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"  Tiger Beat On The Potomac -- beset at the moment by allegations that one of its Founding Geniuses has been for lease by the hour, and also beset by extraordinarily lame alibis for same by the other Founding Genius -- has decided to go all counterintuituve on the topic of its most recent mancrush, Governor Big Chicken of New Jersey. Bigger, it seems, is better. Exit polls showed that Barack Obama beat Romney by 10 percentage points on the crucial question of which candidate &amp;quot;is more in touch with people like you.&amp;quot; When it comes to conveying empathy, appearance matters. As a black man, Obama was able to connect instantly with the estimated 35 million non-white voters before they ever considered his political ideology or competence. Christie&amp;#039;s size would allow him to do something similar with overweight voters. And let&amp;#039;s face it: America definitely has a plus-size electorate. Almost 70 percent of us are overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including more than a third who, like Christie, are obese. Actually, Big Chicken&amp;#039;s biggest asset is the desperate need for the country&amp;#039;s courtier press to sell a friend of hedge funds and casinos as a Regular Dude, which is guaranteed to be pushing the needle on the insufferability meter deep into the red zone by the middle of next year. Frankly, I don&amp;#039;t much care if Big Chicken has his own gravitational field or not. I do care that Big Chicken is chickening out again. Yet that&amp;#039;s what he appears to be doing when it comes to the Dream Act. When the governor was seeking the Latino vote weeks ago, he assured advocates he&amp;#039;d support New Jersey&amp;#039;s version of this bill. But now that he&amp;#039;s been re-elected with 51 percent of the Hispanic vote, he&amp;#039;s backpedaling. Christie told a radio station last week that he would not sign the Dream Act, which passed the state Senate and is expected to be taken up soon by the Assembly, for reasons that make no sense. First he claimed New Jersey&amp;#039;s program would be &amp;quot;richer than the federal program,&amp;quot; when in fact they deal with two entirely different issues: The federal bill creates a pathway to citizenship, while New Jersey&amp;#039;s allows &amp;quot;dreamers&amp;quot; to pay in-state tuition and become eligible for financial aid. His other excuse was that out-of-state residents would be eligible for in-state tuition if they went to a private high school in New Jersey. Think about this: He&amp;#039;s saying we should scrap this bill because someone might come to our pricey boarding schools from out of state, then decide to go to a public college and get in-state tuition. How many students could this possibly apply to? Of course, there is an explanation, which is lame enough to have been thought of in the executive suites at TBOTP. &amp;quot;I said the legislature should move toward tuition equality,&amp;quot; he said Monday in a press conference. &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t support any particular piece of legislation. And I still support tuition equality.&amp;quot; Besides, there&amp;#039;s a comma splice in subparagraph Q, and he couldn&amp;#039;t live with himself if New Jersey got a reputation for bad grammar. At this point, I really don&amp;#039;t care about the size of his stomach. The real issue is that he&amp;#039;s already left his guts in Iowa. Bartender, a double Prestone, and see what the pundits in the back room will have. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19949/politico-chris-christie-weight-120413/>