My Mean Governor

A guest post from Richie.

My mean governor, Chris Christie of NJ, is against expanding health coverage for poor people, against restoring the earned income tax credit for low wage workers, and he's clawing back affordable housing money from municipalities to patch state budget shortfalls.

And, as a 'fiscally conservative' Republican, his revenue projections were way too rosy, sending the state further into debt, and he's fighting with the Democratic state legislature to pass an across-the-board income tax break that would disproportionately go to the state's highest earners (despite him disingenuously repeatedly billing it only as a 'middle class' tax cut), even though the richest folks don't need it and the state can't afford it. (The Democrats responded with a property tax cut, paid for by an income tax increase on people making over $1 million). Let's not mention that Christie already killed a massively necessary public transportation project, backed mostly by federal and port authority funding, and his Ed Dept lost the state nearly half a billion in "Race to the Top" federal education funds due to in-fighting.

Shockingly, this all apparently makes him an ideal candidate for VP, and as Romney is just weeks away from picking his running mate, buzz still surrounds Christie. Not that the other options are much better. Or, for that matter, is Romney, who is staking his entire campaign on overturning 'Obamacare' (which he, quite literally, pioneered as 'Romneycare' in Massachusetts), and on his business acumen (which (a) is actually quite a different skill set than governing, not to get into a long lecture about microeconomics vs. macroeconomics; and (b) his career had almost nothing to do with job creation, despite his claims, and almost everything to do with wealth creation for his firm and select investors, and if we learned anything from 8 years of George W. Bush, it's that simply helping rich people get richer doesn't necessarily improve the economy or lead to job creation.)

But here's the narrative you'll certainly be hearing in the coming months: Chris Christie is AWESOME because he says what he's thinking and he's not afraid to get feisty with random constituents and teachers, or to lose terrible, awful federal funding for horrible, job-creating things like education and infrastructure. Because we all know that the real problem with America is that our teachers are super-duper wealthy. Or something like that. And Christie single-handedly restored New Jersey to greatness by, I don't know, going to a bunch of Bruce Springsteen concerts? See, not only is Christie AWESOME, he's also COOL! And that makes him an amazing governor, and qualified to be VP, president, or even ruler of the known universe.