The head-cracking candidate
by digby
The following is rom Chris Christie’s Today Show interview this week when he was asked about telling a citizen to sit down and shut up:
LAUER: That kind of response is something your staunch supporters love. It makes other people queasy. Are you going to have to control that side of your personality to be seen as presidential outside the rough-and-tumble world of New Jersey politics?
CHRISTIE: First of all, you’re assuming I wasn’t controlled. And you know, I sat and took it for a while. And then other people, the hundreds of people that were there, deserved to hear what we had to say that day. That person had their say. I’d sat and listened to it. It was time for them to sit down. And I’m not going to change, Matt. This is who I am.
LAUER: Maybe I should say instead of controlling that side, do you have to hide that side of your personality outside of New Jersey?
CHRISTIE: There’s no hope of that.
No he’s not going to hide it. He considers it an asset. So do his handlers, especially if he ends up in a general election fight with Hillary Clinton. I think they’ve decided that any man running against a woman will be dogged by accusations of sexism and aggression and I think they probably believe that helps them get out their base and possibly dig into the more macho elements of the Democratic party. (Yes, there are plenty of them.)
They foresee a straight-up Bros vs the Hoes battle. Which will be terrible for out politics and our culture. But you can see why they might think it’s a way to win presidential elections. They have to find a way to get some piece of the Democratic presidential coalition or they cannot win.
Certainly, they can count on the media to help them frame this the way. They love a good battle of the sexes. (The only problem, of course, is that there are Republican women out there too. ) This is not unprecedented. George W. Bush had an element of this and they loved him for it. I wrote about it a long time ago, calling him “America’s angry ex-husband.”
He’s the dad who is always mad. Surly, unpredictable, spoiled. You know the type. “I’m the commander in chief, see. I don’t need to explain … Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”
Chris Christie is a classic conservative archetype and who better to take it to an uppity women candidate?
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