Forget his divisive politics or the fact that he has a reputation for being a bully: this week, people are discussing whether at about 300 pounds, New Jersey governor Chris Christie is simply too heavy to win a presidential election.
Yes, William Howard Taft outweighed him probably by about 30 pounds –but Taft ran for president well before the media age, before a candidate’s image and appearance were as important as they are today.
During the last gubernatorial election, one of Christie’s opponents ran an ad in which Christie was accused of “throwing his weight around,” accompanied by a clip of Christie emerging from a car, in super slo-mo, his belly struggling to stay in sync with the rest of his body. (Way to stay classy, New Jersey)
I’m wondering whether anybody knows… When the President travels to campaign for, say, a gubernatorial candidate, who pays for the Air Force 1 expenses, security for the President, police overtime onsite, etc?
And just for the record, I can’t speak for Virginia, but no matter what you might hear, the New Jersey election was not a referendum on either Obama or the Democratic Party: it was a referendum on Jon Corzine. When New Jerseyans went into the voting booth yesterday, Barack Obama was the last thing on our minds: We were too busy holding our noses as we decided whether the thought of reelecting Jon Corzine was distasteful for us to vote for Chris Christie.
Personally, I voted for Chris Daggett, since in this case voting for the third party candidate wasn’t taking a vote away from any decent candidate. He had me at “I’m not Corzine or Christie.”
As it happens, despite recent polls predicting up to 20% of the vote for Daggett, he ended up with about 5%. Which means, God help us, New Jerseyans got the governor we deserve.
I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m amused by the fact that New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie’s official website has a link to his ”88 Ways Chris Christie will fix New Jersey” list, and the link is broken (it links to an older, no-longer-existing page called “79 Ways…”; the new page was a new name, but nobody thought to change the link that’s supposed to lead to it).
I guess that’s the 89th thing that should be fixed.
