[PJ] Remember Chris Christie? He thinks you do. He even thinks you want to. Christie spoke in New Hampshire on Monday, and you know what that means. The former New Jersey governor thinks he will be the one Republican presidential hopeful to take down Donald Trump in 2024 and ride to the White House in a blaze of glory (if not on a milk-white steed, as finding one that could hold him would be nigh impossible), amid hosannas from a grateful nation that is finally saved as Christie slays the twin dragons of America-First Trumpism and Old Joe Biden’s America-Last socialist internationalism. If you doubt that this is going to happen, that’s only because it isn’t, but nonetheless, up in the Granite State on Monday, Christie was really throwing his weight around."I'll moiderize him!"
Christie based his claim that he could beat Trump on the one successful moment of his brief and disastrous 2016 presidential campaign, when he humiliated and mocked Marco Rubio for repeating some campaign patter he had memorized. As a flustered Rubio struggled to get his bearings and kept repeating the same words, Christie taunted him, saying: "There it is — the memorized 25-second speech."
This nasty exchange, in which Christie appeared more as a bully than as anything else, was supposed to give us the idea that it was wrong for presidential candidates to have memorized any statements (why?) and that Christie himself was a plain-spoken straight shooter who never, ever doled out any canned answers himself (unlikely). Rubio did indeed come off as stiff, unnatural, and overly reliant upon his prepared material rather than daring to think on his feet, but Christie is kidding himself if he thinks the incident made him look statesmanlike or presidential. It was no coincidence that his purposeless, passionless, aimless and self-serving presidential campaign ended a week later.