Last November, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie sat down with CNN’s Jake Tapper to discuss President Barack Obama’s infamous promise that if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.
Tapper asked Christie what type of advice he would give Obama on how to handle the widening Obamacare scandal. Tapper specifically wanted to know what Christie thought of Obama’s revisionist mansplaining of how the “if you like your plan” promise really worked.
“If it was a mistake…then just admit it to people.”
Thus far, Christie appears to be blatantly ignoring his own advice on how to handle a corruption scandal that could imperil his 2016 presidential campaign hopes. Instead of taking ownership of his staff’s blatant abuse of power in deliberately gumming up traffic to punish Christie’s political foes, Christie has repeatedly not just denied responsiblity, but denied that there’s anything to be responsible for.
Andrew McCarthy, who just like Christie is a veteran of the U.S. attorney’s office, wrote about Christie’s continued dissembling at NRO this morning:
That type of response, which is the exact opposite of admitting a mistake, has been indicative of Christie’s attitude towards the scandal: There’s no scandal, and even if there was, it’s all politics.
As I wrote yesterday, there are a number of reasons why this scandal could ultimately be Christie’s undoing (there are also a number of ways it could blow over and be a non-issue). Reason #2 was “It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up.”
If Christie demanded a “full investigation” which conveniently (and erroneously) cleared him and all his friends of any wrongdoing, then that fact alone calls into question his ability to manage the day-to-day responsibilities of overseeing basic government activities. But what if he didn’t demand anything? What if there was no investigation at all? What if he simply never cared enough to scratch more than a millimeter below the surface?
It’s those types of nagging questions, and not the traffic jam itself, that will continue to dog Christie until he comes clean on what actually transpired under his nose.
