CHRISTIE´S WIN IS NOT ABOUT THE MARCH OF THE MODERATES / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENT & ANALYSIS

November 8, 2013 1:10 pm

Christie’s win is not about the march of the moderates
 

By Christopher Caldwell
 

The Republican governor is more conservative than his admirers care to imagine
 

 

Chris Christie, New Jersey’s Republican governor, is fat, eloquent, irascible and charismatic.

 

 

Following his re-election this week, much of the US press is anointing him the 2016 Republican presidential nominee.

 

They have a case. He wants the nomination. He has been building a nationwide fundraising network for months. His performance in the last campaign was magisterial. Not since Ronald Reagan’s time has a Republican won a statewide majority in New Jersey; Mr Christie took 60 per cent, burying the hatchet with voter groups the Republicans thought they had lost and winning 48 per cent of Latinos.

 

Mr Christie has picked fights with the Republican party’s Tea Party wing, one of whose backers, Ken Cuccinelli, gubernatorial candidate for Virginia, was defeated on Tuesday. Moderation is the way forward for the party, consensus has it, and Mr Christie is moderation’s most convincing representative. But this may be the wrong perspective.

 

More serious than the ideological divisions among Republicans are the sociological ones. The party is badly split by region. In 2012, Rick Perry, Texas governor, eager to talk to northern voters about guns and prayer, sounded like someone from a faraway civilisation. In 2008, Rudolph Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, had trouble explaining to the Bible-reading south why he supported abortion.

Mr Christie is not simply the next election cycle’s Giuliani. Although he “embraced” President Obama in the wake of the devastation wrought by superstorm Sandy, which struck his state a year ago, Mr Christie is more conservative than his cheerleaders realise. He has vetoed three gun control bills, a minimum wage bill and a gay marriage bill (although a court decision brought New Jersey gay marriage anyway). He has put his state’s calamitous budget in order. When Mr Christie says “I’m a conservative”, he is not just tacking towards the Republican primary electorate.

Mr Christie, though, is far from secure in his status as the Republican presidential frontrunner. His electoral strategy is to woo growing demographic groups to his side.

Should his party reckon that its best immigration policy in 2016 is the oppositional one it proposed in 2012, his campaign will be disarmed before it starts. Mr Obama’s health reform is another potential problem. The failures of both the sign-up website and the insurance programme have strengthened the position of those presidential hopefuls, such as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who urged a shutdown of government to highlight its flaws. Republicans who made their peace with the programme have been weakened. Mr Christie is among them. He included New Jersey in Obamacare’s optional Medicaid expansion, from which half the states have opted out.

 

The greatest danger to Mr Christie is the class split in his party. Its big donors imagine a party left over from the days when Republicans controlled the boardrooms of America. The rank and file are drawn disproportionately from white working and middle-class voters who have lost out from globalisation and information technology. Republican voters grouse that their donors have less in common with them than they do with Democratic donors.

For all his working-class affect, Mr Christie is the darling of this bipartisan donor class. In Collision 2012 , about the presidential campaign, Washington Post reporter Dan Balz gave an account of a meeting in a private New York club to which Mr Christie was invited by Home Depot founder Kenneth Langone. Mr Christie found himself sitting before 60 of the party’s top money men as Henry Kissinger begged him to run, concluding: “Your country needs you.”

 

The idea of Republicans as the party of big new fortunes made in dynamic industries is long out of date. Today Democrats best fit this stereotype. Theirs is the party of the Silicon Valley moguls, just as the Republican party used to be the party of Midwestern factory owners. In this sense, the Virginia gubernatorial election may be just as important as the one in New Jersey in predicting presidential politics.

There, Terry McAuliffe, a fundraiser from Bill Clinton’s administration, narrowly defeated Mr Cuccinelli, his Republican opponent, on the strength of his donor network. Mr McAuliffe raised $34m to Mr Cuccinelli’s $20m. In the closing weeks of the campaign, when Virginia law requires daily reporting of large donations, there were days when Mr McAuliffe outraised Mr Cuccinelli 50 to one.

One reading of Tuesday’s races is that moderation is becoming more important. That may be a superficial interpretation. Another reasonable conclusion is that a bipartisan caste of plutocrats is determining the country’s political course. It will not strengthen Mr Christie’s position should that impression spread.


The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

 

 

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013.