By Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
The first time I saw New Jersey Governor Chris Christie
on television, a few years ago, my first reaction was astonishment: "A
talking Republican!"
It would scarcely have been more astonishing if there had
been a talking giraffe. For reasons unknown, most Republican leaders seem to
pay very little attention to articulation -- certainly as compared to leading
Democrats, who seem to pay little attention to anything else.
Governor Christie's nearly two-hour-long press conference
last week showed again that he is in a class by himself when it comes to
Republicans who can express themselves in the heat of political battle.
When it comes to policies, I might prefer some other
Republican as a 2016 presidential candidate. But the bottom line in politics is
that you have to get elected, in order to have the power to accomplish
anything. It doesn't matter how good your ideas are, if you can't be bothered
to articulate them in a way that the voting public can understand.
Chris Christie's press conference showed that, unlike
Barack Obama, Christie did not duck the media or sidestep questions. Nor did he
resort to euphemisms or cry out, like Hillary Clinton, "What difference,
at this point, does it make?"
He met the questions head on and gave unequivocal answers
-- the kind of answers that could, and should, destroy his political future if
they are not true.
More important, Governor Christie quickly fired the
people he held responsible for deliberately creating a traffic jam on the
George Washington Bridge. Contrast that with the many scandals in Washington
for which President Obama has not fired anyone.
While the creation of a traffic jam in a small New Jersey
town shows the calloused ugliness too often found among political operators
puffed up with their own power, this cannot compare with the threat to freedom
when the Internal Revenue Service targets the administration's political
opponents during an election year.
Nor can a traffic jam compare with the Department of
Justice's gun-running operation that led to the death of an American Border
Patrol agent in the southwest or the State Department's actions and inactions
that led to the deaths of four American officials killed by terrorists in
Benghazi.
Nevertheless, media coverage of the traffic jam in New
Jersey was several times as extensive as any -- or all -- of these far more
consequential scandals in Washington. Moreover, many of these media reactions
simply assumed that Governor Christie must have known about the traffic jam on
the George Washington Bridge.
Does anyone who thinks that a traffic jam at the George
Washington Bridge should attract a governor's attention have any idea how many
traffic jams there are on the various highways leading into Manhattan?
The Long Island Expressway, for example, long ago
acquired the title, "the world's longest parking lot." Traffic backed
up heading into, or out of, the Holland Tunnel or the Lincoln Tunnel is nothing
new. My recollections of driving on highways in and around Manhattan include
very few memories of free-flowing traffic.
Any governor who devoted his time to looking into traffic
jams between New Jersey and New York would have very little time left for doing
anything else.
If anything good comes out of this shabby episode of
political vindictiveness by Governor Christie's staffers, it showed what a
skewed sense of perspective most of the media have on what kinds of issues are
important. It is not that the media consider traffic jams more important than
human lives. But the fact that Christie is the current frontrunner for the
Republican presidential nomination in 2016 -- and is ahead of Hillary Clinton
in the polls -- makes him a target for a partisan media.
Given that blatant partisanship, the need for a
Republican candidate in 2016 who can make his case to the public, in spite of
the media, is especially acute -- even though it is much too early to try to
predict who that candidate will be.
Whatever the political fate of Governor Christie, he has
provided an example of the kind of articulation that is needed -- indeed, imperative
-- if the Republicans are to have any chance of rescuing this country from the
ruinous policies of the past few years.
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