It’s late in the game, but in an interview published Friday Chris Christie left the door open to endorsing Kamala Harris, and even serving in her cabinet.
“If she wins, she has said she will put at least one Republican in her cabinet – if she offered you a cabinet position, would you take it?” the NY Times columnist Frank Bruni asked him.
“It would depend on two things: what was the position, and what role did she say she wanted me to play?” Christie said. “Am I there as a mannequin or am I there to actually provide her with effective advice and counsel? The country’s more important than anything else. And if I thought that I could help the country, look, any president that calls on me, I would be willing to help.”
His ambition lives. And he knows he’s unlikely to get a cabinet post unless he endorses Harris, as a growing number of Republicans are doing.
I know, the Christie haters out there will scoff at this. Who gives a damn what Christie does? they’ll ask.
How about white men in Pennsylvania, the guys who Trump can’t possibly win without? If Christie convinced 3 percent of them to jump the fence, or even sit this one out, that could tip the election and change world history. So don’t tell me Christie is irrelevant.
He spent eight years as governor in the Philadelphia TV market and has been a regular on national TV since. He’s effective on the stump. And his style is macho and decisive in a way that appeals to Trump voters, according to focus groups. Who can forget, “Get the hell off the beach!”?
Bruni pressed Trump on his vote and got the familiar fan dance.
“I’m not going to vote for the lesser of two evils anymore,” Christie said. “I’ve done it before. I did it with Trump in ‘16. I got motivated to support Trump because I thought Hillary Clinton would be such a bad president, you know? I’m not making a decision like that again. She’s got time to convince me. But she hasn’t done that yet.”
Bruni: “Are you saying you may just not vote on Election Day?”
Christie: “I’ll vote, but I may not vote for president.”
Bruni: “Is that really a responsible thing to do?”
Christie: “I have an obligation to vote for the person that I think is best if I believe there’s a best choice. I will not vote for Trump. Practically, my vote is not going to matter in New Jersey, anyway. She’s going to win New Jersey by 10 to 14 points.”
It’s an incredibly lame answer, and I can’t imagine Christie believes it.
Voting for the lesser of two evils might not feel good, but that’s what grown-ups do. Does it make any sense to vote for the greater of two evils, or to sit on the sidelines when that greater evil has a good shot to win?
And yeah, New Jersey is going blue in November, but that misses the point. Christie could well affect the vote in Pennsylvania by a few points if he gives it his best and spends the final month working his heart out for Harris.
It’s a long shot, I’m afraid. Even Mitt Romney says he won’t vote for Harris, because he wants to remain a player in the Republican Party as it charts a course after this election, one way or another. Maybe Christie is clinging to that same dream. Both men seem to be forgetting that they’ve been decisively rejected by the party’s base and are unlikely to even be sitting at that table when the next chapter unfolds.
My hope is that Christie thinks about how he might feel on his death bed, that he remembers he deserves a share of blame for the nation’s scary predicament today. He was the first major Republican to endorse Trump in 2016, and he stuck with him during his entire first term, long after we knew he was a scoundrel, after he praised KKK marchers as “fine people,” and bragged about sexually assaulting women, and stole money from his charities, and froze military aid to Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression because President Zelensky refused to manufacture evidence of Joe Biden’s alleged corruption. Christie helped Trump prepare for the debates in 2020. He’s partly to blame for putting our democracy at such risk. He owes us a debt.
Now, it’s crunch time. Pay up or move on, governor. History will judge you accordingly.
More: Tom Moran columns
Tom Moran may be reached at [email protected] or (973) 986-6951. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
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Publish date : 2024-10-12 23:52:00
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