Farewell, Chris Christie

He was twice on the cover of National Review. He was the subject of admiring profiles in the Washington Post, Time, and, yes, THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Throughout his first term as governor of New Jersey, he was described time and again as a “rising star” of the GOP and a certain presidential contender. Though a moderately conservative Republican, he won reelection in a deep blue state with 60 percent of the vote in 2013.

Over the last four years, Chris Christie has exchanged his reputation as a tough-talking and effective conservative governor for that of a shrill and scandal-prone politician who scrapped his own principles and kowtowed to Donald Trump in a futile attempt to gain favor. On his last day in office—Christie’s Democratic successor, Phil Murphy, is sworn in today—it’s worth asking what happened.

It’s hard to overstate the optimism with which conservatives viewed the Chris Christie of the years 2010 to 2013. When the former federal prosecutor was elected governor in 2009, he faced a state budget deficit of over $2 billion—partly the result of the recession, partly of the New Jersey Democratic establishment’s spend-everything-now philosophy. Christie refused to raise taxes, aggressively exercised his veto, and had balanced the budget by 2011. He took on out-of-control state pensions and, unlike many governors who campaign on the issue but fail to accomplish anything, signed a series of reform bills that likely averted a fiscal apocalypse in the state. Christie’s 2011 speech to the American Enterprise Institute was the work of a principled and articulate conservative who grasped the dangers of unchecked entitlement spending. “If we’re not honest about these things,” he said, “on the state level about pensions and benefits and on the federal level about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, we are on the path to ruin.”

He repeatedly fought the New Jersey teachers union over tax increases and the tenure system. Some of these confrontations were captured on video and posted on YouTube; they revealed a governor who understood the issue and wasn’t afraid to push back, hard. The videos went viral.

Christie’s portly stature was highly unusual in an age of svelte politicians, but he disarmed skeptics by poking fun at himself—he famously ate a donut on David Letterman's show. His weight was part of his unorthodox brand. So popular was he in 2011 and 2012, that GOP mega-donors and rank-and-file Republicans both begged him to challenge Mitt Romney for the 2012 presidential nomination. He countered that he simply wasn’t ready to be president. But the time was right: Republicans in 2012 wanted a fighter.