Feature: Is NJ Governor Chris Christie A Mad Man?

Corzine was also a former bank CEO running for reelection during a recession caused by corrupt banks, and in the 2009 gubernatorial debates, Christie plucked him by the roots. Christie’s message was simple: Taxes are suffocating the people of New Jersey, and I will lower your taxes. When it came time to provide details of his tax plans, he was vague. But Christie ruled TV and the messaging war, and the voters handed him a slim four-point victory.

What happened next was that Christie started a class war. He didn’t call it that, but that’s what it was. There was the budget, of course, which handed a tax break to the richest one percent of New Jerseyans. But there was also his brutal, defining, relentless campaign against the teachers union, whose contracts and seniority/tenure requirements have long strained the state’s budgets and infuriated education reformers. Christie held the teachers’ generous pensions, salaries and health-care benefits up to the spotlight, asking if it was fair for some New Jerseyans to bear the brunt of the recession while “a privileged class” lived high on the hog. It was politically savvy populism that allowed Christie to pose as a champion of average New Jerseyans while simultaneously diverting anger over his school cuts, protecting the rich, and breaking the back of a key Democratic interest group. And he was so effective making the case that by June he had driven the union’s unfavorable rating from 35 percent to 44 percent.

It seemed like pretty breathtaking stuff. But while the national conservative press fawned over Christie, local conservatives started noticing some anomalies. When he first came into office, Christie claimed the budget situation was far worse than he ever guessed; one of his first acts was to declare a “state of fiscal emergency” and impound $2.2 billion in spending. Fiscal hawks were all for it; back in the ’90s, they’d watched Christine Todd Whitman slash taxes without cutting spending, and now, finally, a real lumberjack was actually swinging the ax. But the closer the conservatives looked, the less they liked. For one thing, to make the numbers work on his 2011 budget, Christie skipped a legally required $3 billion payment into the pension system, just as Whitman had done. He withheld property-tax rebates to the tune of $848 million — something he’d blasted Jon Corzine for planning to do. (Christie promised to restore the rebates next year in the form of quarterly tax credits.) And by cutting aid to local municipalities, he was potentially driving property taxes higher; he managed to pass a bill capping property-tax hikes at two percent per year, but it has easily exploitable loopholes. Christie and his allies, says Steve Lonegan, “admit that the system is failing, but they’re maintaining it.” Says Rick Merkt, “He’s following in the proud bipartisan tradition of screwing around with the budget numbers. … He’s fine as long as he’s got the bully pulpit, and he’s very effective with people who don’t know the facts. But if you compare his rhetoric with the accomplishments, in many ways it’s very thin.” Rick Shaftan, a conservative pollster who worked for Lonegan, is more blunt: “What makes him a conservative? Telling off a teacher … ?”