By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
What a bizarre spectacle. Assuming he did not lie during
his marathon news conference last week, the feeding frenzy surrounding New
Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will be remembered as one of those incredibly odd
moments of elite journalistic hysteria that are difficult to explain to people
who weren't there or didn't get it.
I'm not referring to the scandal itself; that's easy
enough to understand. What Christie's team did was outrageous and deserves as
much foofaraw and brouhaha as the New Jersey media can muster.
What's harder to grok is the hysteria at the national
level.
For starters, there have been countless greater outrages
at the state level that have received far less national coverage. (Indeed,
there have been national scandals under President Obama that have received less
intense national coverage.) Since 1961, four Illinois governors have ended up
in jail, and with the exception of Rod Blagojevich, few have received
comparable media attention.
"Meet the Press" dedicated 33 minutes to the
New Jersey scandal, including a grilling of Reince Priebus, head of the
Republican National Committee, as if Christie were Nixon during Watergate (a
comparison ostensibly serious people have made).
Many conservatives see liberal media bias in all this.
But that diagnosis misses the fact that this was the 50th anniversary of the
War on Poverty, giving producers ample opportunity to advance a liberal agenda.
Moreover, Christie is actually quite popular in establishment media circles --
the sort of politician Sunday-show liberals insist America needs more of. He's
also quite unpopular in many quarters of the right.
If there is a secret left-wing cabal interested solely in
advancing the liberal cause through the media, the Christie auto-da-fé was a
missed opportunity.
A more plausible partial explanation is partisan bias,
which can be hard to distinguish from liberal bias in many outlets since it
tends to favor Democrats. The key difference is that partisan bias focuses more
on the political interests of specific politicians or a party generally.
Feeding-frenzy defenders insist the closure of lanes on
the George Washington Bridge is special because innocent constituents were
deliberately inconvenienced for partisan purposes. That's surely what makes
this scandalous, but it hardly makes it unique. The Obama administration
employed similar tactics during the sequester and the government shutdown.
Closing the open-air World War II Memorial, furloughing air traffic controllers
and other efforts were deliberate attempts to maximize the pain of innocents
for political benefit. The tactic worked, but that's not a justification for
it, is it?
The allegation that the Obama administration used the IRS
to target political opponents is far more explosive (similar tactics were at the
core of the Nixon impeachment effort). And, unlike Christie's claims of what he
knew and when, similar White House denials haven't held up.
And in the same week the media succumbed to St. Vitus'
dance over Christie's alleged "cover-up," it was revealed that the
Department of Justice had appointed an Obama donor from the civil rights
division, instead of the public integrity division, to investigate the IRS
scandal. The department now says it would be unlawful to remove her from the
assignment because of her political views. That's untrue. No hysteria there.
Christie is widely seen as a threat to whoever the
Democratic nominee will be. Unlike some recent GOP nominees, who struggled to
be merely lifelike, Christie has an authenticity and charisma most national
Republicans lack. As ABC's Jonathan Karl put it on "This Week,"
Christie is "the most intriguing and colorful person" in American
politics.
That probably explains the overkill as much as anything.
Christie is new, exciting and interesting in ways Obama once was. The
difference is that when Obama was new and exciting, the media were biased in
every regard and heroically skeptical of any Obama wrongdoing. "We thought
he was going to be ... the next messiah," Barbara Walters recently said. The
cult of personality has diminished but the partisan skepticism remains.
Christie, like most Republicans, never benefited from
such skepticism, and never will.
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