...I've been re-reading "Double Down," the how-it-happened book about the 2012 election by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. H and H provide a lot of details about Mitt Romney's process for choosing a VP candidate, including the fact that the campaign took a close look at Christie. What didn't get a lot of attention in late 2013 when the book came out, but may come back to bite him if he runs in 2016, is the fact that Christie didn't pass the Romney campaign's vet.
From the book: "For the past two and a half years, Christie had received skin-blanching exposure from the klieg lights of the national media. But the vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record."
From a 2010 Dept. of Justice Inspector General's investigation of Christie's spending patterns in his job as a U.S. attorney to the fact that Christie worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Securities Industry Association at a time when Bernie Madoff was a senior SIA official to Christie's decision to steer hefty government contracts to donors and political allies, there was a whole lot of info that gave the vetters pause. And all of it was in addition to concerns about his weight, his health and his temperament and a couple of years before Bridgegate hit the fan.
One member of the vetting team told his colleagues, If Christie had been in the nomination fight against us, we would have destroyed him - he wouldn't be able to run for governor again. When you look below the surface, he added, it's not pretty. (For the entire story, see Double Down, hard-cover edition, pages 349-356.) Read my entire post here.
Slate.com has a fascinating article about what it was like working with The Donald on The Apprentice. There's lots of good stuff, including an intriguing theory about the dynamic between Trump and Chris Christie:
“There
was a fat contestant who was a buffoon and a fuckup,” recalls the midlevel
producer. “And he would fuck up week after week, and the producers would figure
that he’d screwed up so badly that Trump would have to fire him. But Trump kept
deciding to fire someone else. The producers had to scramble because of course
Trump can never be seen to make a bad call on the show, so we had to
re-engineer the footage to make a different contestant look bad. Later, I heard
a producer talk to him, and Trump said, ‘Everybody loves a fat guy. People will
watch if you have a funny fat guy around. Trust me, it’s good for ratings.’ I
look at Chris Christie now and I swear that’s what’s happening.”
Read the article here.
And just so it's not "all Trump all the time" here at Writing The World, I'll mention one of my other fave blog topics, Sarah Palin, and I'll start with a question: Do you know what "exacerbates" means? Sarah doesn't, apparently, because she used it recently to refer to the experience of having grandchildren and, well, it kinda came out wrong, at the 57 second mark:
From my Merriam-Webster dictionary: Exacerbate, "to make more violent, bitter, or severe." Presumably not what Sarah meant to say about the grandkids. If you're keeping track, she currently has three (Bristol's son Tripp, Bristol's daughter Sailor, and eldest son Track's daughter Kayla Grace,) with number four rumored to be on the way. Word on the street is that Track's girlfriend (yes, the one he threatened with a gun during the domestic violence incident earlier this year,) is due in October.
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