Clown Time Is Over: Christie Leaves Jersey Commuters in the Cold

To start the new work year, I waited 40 minutes in sub-freezing temperatures for a bus, any bus, with an empty seat to take me on my morning trip into the Port Authority building in midtown Manhattan.

But when you get right down to it, Chris Christie left fellow New Jersey commuters in the cold for his entire eight years in office—not only waiting in vain for service that could respond to events in the 21^st century, but just to maintain levels already achieved.

In his final weeks on the job, New Jersey’s governor has gone public with his annoyance at successor Phil Murphy for posing with a large cutout photo of Christie in his infamous beach image from this past summer. (“It sends a really terrible message to people about if you say you want to bring people together.”)

Too damn bad, I say. After years of public service, you’d think that Christie would have long since developed a hide thick enough to match his belly—particularly since he has been so adept at pouring on his critics scorn as thick as his holiday turkey gravy.

I hold no brief for Murphy, who, in his year-long media saturation campaign, took a page out of fellow plutocrat Jon Corzine’s electoral playbook.
 
But give Murphy points for recognizing that the state’s infrastructure is a disaster; for starting his own “Time’s Up” movement by warning low-accomplishment, high-salaried appointees that they should be seeking other work soon; and for pointing to the person who, more than any other in the state’s dismal quarter-century of recent transportation history, is responsible: Christie.

Over a year ago, I identified Christie as a leading member of the “Pig Pen” of conservative GOP officeholders, commentators and operatives who aided the rise of Donald Trump. For that craven attempt to curry favor with the Chaos President, he will bear the full brunt of historians’ judgment.

‘Sad,’ ‘Pathetic’—and a Punchline

But in the meantime, with a 15% approval rating (lower than even his sorry predecessor Corzine), New Jerseyans have already delivered their own judgment of Christie’s (mis)leadership. Increasingly, that judgment can be summed up in words often used in the tweets of the GOP nominee he endorsed sooner than any other governor in the nation: “sad” and “pathetic.”

The cause of his fall was also the reason behind his abysmal transportation record: his headlong, misbegotten campaign for the Presidency, a pursuit that not only was a waste of time but catnip to late-night comics. He went from a colossus in his state—an incumbent who swamped his hapless rival in his 2013 re-election campaign—to a figure of derision. 

By the end of the first week of February 2016, he had made 190 stops in New Hampshire to secure a primary win in that state, more than any other candidate, according to NECN's candidate tracker. While he was away, his energy was distracted as the legislature squabbled over how to adequately fund a nearly broke fund to repair state roads.

Even before rivals such as Trump took a swipe at him as an absentee governor, New Jerseyans had come to the same conclusion. The suspension of his Presidential campaign, in the vain hope that Trump would dangle a significant post in his administration, left him the most broken of lame ducks for nearly two years before he left office.

Nobody had dared cross him while he was riding high. After his campaign crashed, nobody could stop deriding him. (As one example among many, David Letterman: "Governor Christie was asked, 'Do you think this will hurt your chances of being president of the United States?’ And he said, 'Hey, we'll close that bridge when we come to it.'")

The governor is a famous Bruce Springsteen fan. But in his final 24 hours leading the state, he should heed not “Born to Run” but another tune by a Seventies rocker: Elvis Costello’s “Clown Time Is Over.”

Bridgegate Didn’t Start Christie’s Transportation Mess

A post of mine from four years ago on Bridgegate reviewed that rank abuse of power in the light of two other Christie transportation failures: 

*dropping the ARC Tunnel project under the Hudson—not just a project he previously backed in talks with the Obama administration, but one that was already funded, under construction and desperately needed to relieve traffic congestion. However, pathologically tax-averse GOP primary voters needed to be appeased at all costs. (The full consequences of terminating ARC won’t be appreciated until 2020, when Amtrak begins closing the existing tunnels for repairs. Christie had better hope that, with the resulting delays, he doesn’t have a job that calls for him to cross the Hudson—or to pass irate fellow commuters with long memories along the way.)

*defending a New Jersey Transit system that failed to take into account the impact of climate change—and watching as 300 railcars, one quarter of its fleet, were damaged by Hurricane Sandy.

But we now know, due to the media that Christie and Donald Trump have scorned as much as they have courted, that these failures were part of a larger, system-wide breakdown facilitated by the outgoing governor and his spineless minions:

*Using funds for a purpose unintended by legislation. Christie leaned hard on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to shift money intended for the ARC Tunnel project to rehabilitate the Pulaski Skyway and two other state roads, all so that he would not enrage GOP Presidential primary voters by raising the state gas tax or state voters by raiding the transportation trust fund. The reasoning behind it was a bald-faced lie: that these roads provided direct “access” to the Lincoln Tunnel. (Take out a map and see if you agree.) The Securities and Exchange Commission saw through the ruse, and last month, after a lengthy investigation, fined the Port Authority $400,000 for the fiscal diversion. 

*Allowing nationwide models of efficiency to deteriorate. Some of my readers are, like me, old enough to recall when New Jersey Transit had an admirable record of on-time performance. Not anymore. According to a March 2017 Bloomberg News report, the agency’s railroad has the most accidents and safety fines among its peers. 

*Stocking an agency with unqualified cronies. Christie’s aspirations for higher office—not just President, but also Attorney-General, chief of staff and even transition head for Trump—unraveled because of the machinations of one such patronage dump, David Wildstein, a high-level Christie appointee to the Port Authority who concocted the insanely vindictive Bridgegate scheme. But the Port Authority, we now know, was not the only institution that he used to install allies and undermine its mission. Two weeks before Christie was due to leave office, the Bergen Record reported that NJ Transit hired or promoted 10 of the governor’s staffers at a time when it couldn’t retain veteran employees necessary to operate the system safely and reliably. The draining of the latter talent pool gave other states an edge in creating advanced transportation systems that will serve the long-term interests of citizens—even while New Jerseyans must struggle right now with delays and cancellations so severe in the New Jersey Transit system that some frustrated commuters are even floating the idea of refunds. In the early postwar period, GOP anti-labor advocates helped popularize the term featherbedding as a term of opprobrium for union "make-work" sinecures. But, by appropriating the idea for his own purposes, the outgoing Republican governor of the Garden State deserves a similar neologism in his honor: Christie-bedding.

 

*Putting lipstick on the Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) pig. True, long lines at DMV locations were a constant under the direction of prior New Jersey governors of both parties. Christie’s solution? A name change for the institution, to the Motor Vehicle Commission (MVC), and a vow to use computers to streamline operations. Those who sensed something amiss were right: the new name was a public-relations move leading to no upgrade in efficiency, a state of affairs that quickly became apparent when that new-fangled technology…failed to work. In the meantime, several state inspection and license/registration offices had closed, forcing motorists to travel miles away to locations with lines even longer than what existed before. By August 2016, Christie was calling these continuing failures “unacceptable” and vowing immediate action—a statement pretty rich, because he already had done so much by himself to worsen their condition.

In an odd way, this perhaps least-noticed aspect of Christie’s mismanagement of the state’s transportation needs ties back to his most famous one. Lost amid the round of accusations cascading around Bridgegate was another by Elizabeth Mayor Christian Bollwage that the Christie administration took an ax to an MVC location in his city—the fourth largest in the state—in 2010 as retribution for opposing such administration initiatives as an annual cap on budget and property tax hikes.

The Christie administration denied the charge four years ago. But the modus operandi of Bridgegate—i.e, using an element of the transportation system as a tool for political vengeance—may have gotten its first tentative, small-scale tryout here.

Untruth and Consequences

Already serious, the consequences of Christie’s malign neglect of state commuters will likely become dire in the not-so-distant future. That Gateway project agreement he trumpeted as a better deal for the state? It’s already unraveling. Christie was too busy jumping on planes carrying him to Iowa and New Hampshire voters to explain to his own constituents how the $13 billion Gateway tunnel would have been a better financial deal than the $8.7 billion one already in place for ARC. 

(Oh, and those potential cost overruns he cited as a reason for killing ARC? He never bothered to say how Gateway--to be started, at best, several years later--would not avoid incurring the same unanticipated add-on costs.)

But now, the Federal Transit Administration has thrown cold water on a recent funding proposal by New York and New Jersey for the first phase of the project that would have the federal government take on half of that portion of the bill. 

Tell me, Faithful Reader: Will the self-proclaimed “Builder President” aid his--ahem, biggest--early supporter by defying a red-state base on Capitol Hill with no interest at all in helping along anything related to the Eastern Seaboard—particularly anything within a paragraph of the words “mass transit” and “taxes”?

For a governor who throughout his two terms rated himself highly for management efficiency, a pro-business attitude and concern for the middle class, Christie failed spectacularly in overseeing the state’s transportation needs because he and his top appointees—who, once can be sure, do not take public transportation from out of state to their jobs-- could not understand the centrality of transportation to business site selection decisions. To start with, millennials are more comfortable in using public transportation than other age groups, and attracting and retaining young talent is a priority for businesses. 

But even for other age cohorts, every half hour that a worker loses in stalled traffic means higher stress that finds its cost in heightened medical expenses and family fractures. That same half hour in traffic for businesses spells lost productivity.

It is debatable whether, as Barack Obama contended, "elections have consequences." But the Christie Administration went a long way toward proving that all forms of untruth do.

The biggest lie was that Christie was a responsible guardian of the public's money. For a while, he got away with pursuing a selfish short-lived run for the Presidency that sacrificed the long-term public interest, and with parking his own loyaltists at the public trough. 

But it all caught up with him in the end, and now it's Christie who can see no future in either Trenton or Washington. Cold comfort on this night to the citizens he misled and abused for two terms.

Trump’s Advisers: Kitchen Cabinet—or Pig Sty?

In the wake of Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory on Tuesday night, speculation now turns to the informal advisers who might influence his decisions. In the past, this group of supporters, well-wishers and friends who had Presidents’ ears were known as the “kitchen cabinet.” (The term dates back to the quartet that Andrew Jackson consulted, often far more assiduously than his regular Cabinet.) Teddy Roosevelt’s similar group was nicknamed, in keeping with that President’s hyperactive physical fitness regimen, the “Tennis Cabinet.”

I can’t imagine, however, given how little interest our President-elect has in history, that he will recall these nicknames. Nor do they adequately convey the nature of  his shameless surrogates at the tail-end of the primary season and throughout the general election.

Historian Ken Burns has called the full assembly of GOP officials who threw in their lot with Donald Trump “Vichy Republicans,” and though this captures the sense of their collaboration with evil and madness, it is neither pungent nor precise enough to describe the particular men (and it is all men) who came to cling to him as a way of keeping their hand in the political game when their fortunes were on the wane. No, only one name will do for this group: The Pig Sty.

That name evokes more than merely disgust over their opportunistic loyalty to a reality-show star manifestly unsuited to the Presidency. It also describes their treatment of women—starting with those in their personal and professional orbits, and proceeding to the Democratic candidate. No surprise in that: Like their candidate, they all belong (psychologically if not chronologically) to the era of Mad Men, when political and business leaders regarded women as playthings rather than people.

You might notice that they all have developed a noticeable stoop. This is not simply a function of their age (ranging from middle age to senior citizen), but because they carried so much water for Trump throughout his scorched-earth campaign.

Let’s examine what each brings to the table, shall we?

Chris Christie: Leading off with the governor of New Jersey was a no-brainer, considering that his photo—of noticeably porcine proportions—embodies literally, not just metaphorically, the inhabitants of this pig pen. Millions of Americans watched him at the Republican Convention, inciting the rabid crowd to chant “Lock her up!” against Ms. Clinton. More recently, many New Jerseyans wanted to shout the same thing at him when virtually the only point of agreement between prosecution and defense during the Bridgegate trial was that he’d approved the mad scheme to close two of three Fort Lee access lanes into the George Washington Bridge. Nor did it escape the nearly 80% of his state’s residents who now disapproved of his performance that he’d heaped all kinds of abuse on his former deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly—first (according to her uncontested testimony at the trial) by hurling a water bottle and cursing her out on one occasion, then by hiring—at state expense—a Republican-connected law firm that, before exonerating Christie of wrongdoing, accused her of orchestrating the bridge closures—and including the gratuitous detail that the single mother of four had been involved in an affair with former Christie campaign manager Bill Stepien. That last episode constitutes what a Daily Beast article has slammed as “Slut-Shaming.”

Newt Gingrich: The former Speaker of the House and GOP Presidential candidate earned Trump’s gratitude toward the end of last month when he angrily dismissed questions from Fox News' Megyn Kelly about multiple sexual misconduct charges against Trump by claiming that she was “fascinated by sex.” More than a few viewers of the exchange observed that it was Gingrich, not Kelly, who was “fascinated by sex.” How else to explain how he married second wife Marianne only six months after divorcing his high-school geometry teacher, amid acknowledgement from congressional staffers that he’d been conducting an affair; or how, 19 years later—amid impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton that Gingrich had initiated related to the Monica Lewinsky affair—the now-ex-Speaker broke with wife #2 to make way for a “breakfast companion” 23 years his junior. (See this Washington Post article about his messy marital history.)

Rudy Giuliani: His descent since hooking up with Trump has been the most frightening to behold of all these figures. Even close aides from his days as a crusading U.S. District Attorney and Mayor of New York have admitted to dismay over his vein-popping, bug-eyed appearances before the GOP convention and on cable news shows, with one quoted in a New York Times article as finding his old boss to be "painful to watch." He ranted on and on about Clinton, so eager to wound her that he couldn’t see the collateral damage to his own reputation. While stating that Mrs. Clinton could only have been a fool not to have suspected her husband of cheating on her, he never saw the natural rejoinder: Was his own ex-wife, Donna Hanover, also being a “fool” for trusting him? Similarly, in fanning rumors, offered up with only the flimsiest of evidence, that Ms. Clinton might be suffering from Parkinson’s, he suggested that listeners Google “Hillary Clinton” and “health”—totally oblivious to the idea that many were finding far more substantiated information by searching for “Rudy Giuliani” and health. Altogether, he seems to have dragged into the sunlight something monstrous from the darkest recesses of his soul.

Roger Ailes: He might have been forced out of his longtime perch at Fox News, but not before performing significant service at the conservative network. He created the echo chamber that would broadcast such dubious stories as Clinton’s imminent indictment for violations relating to the Clinton Foundation. The same network exec whose creation lashed Bill Clinton in the 1990s for sexual harassment has himself now been accused of the same offense by considerably more women (more than 20, if you’re keeping count, according to this piece from the Huffington Post). Naturally, the candidate who talked about “grabbing p---y” made this same disgraced TV executive part of the team preparing him for the debates against Mrs. Clinton.

Roger Stone: A political black arts operative par excellence, he “confirmed” Trump’s suggestion that Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved in the assassination of JFK. He also peddled the phony National Enquirer story that the U.S. Senator from Texas had engaged in extramarital affairs. Of course, this was the same operative fired from Bob Dole's 1996 Presidential campaign after news broke that Stone and his wife had placed ads seeking swinging partners. (Elizabeth Preza's article from Alternet this past May had all the dirty details about this dirty trickster.)

Corey Lewandowski: During primary season, Trump’s first campaign manager ran into trouble because of a scuffle with a female reporter. This was not the first time he got in-your-face with a woman: In one dispute while he was at the Koch-funded super PAC “Americans for Prosperity,” he called one the “C” word. (See Francis Langum's article from the blog "Crooks and Liars" about this "big guy henchman" who's more than a little reminiscent of Richard Nixon's H.R. Haldeman.)

In a May 2016 article in The Atlantic that answered the question, “What Is the Greatest Prank of All Time?”, Candid Camera host Peter Funt nominated Trump’s Presidential campaign—“the 2016 reality-TV show that has convinced many people that Martians have taken over the GOP.” The Trump Pig Sty befouled the atmosphere enough that, if Funt were to consider it now, he’d have to write, “taken over America.”

Photo of the Day: New Home Projected for Bridgegate’s Kelly and Her Boss

I took the photo accompanying this post in front of the same lawn in Tenafly, NJ, that I spotlighted just before Halloween. That earlier post featured a Presidential candidate that I’ll torture by not even writing his name. In any case, I think it’s a safe bet that the creator of this Halloween décor is not a Republican.

Unless he’s a different animal. Maybe, for instance, he shares my animus against bullies wherever they might be found, whether in the playground or the penthouse. And God only knows that virtually the only point that the prosecution and the defense could agree on in the recently concluded Bridgegate trial is that the boss of Bill Baroni and Bridget Anne Kelly was a bully. (I made my feelings about the affair amply known two years ago, in this post.)

The creator of this improvised jail cell for Chris Christie and Ms. Kelly was, I suspect, a trifle bit premature in projecting the future abode of the New Jersey Governor and his former deputy chief of staff. Some appeals court judge may accept the defense’s contention that the jury should have been instructed to consider whether an adequate motive had been established for the stunning decision to shut down two of three access lanes into the George Washington Bridge. 

But, even if the guilty verdict on all counts is overturned on appeal, Ms. Kelly has lost so much already. She’s lost who knows how much to legal fees, since, unlike Christie, she did not have the backing of a major party. She has been diminished in the eyes of friends, neighbors and parishioners who are now left to wonder how someone they thought they knew could become involved in such a crazy scheme.

She will almost certainly be regarded as radioactive by future Republican officeholders. She may well get a job from some future kind soul who’s ready to overlook what pushed her out of the New Jersey government, but other people have taken far longer to find a job through no fault of their own. She will have to explain to her young children why she is spending less time with them and why they may be hearing bad things about her from other children or parents.

No wonder she has looked bad, both in this made-up decoration and the photo of her in real life with her lawyer as she emerged, wrecked, from the devastating verdict just rendered against her. I share the feeling of an acquaintance who, in talking about the verdict--and admitting he had voted for Christie, twice--still lambasted the governor for making this single mother of four the scapegoat for a scheme Christie had to have known about and approved

On the other hand, though I have considerably more sympathy for her than for Christie, that feeling only extends so far. She could explain away (albeit with difficulty) what she meant by her now-infamous remark, "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee." It is 1,000 times harder to explain the meaning of, “Is it wrong that I am smiling?”

This week, she learned—courtesy of ordinary people, the kind she had once belonged to before she hitched her wagon to a now-faded Presidential star—that the answer to her question is “Yes.”

Many people are now wondering why Christie will not, like Kelly and Baroni, be wearing an orange jumpsuit any time soon.  The average New Jerseyan can render his or her own verdict against Christie on Tuesday by voting against the candidate he supported early in the race, one who may well appoint him chief of staff in a new administration: Donald Trump. And after that, the state and the country can do something the governor dreads: ignore him from now on.

The Funniest Thing I Saw This Weekend

Baby boomers have really gone all in for Halloween, if Bergen County, NJ, where I live, is any indication. The costume figure with the orange hair (which goes nicely with pumpkins all around, doesn’t it?) can be seen—at least for the next several days—on a front lawn in Tenafly, the town north of where I live. At his feet is a sign: “DIPLOMA—Trump U Global Affairs Studies.”

The owner of the house where this figure stands is a Democrat, I suspect. Just a hunch, derived from the Donald Trump figure standing next to another display, showing a blonde and a heavy-set fellow, both behind bars, with a sign reading: “FEDERAL PENITENTIARY: Time 4 Some ‘Jail Problems’ in Fort Lee.”

With Halloween nearly here, I’ve been reading a fair amount  of horror fiction the last week or so, but none of it is as scary as what I read here, in this post by Kristin Salaky from the blog “Talking Points Memo” earlier this month:

“An Indiana man is under fire for creating a parade float that depicts Hillary Clinton in an electric chair with Donald Trump pulling the trigger, local TV station WCPO reported Monday.

“The float, which debuted at the Aurora Farmer’s Fair in Aurora, Indiana, had a lot going on. It featured not only a mock execution of Clinton by Trump, but also an Easter Island head painted black and identified as President Barack Obama, a sign listing some of Clinton's scandals and insults against her, and a Trump/Pence campaign sign (Trump's running mate Mike Pence is the governor of Indiana).”

That explains much about the level of emotion this election year, doesn’t it?