Possibly not in New Jersey. Still, opponents have been handed the weapon that may keep Governor Christie from a 2016 national run -- they've been handed the weapon by Christie himself. I'm sure he thought he could get away with the Fort Lee mess, a local sensation of less interest nationally. But it adds up to giving any future opponent fuel for a Christie burning.
A cache of private messages between Governor's Christie's deputy chief of staff and his two top executives at the Port Authority reveal a vindictive effort to create 'traffic problems in Fort Lee,' apparent pleasure at the resulting gridlock, and insults used to refer to the borough's mayor, who had failed to endorse Christie for re-election."
"The documents obtained by The Record also raise serious doubts about months of claims by the Christie administration that the September closures of local access lanes to the George Washington Bridge were part of a traffic study..." ...BergenRecord via Political Wire
Christie has made a lot of people in New Jersey angry and even as he has handed future rivals a pretty powerful weapon to use against him in 2016.
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The New York Times has a next-day review of the damage done to the New Jersey governor -- and Christie's reaction to the damage.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has built a remarkable brand in Republican politics around a simple message: that his bluster and brashness, grating as they might be, were driven by a desire to transcend partisan rancor and petty politics in the service of the public good.
He would never let himself engage, he once pledged, in the “type of deceitful political trickery that has gone on in this state for much too long.”
But embarrassing revelations about his office’s role in shutting down some access lanes to the George Washington Bridge now imperil that carefully cultivated image. They suggest that the same elbows-out approach that the Christie administration brought to policy battles at the State House may have been deployed for a much less noble end — punishing an entire borough for its mayor’s sin of not embracing the governor’s re-election campaign.
For Mr. Christie, the timing of the blossoming scandal is dreadful, disrupting a highly anticipated plan to present the popular governor to the national electorate as a no-nonsense, bipartisan balm to a deeply divided federal government.
The usually verbose and swaggering Mr. Christie, who once mocked questions from reporters about the abrupt closing of lanes to the bridge, seemed at a loss for how to respond on Wednesday. ...1/9/14
