NJ Today

Christie Todd Christie's bobbing & weaving

Ask someone about Christie Todd Christie's position on any issue and you are likely to come up with a dumb answer, because until this point we have yet to hear where the former Bush-appointee stands. His campaign has sought to elude specifics by ducking debates and using many words to say very little about substance.

That is why it is perplexing to hear that Christie would be a worthy challenger against Corzine after having predicted that Lonegan will emerge as the GOP nominee. I do not agree with Lonegan on a long list of issues, but I can at least respect his integrity and determination.

Christie bores me to sleep. Corrupt and incompetent Gov. Jon Corzine will easily defeat the liberal Republican because New Jerseyans will not get excited over nothing.

Here are seven issues that are guaranteed to sink Christie's general election campaign:

1. He bought a job in the Bush administration by raising $500,000 for the 2000 Republican presidential campaign, including a good deal of that from within his own family.

2. He gave former Attorney General John Ashcroft a no-bid monitoring contract worth $25 to $50 million.

3. He gave another no-bid monitoring contract worth $10 million to a law firm whose partners then returned the favor by giving his campaign $25,000 in donations and raising thousands more from clients and other contacts.

4. He gave yet another no-bid monitoring contract worth $5 million to the former federal prosecutor in New York who decided not to indict Christie's brother Todd, although it seems Todd Christie (that is his real name) did exactly the same or worse as the 14 people who were indicted for the kind of stock market manipulation, which caused the current national economic crisis.

5. He gave a woman involved with trafficking 14-year-old girls for prostitution a plea bargain that resulted in five years probation.

6. He broke all sorts of rules to get his name off a list of US Attorneys targeted for firing by the Bush administration because they did not give Republicans a partisan advantage by persecuting Democrats; and his name dropped off the list when he made a particularly public probe of US Sen. Bob Menendez during his 2006 campaign, even though no charges resulted from that media-rich investigation.

7. Christie is named in a federal tort claim lawsuit charging that as US Attorney, he used his federal power to coerce a party to a civil lawsuit in which the plaintiff had previously been represented by Christie in his private practice.



Of course, I can call him "Christie Todd Christie" because he represents the same liberal wing of the Republican Party that has been exterminated in much of the United States and as conservative Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine said, he stands "a little to the right of Corzine" in much the same manner as ever-popular ex-Gov. Christie Todd Whitman.

Christie's bobbing & weaving seems to make sense, because if Republicans think about their primary election choices, his sinking will take place a few months earlier than New Jersey's political establishment has planned.