I just saw Chris Christie on Wolf Blitzer blaming Biden for the antivaxxers refusing to get their shots saying that Biden needs to tell them t’s important to get vaccinated and give them information about why it’s important. He said “they want to be educated, not indoctrinated.”‘
Right. Biden hardly speaks of anything else, but Christie thinks he gets points for “both-sidesing” this issue and Blitzer sat there like a drooping potten plant.
Christie honestly thinks he can walk this line between being a Trump asshole and a Chris Christie asshole as if there’s a difference. He cannot.
Anyway, here’s Jonathan Last to make the case even morenpointedly, and he used to be a Republican:
Chris Christie sold 2,289 copies of his new book last week and if anyone deserves this kind of public humiliation, it’s him.
How big of a failure is is 2,289 copies? Here’s Eric Boehlert:
How Christie was able to sell so few books after lining up so much national media attention during his marketing roll-out — “This Week” and “The View,” “Fox & Friends,” along with Fox News, Fox Business, the Daily Show, HBO twice, and CNBC — represents an extraordinary disconnect.
Just to walk through the economics of this for you: Christie’s book was published by Simon & Schuster. I haven’t seen any reporting on the advance they gave him, but for the sake of argument, let’s call it $50k.1 Then there’s the PR costs—a minimum of $10k. Making the books—PP&B—runs about $3 a unit. And depending on how many copies the publisher printed, they’re then going to have to spend money converting the unsold hardcovers to paperbacks. And then they’ll eventually have to pay to pulp the unsold paperbacks.
So all told, Simon & Schuster spent at least $70k in order to sell $58k worth of books—of which they, the publisher, only take home about 50 percent. (The other half goes to Amazon.) And the likely true cost to Simon & Schuster is probably closer to 10x that number, since we’re being so conservative with our guesses.
So this thing is a disaster.
But it’s worth noting that it’s only a disaster for the publisher. Chris Christie gets to keep his advance. Chris Christie was able to leverage this nothing-burger book to get on TV and promote himself.
For Chris Christie, personally, the book was a roaring success.
It’s someone else who got left with the bag.
That’s a pretty good synecdoche for the entire Chris Christie Experience.
The big fella never pays for his mistakes. He never admits that he was wrong. It’s always someone else’s screwup. Someone else who gets stuck with the check.
And that’s why, despite all of those nice sentiments at the top, I’m not sure we really should welcome Christie into the pro-democracy fold. Some reasons:
-There’s no repentance from Christie, no admission of the part he played in getting America to this place.
-There’s no acknowledgment from Christie that the side he’s leaving is playing with an authoritarianism unique in the American experience.
-Instead, Christie frames his break with Trump as trying to put the Republican party in a better position to win future elections. His pivot is not from pro-Trump to anti-Trump, but to anti-anti-Trump.
-There is no reason to believe that Christie is sincere in this halfway-break he’s making. Even his current “better position to win” schtick may well be expedient—just another gambit to put himself over.
-It seems certain that if Trump called Christie tomorrow and offered him the 2024 VP slot, Christie would do it in a New Jersey minute.
So yes, the pro-democracy movement needs every ally it can get, no matter how unsavory. But I’m not convinced that Chris Christie is an ally.
And in any case, as his 2,289 books show, how useful would he be if he was really on the side of the angels?
Chris Christie has no constituency. He is a media creation with no real-world support.
Which would be fine, if he was willing to stand up and speak the truth.
But he isn’t. Instead he spins and dances and tries to frame facts and history in ways that make him the hero and preserve maximum viability for his future.
Which would be fine—okay, not “fine,” but dealable—if he was a dependable guy who’d been on the right side from the start.
But he isn’t. And he wasn’t.
People are public figures for one of three reasons: The position they hold. The constituency which supports them. Or the ideas they champion.
Chris Christie is a man with no position, no audience, and nothing to say. He is nothing more than an inconsequential phony.
Someone needs to tell the cable news networks because they keep booking him.