Ambitious candidates are crowding the approach to the presidential campaign runway. Hillary Clinton has rented two floors of a Brooklyn office building. U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) made a formal announcement this Tuesday, two weeks after his Texas colleague, Ted Cruz, made a well-received speech kicking off his bid. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) is expected to launch his bid April 13th.
Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO and unsuccessful 2010 California Senate candidate, is expected to jump in soon, having made favorable impressions by talking tough on what she portrays as Clinton’s gossamer record of accomplishments. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, on the other hand, has seen his prospects deflate. Familiarity is proving a burden for Christie’s presidential prospects. He hopes to revive his standing among the faithful with some town hall meetings in New Hampshire next week.
The candidates are not the only ones getting busy. Those practitioners of the dark art of the takedown, opposition researchers, are enjoying the start of the presidential campaign season. Those political gumshoes mine lethal information about rival candidates, plant their findings with the public, and leave no fingerprints.
Expect to see Christie first on the griddle if he begins to move voters in New Hampshire. He is an irresistible target for professional mischief makers. Mitt Romney’s team tried to give a thorough vetting of Christie as a possible running mate in 2012. Prying standard information out of the palace guard around Christie was a frustrating experience for Romney’s professional team. Poking around the many mysteries of Chris Christie proved one of the unexpected frustrations of the Romney campaign.
Republicans have been warned. Christie will not be able to withstand the searing spotlight that a presidential campaign trains on a serious hopeful. The Christie buffet of unsavory dishes includes the Michele Brown problem. It’s closer to a Clintonesque bimbo eruption than Republicans will want to get.
Brown was a top aide to Christie when he was United States Attorney for New Jersey. In 2007, Christie lent Brown $46,000 that he failed to report in mandatory state and federal ethics filings. When the loan and Christie’s failure to report it—all while he was scrutinizing and prosecuting others over ethics violations—came to light during his 2009 bid for governor, Christie explained that he was helping loyalist Brown with expenses after her husband lost his job.
The Brown loan is a thread rivals will not resist giving a few tugs. Where the two went together on business and the details of their travel arrangements will be fair game. Christie has plenty of detractors who will be pleased to provide a drip, drip, drip of details and leads. Christie relishes taking a good old pop at a target. A presidential campaign provides endless opportunities for them to hit back.
A tiresome know it all like Christie makes a lot of enemies. They will delight in expanding on the emerging narrative of Christie’s avarice. There’s his “friendship’ with autocratic King Abdullah of Jordan. The Hashemite monarch sprang for a $30,000 weekend for Christie and his family in 2012. Luxurious gifts in these high profile new friendships always flow from the rich friend to the public official, never the other way.
It was the same with Christie’s ill-considered January trip to a Dallas Cowboys playoff game, compliments of team owner Jerry Jones. It was the sort of flagrant display of entitlement that puts off voters and provides memorable visuals for damaging negative ads. It could be enough to cause the Republican faithful to conclude that Christie has trouble balancing his impulse to gorge on privilege with the sense of propriety the public expects in a presidential prospect.
Christie’s taste for private luxury may garner enough early attention that voters won’t get to offer a verdict on the thugs around him who stopped traffic on the George Washington Bridge in 2013 to punish a local mayor. Christie may never get to explain his record in New Jersey, where the economy lags as the public pension burden grows more alarming. No wonder the governor’s approval rating has plummeted at home.
Plenty of operatives are working to make sure those approval numbers do not recover in the presidential contest, but you may never know their names.
