By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com
INDIANAPOLIS – Gov. Chris Christie’s landslide re-election victory Tuesday in New Jersey should tell both Democrats and Republicans a few things.
Christie, a Republican, trounced his Democratic opponent with 60 percent of the vote in a generally blue state. Just last year, for example, President Obama, a Democrat, won New Jersey by 17 points – his largest margin of victory in any state in the country.
That’s impressive as it is, but it’s the way that Christie won that drives home the point. Poll after poll made clear that most of New Jersey’s citizens don’t agree with him on issues important to him.
Christie opposes same-sex marriage. Most of the people in New Jersey support the idea.
Christie opposes abortion. Most residents in New Jersey favor reproductive rights.
Nor does Christie hide these views. He waged a high-profile and high-energy campaign to oppose same-sex unions in the state and dropped a legal appeal only after the New Jersey Supreme Court indicated that he was wasting his time.
Why, then, did Christie win and win big? Why did so many New Jersey voters cast their ballots for a leader who stands for many things they oppose?
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie appeared at a rally last year in Indianapolis to stump for GOP women running for office. Photo by Lesley Weidenbener
Well, maybe it’s because Christie is focused on getting things done – not stopping others from getting anything done. He took a lot of heat from his fellow Republicans and conservatives last year for working closely and effectively with President Obama after Hurricane Sandy pummeled New Jersey, shattering communities and leaving much of the New Jersey shore looking like a holocaust had happened.
Christie’s response to his critics was refreshing in its maturity.
In effect, he said: This is too important for political games. My state’s hurting. My people are suffering. I’m going to do my job and do what I can and what I have to in order to help them. I’ll worry about politics after my state and the people I serve are safe and healthy again.
There was a time that responses like that were called leadership.
And showing leadership, the New Jersey election results demonstrate, turns out to be pretty good politics.
Christie’s approach to governance stands in sharp contrast to that of another Republican who covets a national profile, Texas’s Sen. Ted Cruz, a darling of the tea party movement and other our-way-or-the-highway conservatives.
Following his doomed attempt to defund the Affordable Care Act – doomed because, even if by some miracle, Cruz had gotten Congress to vote for such a thing, Obama would have vetoed it and Cruz didn’t have the votes for an override – the Texas senator drove a federal government shutdown that cost the country $24 billion and slowed job growth.
That might have chastened some people, but not Cruz. On the stump, he’s been taking shots at big-tent Republicans such as Christie by saying that the secret to success for the GOP is insisting on more intransigence and ideological purity. Cruz calls that giving people something to vote for.
Christie, not surprisingly, scoffs at such notions.
Without mentioning Cruz or any other ideologue by name, Christie says that they misunderstand why people vote the way they do. He argues that while voters care about issues, their reasons for voting are much more complicated than any ideological litmus test would indicate.
Voters, Christie says, don’t go down a checklist and say that they’re going to vote for this candidate or that candidate because he or she agrees with me on every issue. Instead, voters look at whom they can trust, who they think can get things done and who they believe has their interests at heart even when the candidate doesn’t agree with them on some issues.
Christie says voting is “visceral,†a relationship built on a faith that the leader will work to serve the community, not shatter it. He says that working with people with whom one disagrees in order to get important things done – such as working with a Democratic president to save the lives and homes of New Jersey citizens – isn’t a betrayal of principle but an affirmation of responsibility, which is supposed to be a conservative value.
In this hyper-partisan era, such thinking is considered revolutionary.
Once upon a time, we just called it being a grown-up.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits†WFYI 90.1 FM Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.
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