Chris Christie’s dream: Why he wants to be the next George W. Bush (seriously)

[DonViejo]

NJ's governor sees an old path to the White House. But there's a difference: Bush didn't contend with a Tea Party

BY STEVE KORNACKI

Officially, Chris Christie’s winning reelection campaign was aimed at voters in Democratic-friendly New Jersey, where no Republican candidate for statewide office had cracked 50 percent of the vote in 28 years – until Tuesday night, that is.

But in post-Sandy Jersey, Tuesday’s landslide was an inevitability that the Democratic nominee, state Senator Barbara Buono, was powerless to avoid. The real audience for Christie’s campaign was the national Republican Party and the national press corps. The message he wanted to convey: I am the exception to the ever self-defeating tendency of today’s GOP.

In that sense, the election couldn’t have been better timed for Christie, coming on the heels of the GOP House’s politically devastating shutdown gambit – and coming on the same night that one of the foundational forces of the Tea Party movement that instigated the shutdown, Ken Cuccinelli, was defeated in the nation’s premier swing state by a profoundly flawed Democratic candidate. The big picture story for the Republican Party in 2013 has been one of lessons not learned from their own 2012 autopsy, but there in New Jersey was a Republican governor closing his campaign with a rally in a heavily Latino Democratic bastion and assembling a coalition that would cure all of his party’s woes at the national level.

The obvious analog for this Christie triumph is the 1998 Texas reelection victory of George W. Bush. The outcome of that race was never in doubt, but the Karl Rove-led Bush team pushed hard to produce a result that would be interpreted as a national GOP blueprint – something they achieved when Bush crushed Democrat Garry Mauro by 37 points and won 40 percent of the Latino vote and nearly a third of the black vote.

full article
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/06/chris_christie%E2%80%99s_dream_why_he_wants_to_be_the_next_george_w_bush_seriously/