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" IT&amp;#039;S ALL PART OF YOUR PARANOID FANTASY /// Christie, at the Reagan Library, revealed himself not as the heir to Reagan but the legitimate descendant of Nixon (the uniter version). As is apropos to the current state of Republican presidential politics, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie last night went to the Temple of Ronnie and gave a campaign speech without a campaign. There were as many hints in it that Christie plans to run as there have been outright denials from him that he is interested in doing anything of the sort. Nevertheless, this newest outbreak of interest in the portly bully has more behind it than merely the GOP&amp;#039;s now biweekly dissatisfaction with whomever it is that happens to be the leading candidate. For one thing, there&amp;#039;s big money there. Christie seems to be the candidate of choice for all those investment-house playaz and hedge-fund cowboys who get on the commuter trains every morning in Short Hills. We&amp;#039;ve seen an organized counterattack from really big money in the last couple of weeks in response to President Obama&amp;#039;s sudden turn toward a slightly more vigorous, but still rather mild, rhetoric on the subject of income inequality and equitable taxation. The president of the Coca-Cola Company bubbled over with frustration in the Financial Times, and the owner of the NBA&amp;#039;s Washington Wizards ran his mouth about how he struggled up from nothing. Chris Christie is an obvious and effective political vehicle for this effort. In addition, he&amp;#039;s made a specialty of kissing up while kicking down. He&amp;#039;s a bully, and he&amp;#039;s proud of it, which they love, because America&amp;#039;s noble and embattled plutocrats have, by god, stood enough guff from those people down in steerage and that president some of them elected. Rachel Maddow made this point in lovely fashion last night, running a succession of YouTube videos of which Christie and his people are so proud that they&amp;#039;ve taken to using them to establish his bona fides as a national figure. Here&amp;#039;s Chris berating a public-school teacher. Here&amp;#039;s Chris blowing off an uppity constituent on a radio show. Here&amp;#039;s Chris explaining that he&amp;#039;s a ruff-tuff guy from Joisey who can give your attitude back to you if you cop one with him. If there were any political advantage to pulling the wings off of flies, Chris Christie would have his own show on the Outdoor Life Network by now. It&amp;#039;s strange, but with considerable historical precedent in Republican politics, Christie can do all of this while still convincing many political observers that he&amp;#039;s a &amp;quot;different kind&amp;quot; of Republican from those Neolithic bumblers \u2014 except for Romney \u2014 up on that stage in Florida last week, and Romney couldn&amp;#039;t sound tough if you dressed him up in those spiked shoulder pads that people wear to Raiders games. At his angriest, he sounds like someone sending back a steak. But Christie, effortlessly, can summon up those mystic chords of meanness that echo deep in the Republican Id while, at the same time, getting credit for being a reasonable guy because he doesn&amp;#039;t want all Muslims rounded up and because he declines to glue his head to the door of an abortion clinic. So he got up last night and delivered a campaign speech without a campaign, and all of that was on display. He praised Reagan for firing the PATCO workers, but he didn&amp;#039;t cite it, Christie said, &amp;quot;as a parable of labor relations, but a parable of principle.&amp;quot; (We pause here now to gaze on the staggering vista of pure bullshit contained in that sentence. PATCO is the signature moment in changing the executive branch of the American government from a friend of labor back toward being the kind of friend of management it used to be in the 1920&amp;#039;s. It&amp;#039;s one of the things every little Republican learns from Sister Mary Atwater on the first day of catechism class. It certainly can&amp;#039;t be a secret to Christie, heard recently describing his state&amp;#039;s teacher&amp;#039;s union as &amp;quot;thugs.&amp;quot; We continue.) He also made the point that, because Reagan fired the air-traffic controllers, the Soviets knew he meant business and that, therefore, they folded their empire before Reagan could fire the Politburo. Or something. It was at this point that our good friend Clio, the Muse of History, watching with us at home, finished a fifth of Virginia Gentleman and began singing show tunes. But, of course, he later moved on to touting his success at working out &amp;quot;bipartisan accomplishments&amp;quot; to solve the problems that arise when union workers make too much money. (Tom Friedman just swooned, falling flatly to earth.) There are no problems when hedge-fund managers make too much money, of course, except for a surplus of sparkle-ponies for the rest of us. &amp;quot;There are serious disagreements,&amp;quot; Christie said, &amp;quot;sometimes expressed loudly, Jersey-style.&amp;quot; It would have been cool if Christie had pulled out a baseball bat at this point, but life is full of disappointments. He also explained that this style of governance &amp;quot;has taken hold across many other states,&amp;quot; many of them with Republican governors whose approval ratings at home are lower than Christie&amp;#039;s are. He then went on to call Barack Obama a wimp for several paragraphs. That&amp;#039;s your YouTube hero, pally, right there. Jersey-style! Still, he&amp;#039;s not yet running, and his brother is out there telling people that Christie won&amp;#039;t give it a try this time around. There could be a number of reasons, the most obvious being that he doesn&amp;#039;t look like he&amp;#039;s in shape to run a fouteen-month marathon that ends in a two-week sprint. He may have the heart of a lion and coronary arteries as clear as the skies in May, but he&amp;#039;s still going to be the biggest piece of manflesh to seek the office since William Howard Taft. That has to figure into everyone&amp;#039;s thinking, including his own. And it may be that he needs a little more time to fashion himself completely into the kind of Republican he thinks he can sell to the country. In that regard, there was in this speech a serious tell, as the poker players down at the Taj say.  Christie fashioned himself as a kind of new Reagan: cut from the finest conservative cloth, but willing to work together in a pragmatic way even with the most ferocious of his political opponents. For a moment, leave aside the fact that his record in New Jersey proves nothing of the sort. (He&amp;#039;s comfortable with members of the Money Party on both sides of the aisle. Otherwise, he&amp;#039;s the guy the call screener leaves on hold for half-an-hour until the show&amp;#039;s energy has begun to lag. Chris on a car phone, you&amp;#039;re next!) It was later in the speech when Christie gave the game away, at least in terms of historical parallels, and revealed himself not as the heir to Reagan but the legitimate descendant of another Republican president, a guy who&amp;#039;s pushing up the sod one presidential library west of Simi Valley.  The country is too fractured to govern itself, Christie said. It needs someone to unite it so we can all move forward. A compromiser. Like him, say. And one day in Ohio, in the autumn of 1968, Richard Nixon saw a little girl holding up a sign.  &amp;quot;Bring us together,&amp;quot; it said. And how splendidly that worked out, we can all surely remember. Chris Christie has it in him to be the newest new Nixon, albeit without the personal demons who spent most of their time playing darts in the old Nixon&amp;#039;s head. When the old Nixon was plotting his political comeback in the mid-1960&amp;#039;s, he did so from the same political-legal-financial nexus in New York and New Jersey that now seems to be the source of the current Christie boomlet, while stoking the anger of just enough of the Goldwater crowd to keep them in the tent. And Christie is adept at the kind of projection that camouflages obvious bullying as legitimate self-defense. Among other things, this technique enables Christie to exercise his natural talent of being a colossal asshole to the mere mortals who challenge him, while allowing him to present himself as a unifying presence to those people in the political sphere who really count. (Damn, Brooks just fainted.) The fact that this makes the latter group a collection of pathetically easy marks is probably beside the point. Thus, can the Fox News website rejoice in Christie&amp;#039;s having delivered a &amp;quot;monumental takedown of President Obama,&amp;quot; while the Wall Street Journal&amp;#039;s site has Christie &amp;quot;calling for unity.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a neat trick, and Richard Nixon was its past master. Nixon was the acknowledged maestro of the creative use of various resentments, his own and everyone else&amp;#039;s. It&amp;#039;s his most lasting gift to American politics. Christie was nasty enough last night, with his paranoid fantasies of Barack Obama&amp;#039;s intention to &amp;quot;divide the nation&amp;quot; in order to win an election. (And President Nixon never said that Senator McGovern would weaken the nation, only that his policies would.) But the real deal is in those YouTube clips of which he and his staff are so proud. Richard Nixon fought like a Gaboon viper to keep the world from hearing the angry invective and punk-ass nastiness with which he referred to much of the rest of the political world. Chris Christie&amp;#039;s people put it right out there, as though it&amp;#039;s a photo-op with him and the family dog. Whether you think one approach is preferable to the other is probably the best measure of the depths to which this nation&amp;#039;s political culture has sunk. For those of us who remember how it once worked, Chris Christie is the newest New Nixon, and all of them turn one day into the old one, as sure as god made schoolteachers to be kicked around. Follow Charles P. Pierce on The Politics Blog, on RSS and the Twitter &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a11047/chris-christie-presidential-bid-6498142/>