Thread: Christie a Strong General Election Candidate for 2016, Says Obama Campaign Manager

Christie a Strong General Election Candidate for 2016, Says Obama Campaign Manager David Plouffe

Ed Krayewski|Aug. 19, 2013 1:11 pm

New Jersey Governor's Office


Running for re-election as governor in New Jersey, Republican incumbent Chris Christie holds a sizeable lead over his Democratic opponent and has racked up endorsements from several dozen Democrat politicians in the state. It’s no secret Christie is pining for a landslide; he even scheduled the special election for Senate two weeks before his own election, at a not insignificant extra cost, to avoid losing votes with Cory Booker on the Democrat side of the ballot. Christie’s endorsing the Republican candidate for Senate, Steve Lonegan, reportedly only tepidly. Many assume the full-on press for a landslide this November is in preparation for a 2016 presidential run. And Obama’s people think Christie would make quite a strong candidate. Via the Hill:

"Gov. Christie, this is probably a kiss of death for him, for me to say this, he would potentially be a very strong general election candidate," [former Obama campaign manager David] Plouffe told ABC News's "This Week."

But the former White House adviser warned that "in the current Republican Party," a more centrist candidate like Christie "can't win." And, Plouffe said, decisions like the one last week to bar NBC and CNN from hosting Republican presidential debates were "completely foolish" because it would draw candidates further to the right.

"What's going to be said on those stages to secure the Republican nomination is going to cause huge problems in the general election," Plouffe said. "It happened with Mitt Romney, it will happen in '16."

The differences between Obama and Romney were arguably minimal. Romney at this point would probably have a better chance winning the 2016 Democratic primary than the Republican one.
Christie was the “centrist” preference since the 2012 cycle, and has loomed large in the early pre-election 2016 season, mostly by taking shots at Rand Paul and the ascendant “libertarian” wing of the GOP. The Republican divide came to the forefront last month, when Christie and other establishment Republicans attacked Rand Paul for insufficiently supporting Obama and the NSA’s domestic surveillance operations. Last week, Christie said the Republican party was “not a debating society” and that it needed to “win and govern with authority,” comments interpreted as a jab at Rand Paul, another 2016 Republican contender. Paul responded over the weekend by saying it was a mistake for Christie to say there was no room for difference in the GOP and that the party needed to grow by embracing “libertarian Republicans.” David Plouffe, apparently, would prefer it didn’t.

As to the debate boycott, Democrats boycotted debating on Fox News during the 2008 season, but Plouffe didn’t seem concerned that would draw the candidates to the left. RNC chairman Reince Preibus says Republicans won’t boycott debating on Fox News even though sister company Fox TV Studios will be producing NBC’s putative Hillary Clinton miniseries, for which the RNC plans to boycott MSNBC.


http://reason.com/blog/2013/08/19/ch...election-candi

http://www.alipac.us/f9/wnd-exclusiv...rhouse-284723/

Christie follows Clinton playbook

By Record (Hackensack, NJ) August 19, 2013 12:25 pm

Over the past two years, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie fired up Republican crowds with his tales of how he tamed public employee unions, Democrats and runaway spending in Trenton.
Christie's narrative as the Jersey savior wove through his speeches in a closed-door party conclave in Aspen, Colo., and to policy wonks at think tanks, and in his keynote address to the Republican National Convention last year.
But in a speech last week before a group of national Republican officials gathered in Boston to chart the party's future, Christie made a bold, significant departure. He was now the Republican moderate following the path hewn by another charismatic governor who catapulted to the presidency two decades ago: Bill Clinton.
Clinton's formula _ tack right, tack left and then reach a safe, middle ground _ ended the Republicans' 12-year hold on the presidency. Christie is taking the same approach to end an eight-year Democratic stretch _ and prevent another Clinton from returning to the Oval Office. Hillary Clinton is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in the early polls. She has not said whether she will run.
"I'm in this business to win," Christie told Republican National Committee members in Boston, who were meeting last week across the street from where Mitt Romney, the failed 2012 Republican nominee, gave his concession speech last November.
"For ideas to matter, we have to win, because if we don't win, we don't govern," Christie said according to a Time magazine account cobbled together from interviews with guests and recordings. "And if we don't govern, all we do is shout into the wind. So I am going to do anything I need to do to win."
Christie did not declare his candidacy, but he was stepping into the shadow campaign for 2016 and stepping up the case that he has been slowly building for several years now _ that the party needs to coalesce around a candidate who is electable. Tea Party-favored candidates with impeccable conservative credentials like U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky can't win a general election, Christie implied.
"Our party's got to get back to looking people in the eye, not try to figure out what they want to hear," Christie said. "I tell folks in my state all the time if you're looking for the candidate you agree with 100 percent of the time, go home and look in the mirror," he said, according to an account by Politico. "You're it. You're the only person you agree with 100 percent of the time, all right? If that's the litmus test, forget it!"
It's an argument that struck a chord among the establishment party's grass-roots leaders who attended the Boston event.
"People listened to him and they will go back home and they won't forget that they heard Chris Christie speak," Paul Craney said in an interview. Craney, who heads the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance and is a former executive director of the Washington, D.C., Republican Party, attended Christie's speech.
But unlike those earlier speeches, Christie put his style and accomplishments in the context of his current re-election campaign for governor against Democratic state Sen. Barbara Buono. He boasted of his endorsement from 45 Democratic officials, from Latino groups and the Black Ministers Council of New Jersey, which historically endorses Democratic candidates.
And then there are the polls that Christie often dismisses when they deliver bad news _ but not in Boston. He recited poll numbers showing him grabbing 35 percent of the Democratic vote and holding a 3-1 advantage among independents.
Yet Christie's pitch did not win over everybody in the room.
Steve Scheffler, a national committeeman from Iowa, was less than thrilled with Christie's rebuke of candidates who want to act like college professors and debate political theory. "We're not a debating society," Christie said, according to Time. "We are a political operation that needs to win."
Scheffler, who read Christie's remarks as a swipe at Paul, said Christie can't skirt a debate on his record _ especially on issues like abortion, immigration and gun control.
"I'm not going to write him off, but he's going to need to have a tougher conversation on the issues whether he wants to or not, if he wants to run for president," Scheffler said in an interview. "People want to make sure that, by and large, he's going to stand for Republican principles and doesn't stray off the reservation too much."
And Scheffler does not buy the argument that the party has no choice but to rally behind centrist, establishment-anointed nominees. Look at what happened to Romney and U.S. Sen. John McCain before him, he stressed.
"If you don't have your base on board, you can have all the independent [voters] in the world, but you're not going to get to first base," he said.
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(c)2013 The Record (Hackensack, N.J.)
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Christie is the media darling as he is progressive, they will back him in every way possible, he is simply another RINO much like McCain.

Christie yuks it up, talks blue state governance at RNC confab

By Boston Herald (MA) August 16, 2013 11:58 am

(File Photo)

Chris Christie steered clear of talk about a potential run at the White House in 2016, instead offering a packed house of Republican National Committee members tales of how to win in a blue state -- but likely giving his national profile a boost, anyway.The New Jersey governor and GOP powerhouse, touted as the hottest politician in America by a recent Quinnipiac poll, headlined a mid-day luncheon at the Westin Waterfront hotel, where he kept the focus on governing in a blue state, his duels with a Democratic legislature and beating back the "bully" that he said is his state's teachers' union, according to people who attended and a partial recording of the event.
The speech, closed to the press, also formally introduced Christie to hundreds of GOP organizers, staff and operatives, who reported spending much of the 30-minute speech laughing heartily at a string of anecdotes.
"He's talking to the national grassroots base. Everyone's going to remember this when they go home, and they're going to say, 'I heard Chris Christie speak.' You don't forget that," said Paul Craney, head of the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance and former executive director of the Washington, D.C., Republican Party, who attended the speech.
Christie is viewed as an early favorite for the GOP's 2016 presidential nomination, given his success as a moderate Republican in Democratic New Jersey, a fiery personality that has made him a YouTube sensation, and his blockbuster address to last year's Republican National Convention.
But he's also been criticized for what some party members perceived as a cuddly relationship with President Obama, with whom he famously shared a heartfelt embrace in Hurricane Sandy's aftermath, and with other Democrats. He's also butted heads with the Republican Party's more conservative wing, such as Sen. Rand Paul, on national security and surveillance issues.
Christie spent most of the time today recounting being elected to govern a state in dire financial straits and dueling with the heavily Democratic New Jersey State Legislature about raising taxes.
"Only Democrats can do this, they argued with each other how much to raise the sales tax," Christie said, according to a recording.
He also told a tale of how the governor he replaced, acting on a threat by Garden State legislators to shut down state government if taxes weren't raised, said he'd sleep in his cot in his office as long as the government was closed. Faced with a similar tax battle, Christie said he'd instead go home "break open a beer, order a pizza and I'm going to watch the Mets."
"If you think I'm sleeping on a cot in the governor's office, look at me," the burly governor said to howling laughter. He went on to say his budget was ultimately passed all but intact.
"People love that kind of candor," said Ron Kaufman, an RNC national committeeman and former Bush adviser from Massachusetts who was inside the event. "His message was simple: Listen, you stick to our values, (be) straight-forward about them, you tell voters how we feel and why we're doing what we're doing, you can't lose.' His style is really good. It works in New Jersey, it works in this room."
Christie also described his fight with the New Jersey teachers' union, which he said spent millions in TV ads "saying Chris Christie loves millionaires and hate children."
"When you walk out on the schoolyard and you see a bunch of people laying on the ground bloodied and they're beaten up and you see one person standing over ... that's the bully," Christie said, according to a recording. "In New Jersey, that bully is the New Jersey Education Association. And you've got two choices: you saddle up next to them and whisper secrets in their ear, try to hope they just don't punch you. Or the second alternative is, you punch them first."
Today, Christie boasted, he has more than 20 unions backing him in his re-election campaign.
Despite dozens of reporters waiting for his arrival, Christie was able to slip into the hotel ballroom relatively unnoticed and later left through a back door of the ballroom without addressing the media. Only an Associated Press photographer was allowed in briefly to take still photos of his speech.
Those who attended said Christie stuck mainly to fiscal discussion, steering clear of social issues and any talk of a potential presidential run. He also avoided talking about Obama or the party's Obamacare fight, which were centerpieces of an address former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich gave in the same room the day before with reporters present.
"He was saying that we've got to effect the elections this year, in 2014 and beyond. That was as close as he got to referring to 2016," Morton Blackwell, a national committeeman from Virginia, said of Christie.
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