How Politics Works. CPAC does Chris Christie a favor....

A con­gress­men first duty is to get re-​elected

Sam Ray­burn

It’s axiomatic that no mat­ter how strong or solid your ideas are the first thing you have to do is get elected. With­out the power of get­ting elected or get­ting some­body elected your good ideas mean absolutely nothing.

Once you’ve been elected your choices are to run on your record or run away from it. Con­versely if you are run­ning against some­body already in office seek­ing re-​election, you can run on your opponent’s record (par­tic­u­larly if it stinks), or run on your ideas, the best choice being both.

Last time around Barack Obama, not being able to run on the worst record of a pres­i­dent in my life­time instead attack­ing Mitt Rom­ney. Con­versely Rom­ney appar­ently assumed that record would be enough to carry him over the fin­ish line with­out fight­ing and man­aged to lose what should have been the most winnable elec­tion the GOP had before it since 1984.

And that Brings us to New Jer­sey and Chris Christie.

Back dur­ing the 2012 cam­paign before Hur­ri­cane Sandy hit Chris Christie was giv­ing first-​rate speeches like this:

The key quote:

35 years ago we didn’t have an income tax in NH no income tax like right here in NH, we had no income tax and Gov­er­nor Bren­don Byrne, a demo­c­rat said: If you just give me a small income tax, a lit­tle one, I will lower your prop­erty taxes, we had the high­est prop­erty taxes in Amer­ica back in 1977 so 35 years later, what have we got? We’ve STILL got the high­est prop­erty taxes in Amer­ica and the income tax that started at 2% under gov­er­nor Byrne is now 9%”

And that brings us to CPAC 2013

The media has made a huge fuss about Chris Christie not being invited to CPAC. CPAC’s chair­man put it this way:

“CPAC is like the all-​star game for pro­fes­sional ath­letes; you get invited when you have had an out­stand­ing year,” Car­de­nas said. “Hope­fully he will have another all-​star year in the future, at which time we will be happy to extend an invi­ta­tion. This is a con­ser­v­a­tive con­fer­ence, not a Repub­li­can Party event.”

Car­de­nas cited Christie’s deci­sion to expand Med­ic­aid under Pres­i­dent Obama’s health care law and his sup­port of a $60 bil­lion aid pack­age for Hur­ri­cane Sandy vic­tims, which he argued was filled with waste­ful spending.

You can argue if Christie had a good or bad year but it’s not going to mat­ter what kind of year he ad unless he actu­ally man­ages to win re-​election.

Christie’s deci­sion to take the medicare money was a huge sur­prise given his state­ments of just a few months ago listed above. By buy­ing into this sys­tem he is putting a yoke on New Jer­sey that will be there long after he is gone, but in terms of re-​election, the pres­i­dent is pop­u­lar in NJ and the pres­i­dent won the state by almost 18 points.

MSNBC not with­stand­ing Christie is smart enough to know that the left is not going to lay off of him or paint him as any­thing other than a right-​wing extrem­ist. I sus­pect he fig­ures with the pres­i­dent win­ning the state by that wide a spread and Oba­macare being the sig­na­ture achieve­ment of this pres­i­dent (and I use the word achieve­ment VERY loosely)this move takes at least one tar­get off of his chest.

And when it comes down to it, there is noth­ing CPAC could do bet­ter for his re-​election efforts than keep­ing him away.

By stay­ing away noth­ing he says there can be use to call him a “right-​winger” in a +18 Obama state. It also pre­cludes a nasty con­fronta­tion with con­ser­v­a­tives that could hurt him among a base where he can’t spare a sin­gle vote.

Will it be enough? That depends on where NJ is come elec­tion day, but as Joe Scar­bor­ough cor­rectly states he is going to cer­tainly be bet­ter for New Jer­sey than any­one nom­i­nated by the Demo­c­rat party and he can’t do any of that good if he loses.

With elec­tion day com­ing Christie needed to high­light his cre­den­tials CPAC 2013’s move fit the bill so well and gen­er­ated so much pos­i­tive press from the media that will be turn­ing on him soon enough you would almost think he asked them to do it.

And That’s how pol­i­tics works

Update: I have absolutely no idea how my daily Day by Day Script replaced The Christie Speech above. None of my pre­views showed it.

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While we man­aged thou­sands of vis­i­tors the quest for the weekly and monthly pay­check only man­aged to move $2. As it is $2 more than I had yes­ter­day and twice the value of Newsweek I can’t com­plain but as it’s the end of he month we have two goals going on at once. First the Monthly goal

[olimome­ter id=2]

The monthly goal is based on my mort­gage, My pay­ment is $1200 monthly which I’ll be pay­ing this after­noon at the bank. I’m a mere $59 away from this goal. That’s 3 peo­ple kick­ing in $20

[olimome­ter id=3]

The weekly goal con­tin­ues today, tomor­row and Sat­ur­day. As you can see the weekly pay­check goal is doing rather poorly only $27 toward that weekly pay­check of $300 I’ll need 14 peo­ple to step up at $20 to reach that one by close of Busi­ness on Saturday.

You might ask Hey why monthly and weekly goals? Well the monthly goal assures me the mort­gage gets paid. The weekly goal gen­er­ates an extra month which I’m using to finance the CPAC event. It’s the one trip That I can afford under this system.

But it’s all aca­d­e­mic with­out you.