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Duty Before Party
NOV. 20, 2012
The New Jersey coastline was a shambles,
hundreds of thousands of houses in the state were dark and cold, and entire
towns were largely homeless. The state needed federal help, and Gov. Chris
Christie did what he had to do to get it, including
praising President Obama for delivering aid and
comfort. For that, he was pilloried by a Republican Party that places blind
loyalty above emergency.
A
report in The Times on Tuesday by
Michael Barbaro showed just how low Republican leaders sank in the final week
of the presidential campaign. Hurricane Sandy
struck the East Coast eight days before Election Day, and all the party could
see was a Republican governor praising a Democratic president. When the
president visited New Jersey, Mr. Christie had the temerity
to describe him as “outstanding” and “incredibly supportive.”
Republicans don’t forget that
kind of thing, said Douglas Gross, a party operative in Iowa. “The presumption is that Republicans
can’t count on him,” Mr. Gross said. At the
Republican Governors Association meeting last week, Pat McCrory,
the governor-elect of North Carolina,
told Mr. Christie: “People keep asking me why you were so nice to the
president.” He added, “I tell them you are doing your job,” but the message was
conveyed.
It wasn’t just the praise for
the president, though, that seemed to bother Mr. Romney’s supporters. For
years, the party’s loudest activists have tried to delegitimize Mr. Obama,
questioning his birthplace and his patriotism, even calling him a socialist and
saying outright that he was in over his head.
How could you stand so close
to Mr. Obama on the tarmac, one donor to Mr. Romney asked, suggesting that
physical proximity to the president was out of line. How could you have boarded
the presidential helicopter for a tour of the shore? Apparently party leaders
and donors really expected Mr. Christie to refuse to meet the president at a
time when his state was suffering. They wanted him to reflect their own
pettiness — so obvious in the last four years — and shun the hand dispensing
federal aid.
We have previously been
critical of some of Mr. Christie’s shortsighted actions as governor, but it was
hard not to admire him for standing up to his party’s worst elements and
putting his state first.
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