a lot of questions to answer.”
The emails support that claim, to a certain extent. One correspondence shows that Walker instructed a top aide to coordinate a daily conference call between county and campaign staff. Again, though that doesn’t implicate Walker in any illegal activity, it suggests he might have encouraged it in his underlings.
Walker’s problems don’t end there, either. As the Huffington Post noted, the emails also revealed that Walker once wanted to fire a doctor because she used to be a thong model, a tale that would be perfect fodder for Democrats who want to trot out their effective “War on Women” message. And the emails also contained a racist, homophobic chain message about a fictional nightmare. (Punch line: “I can handle being a black, disabled, one-armed, drug-addicted, Jewish, homosexual… but please, Oh dear God, don’t tell me I’m a Democrat!”)
Meanwhile, Walker’s recall campaign committee — the governor defeated an attempt to remove him from office in 2012, which is what earned him the national spotlight to begin with — is believed to be the subject of a second, ongoing investigation. Depending on what that investigation finds, Walker could be in for yet another round of awful coverage.
The symmetry between Walker and Christie’s tales is remarkable. Both involve a prominent GOP governor with presumed White House ambitions allegedly using his office for underhanded political machinations. And in both cases, the governor claimed innocence and ignorance of his staff’s misdeeds.
That excuse didn’t work for Christie, and there’s no reason to believe it will work any better for Walker.
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, February 20, 2014
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