Last week I was stunned when I heard Rachel Maddow's first report on how Chris Christie took revenge on a mayor for partisan differences by essentially shutting down the traffic on the country's busiest bridge for a few days. Turns out, it's the world's busiest bridge-- and Friday, Maddow did a little update (above). The words "dangerous sociopath" come immediately to mind. I wonder how many voters will see this as the ultimate example of why a self-entitled bully like Christie must be kept as far away from lethal power as possible. I sure hope so, because polls seem to show he's the only Republican with even a chance of beating Hillary Clinton. Of course that was before this whole bridge thing started breaking. Aside from Maddow's reporting, the mainstream media seemed willing to let this episode slide. Now it's exploded into a well-deserved full scale scandal that could put an end to any fears of a President Christie. Christie is trying to say this is all about Democrats drumming up an issue when there is none-- although David Wildstein, a close and thuggish Christie crony who ordered the closures resigned and, when that didn't make the scandal go away, Bill Baroni, Christie’s top appointee at the Port Authority, also resigned.
Mark Sokolich, the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, the New Jersey borough at the western end of the bridge, protested the lane closures in a Sept. 12 letter to Baroni, a former Republican state senator. The mayor wasn’t among Democrats who broke party ranks to endorse Christie for re-election.“We are reaching the conclusion that there are punitive overtones associated with this initiative,” Sokolich wrote in the letter, marked “ personal,” obtained under New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act. “What other conclusion could we possibly reach?”The mayor asked Baroni to reverse the action “quietly, uneventfully and without political fanfare.” Baroni didn’t respond to a request for comment in a telephone message and a text sent to his mobile phone.…Christie told reporters yesterday that the closures were a “mistake,” and said Baroni’s departure was “the appropriate thing to do, given all the distractions that have been going on.”Christie said he had nothing to do with the orders. Baroni, named to the post by Christie in 2010, will be replaced by Deborah Gramiccioni, his deputy chief of staff for policy. Wildstein, who ordered the closures and is a former high school friend of Christie’s, is no longer at the agency, the governor told reporters yesterday.The governor said a Wall Street Journal report that he telephoned New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to complain that Port Authority Executive Director Pat Foye, a Cuomo appointee, was asking too many questions about the incident is “categorically wrong.”The transportation committee of the Democratic-controlled New Jersey Assembly, which held hearings on the lane closures, subpoenaed seven more individuals on Dec. 12 to answer questions.“This was no ordinary traffic jam,” said Wendy Pollack, a spokeswoman for the New York-based Regional Plan Association, a nonpartisan urban planning group that influences regional transportation policy in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.“People understand that work hours are crowded,” Pollack said by telephone. “They don’t understand that public roadways can be blocked for no reason. There might have been an extraordinary abuse of power.”On Dec. 2, Christie joked with reporters in Trenton that he personally manipulated the bridge’s flow with traffic cones. Then he attacked two Democratic lawmakers-- Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg from Teaneck, who represents Fort Lee, and Assemblyman John Wisniewski from Sayreville, chairman of the transportation committee-- as “obsessed with” the jams.Weinberg said she didn’t believe Christie personally ordered the jam.“I initially described this as a couple of frat boys sitting in their office, having a couple of beers and saying, ’I have an idea!’” Weinberg said in an interview Dec. 12.
This is an important moment and it isn't Christie's notorious bombast that should be on trial. It's Chris Christie, a governor who doesn't seem to care about wasting taxpayer money to further his personal agendas. Yesterday's NY Times sees Christie starting to squirm. He "took pains," wrote Kate Zernike, "to put any tone of bullying aside. His normally combative self, the wagging finger and borderline contempt for reporters, was gone, replaced by a charmer, widening his eyes and offering extensive explanation."
The “culture of fear” that workers described at the Port Authority? “The first I’ve heard of it,” he said, and shrugged.Punishing the mayor of Fort Lee? “I don’t have any recollection of having met the mayor of Fort Lee,” he said. (Twitter then exploded with copies of a photo of the governor with the mayor, Mark Sokolich, a Democrat.)Is there a bottom of this story to get to? “I don’t think so,” Mr. Christie said, shrugging again. He added, “We’re going to turn the page now.”Mr. Christie understands the stakes: that as a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, Democrats and the news media will watch his every move. (“Get used to the new world,” he told one reporter on Friday, smiling.)He was not quite taking responsibility: more like putting distance. The lanes had been closed, he said twice, “at the request of Mr. Wildstein”-- David Wildstein, an old friend of Mr. Christie’s, who resigned from his $150,000-a-year job at the Port Authority a week ago.Asked about Bill Baroni, another close friend and the governor’s chief appointee at the Port Authority until he resigned on Friday, Mr. Christie said he had not spoken to him “in the last period of time.”By the end of the hour, the governor tried to turn the situation to his advantage, offering that he wished more people in public life would own up to their mistakes. His office followed up by emailing a video clip from the news conference headlined, “I Take Responsibility for Things That Happen on My Watch.” It opened with him saying, “I wouldn’t characterize myself as angry.”…“We still don’t have a full accounting of what happened, why it was allowed to occur, everyone who was involved and what their motivations were,” said State Senator Loretta Weinberg, the Democratic majority leader, who has attended Port Authority meetings in recent months to seek answers. She called the resignations “an admission of guilt.”Mr. Baroni, who earned $291,100 at the Port Authority in 2011, is a former Republican state senator who was appointed by Mr. Christie in the face of a primary challenge for his legislative seat. At the Port Authority, he created a new job for Mr. Wildstein, who was a high school friend of the governor and who later became mayor of their hometown, Livingston, and started an anonymous political blog that was noted for scoops from the United States attorney’s office when Mr. Christie led it.Port Authority workers testified on Monday that the lane closings had caused emergency vehicles to be delayed, commutes to stretch to four hours and children to be late to the first day of school. It cost the agency toll revenue and overtime pay.Mr. Wildstein, the workers said, told them not to tell anyone about the closings, and had not followed procedure for such significant changes to traffic patterns-- 75,000 cars use those lanes each day. The Port Authority workers said they had gone along with the plan despite warning it would “not end well”; they said they had feared for their jobs, because Mr. Wildstein worked for Mr. Baroni, and Mr. Baroni worked for the governor.If there was a traffic study, the workers testified, it had not resulted in any report that they knew of.Mr. Christie said, “I’ve heard more about this than I ever wanted to,” and said he had better ways of spending Friday mornings than talking for an hour about traffic studies and road closings. Still, at the end of the news conference, in which he named a former prosecutor and close aide of his, Deborah Gramiccioni, to Mr. Baroni’s post, Mr. Christie suggested it might be worth examining why Fort Lee should have local access lanes.But he added that he was not about to call for it right away: “Everybody needs some time to calm down.”
He wishes! Christie needs to appear on MSNBC with Maddow and answer the serious charges she's raised about his behavior. Commuters know how serious this is-- and in a very visceral way. And he's not going to get away with excuses like this, not this time.
