The Patriot Post® · Weekend Review: Christie & Responsibility
By: Thomas Sowell
Governor Christie’s nearly two-hour-long press conference last week showed again that he is in a class by himself when it comes to Republicans who can express themselves in the heat of political battle.
When it comes to policies, I might prefer some other Republican as a 2016 presidential candidate. But the bottom line in politics is that you have to get elected, in order to have the power to accomplish anything. It doesn’t matter how good your ideas are, if you can’t be bothered to articulate them in a way that the voting public can understand.
Chris Christie’s press conference showed that, unlike Barack Obama, Christie did not duck the media or sidestep questions. Nor did he resort to euphemisms or cry out, like Hillary Clinton, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
He met the questions head on and gave unequivocal answers – the kind of answers that could, and should, destroy his political future if they are not true.
More important, Governor Christie quickly fired the people he held responsible for deliberately creating a traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge. Contrast that with the many scandals in Washington for which President Obama has not fired anyone.
While the creation of a traffic jam in a small New Jersey town shows the calloused ugliness too often found among political operators puffed up with their own power, this cannot compare with the threat to freedom when the Internal Revenue Service targets the administration’s political opponents during an election year.
Nor can a traffic jam compare with the Department of Justice’s gun-running operation that led to the death of an American Border Patrol agent in the southwest or the State Department’s actions and inactions that led to the deaths of four American officials killed by terrorists in Benghazi.