New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie should fire
the PR advisors who let him release his bogus Bridgegate report. The report may
exonerate Christie from knowledge of the Bridgegate scandal, but the only ones
taking it seriously are the Christie true believers.
No Republican can hope to win a national election or a
statewide election in New Jersey without independent voters and the Christie
appointed review of the Bridgegate incident will convince few independents that
Christie didn’t have knowledge. Moreover, the very release of the document
damages the Christie rehabilitation campaign.
Let’s first look at the contents. Two topics discussed in
the report, prepared by Christie’s favorite law firm, concern independents and
main stream media such as the editorial board of the New York Times: one is a disputation regarding the facts and the
other a scurrilous interpretation of those facts.
The disputation is the he-said-she-said between Christie and
former best bud David Wildstein. Wildstein said he told the governor they had
closed Fort Lee lanes to the George Washington Bridge on September 11, 2013, midway
through the four-day parking lot that the closure caused. Christie denies it, so the report concludes
that there is not enough evidence to point the finger. But like every
he-said-she-said, most people believe that there is always a little bit of
truth to both sides of the story. And even a little bit of truth on Wildstein’s
part sinks the Good Ship Christie. What
were the PR people thinking? Certainly not about how people tend to react to
these he said-she said accusations.
The truly amazing aspect to the Wildstein revelation and
Christie denial is that if Christie had not released the report, he would have
postponed or prevented the idea that Christie really knew from taking seed in
voters’ minds.
The other killer for Christie in the report is the
psychological analysis it does on the intentions and internal workings of
Christie’s former Deputy Chief of Staff Bridgett Anne Kelly. Kelly takes the
fall as the sole instigator of the lane closures, a rogue employee going
against the rules. The report postulates that she was under a lot of emotional
pressure because she had recently broken up with her lover and concludes that
the inner turmoil made Kelly do it. I don’t think I’m the first to roll my eyes
and wonder sarcastically if she was also having her period that day. What a
load of absolute baloney. When what’s left of the Christie brain trust thought
of the ham-handed idea of blaming it all on a scorned woman, they must have
been punch drunk from a brew of political melodramas and laddie magazines.
Christie blaming it all on the broken heart of a weak women
cum rogue employee leaves many wondering why the Republicans can never seem to
strike the right note when it comes to women. It’s as if they have absolutely
no clue about what makes women click or what they want. A clue to Chris: it’s
not to be patronized by assuming that every mistake professional women make
stems from their hormones or emotional lives.
This idle speculation over causation not only offends most
women and many men, it calls into question the conclusions of the report. Anything that stinks that bad must be rotten.
With the report in hand, Christie and his PR hired guns
should not have released it. While it is
true that the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannity’s of the world will use it to prove
that the issue is closed or to say that it’s the only believable report we will
get, most people are sniggering that it was an inside snow job.
Christie should have tossed the report back to his people
and told them that they had to take out all mention of psychological motive and
just present facts. When the report was appropriately sanitized, Christie
should have sat on it…and sat on it. He should have released it the very day of
the report from the New Jersey legislature or the U.S. District Attorney. By releasing the report on a separate day,
Christies created another news cycle about the scandal. A similar situation
recently occurred when the Paterno family released a report for which they paid
good money that repudiated the previous report by a commission headed by a
former Director of the FBI. The Paterno report changed no one’s mind and had
the negative outcome of creating one more news cycle for the sad story of the
sainted football coach who apparently turned his back on child abuse.
If, instead of creating this additional round of bad news,
Christie had released his version of Bridgegate the very same day that another
major report was released, the story would be about dueling reports and not a
“he-said-she-said” in which one side or 50% of the witnesses is accusing the
governor of early knowledge.
A complete botch by Christie’s PR machine. It’s his report, and yet the Christie
whitewash may have nuked the governor’s chances for the Republican presidential
nomination in 2016. It’s kind of a Fat Boy for the frat boy.