Brian Murphy on Chris Christie's dismal polling numbers, his newfound vow that he'll get right on replacing the failing rail tunnels that link New Jersey to New York City,
but only if you make him president first, and Christie's absolutely transcendent bullshite over the tunnels
in the first place.
Christie didn’t just back New Jersey out of the project that had been the labor of his Democratic predecessor, Jon Corzine, and New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg. He used his opposition to the tunnel to take on the notion of federally-funded public infrastructure and the Obama administration’s stimulus program in a high-profile speech in New York to the George W. Bush Institute. He and his supporters derided the project, which would have doubled the trans-Hudson rail capacity of the Northeast Corridor, as little more than a “train to Macy’s basement” – a phrase Christie was still using in 2014.
As governor, he didn't just kill the tunnels so that he could divert the money to other New Jersey projects, thus sparing him from having to raise New Jersey's
among-the-lowest-in-the-nation gas tax, he did so as part of the organized Republican effort to sabotage America's economic stimulus program and blunt the employment effects of those projects. Which, for a nation trying to recover from an economic collapse so severe that it was dubbed the Great Recession, was just about the most bastardly thing a sitting elected official could do, but there you have it.
And Christie didn't just kill the project and mock the notion of economic stimulus or shovel ready infrastructure improvements, he openly mocked the idea that one of the most highly trafficked transportation corridors in America would be important at all. Why on earth would anyone want to go to New York? Why would anyone from New York ever want to go to New Jersey? Why won't the rest of America's travelers just go around our little state and leave us alone? The two key roles of government, according to even the most anti-government conservatives, are roads and wars, but when the economic collapse happened and a president from the opposing party needed to goose the nation's employment right quick in order to avoid a true depression, even the roads part became a Republican symbol of things government had no business doing.
Now the tunnels have less than two decades of life left, flooding from Hurricane Sandy has caused irreparable damage, electrical problems are plaguing the system and train delays through the tunnel are becoming de rigueur for the region's commuters. The nation's transportation secretary has called replacement of the tunnels one of America's highest-proirity infrastructure projects, and blasted the continued absence of a credible replacement plan as "almost criminal." And the Christie administration has remained steadfastly uninterested, only addressing the issue at all in order to dismissively blame Amtrak for the delays or mutter from the campaign trail that the vital project he killed as governor in a pique of partisan Obama-bashing and tax cutting would be something he'd definitely address as president.
It all serves as an important reminder, then, that Gov. Christie is a twerp. Which is why his presidential numbers continue to hover at plus or minus zero, and why the residents of his own state are no longer fans, and why there is not a snowball's chance in hell that this continually raging man-child will become president—even while the race's other continually raging man-child garners top spots in all the polls.