Feature: Is NJ Governor Chris Christie A Mad Man?

From his earliest days as a public official, Christie has used bluster and overheated rhetoric to take down his enemies. It’s turned him into Angry America’s favorite politician — at least until they get a look at what he’s really doing

In August, conservatives soured even more on Christie over a scandal in his education department. Bret Schundler, the conservative Republican education secretary and a longtime champion of charter schools, had been working with the teachers union to secure a $400 million federal grant. When Christie found out, he exploded, according to testimony later given by Schundler. Christie insisted the grant be quickly rewritten without union input. The application turned out to contain a key omission, and because of it — and because the union didn’t sign off on the new application — the state narrowly lost out on $400 million for kids. Christie immediately called a press conference, blaming the Obama administration. He said that Schundler had given the missing data to Obama’s “mindless drones” during an interview, but the drones had refused to accept the data. But the next day, a video-tape of the interview emerged, showing that Schundler had never provided the missing data after all. Christie, embarrassed, responded by calling Schundler a liar and firing him. “[Schundler] is a man of great integrity,” says Carolee Adams, “and Christie emasculated him.”

Schundler then released e-mails proving that prior to the press conference, he had told Christie’s staff the truth about what had happened at the interview. He may have screwed up, but he was no liar. In his testimony, Schundler said, “I have thought about the possibility that beyond my being a scapegoat for [Christie’s] misstatement, the Governor might be angry at me for not telling him the interview was videotaped. In my defense, I never believed I needed to say, ‘Governor, stick to the truth, there’s a videotape.’ Perhaps I should have.”

As incredible as Schundler’s testimony was, nobody was really watching him that day in the statehouse, because that was also the day Christie chose to announce he was killing the $8.7 billion ARC rail tunnel from Jersey to New York City, the largest infrastructure project in the country. The big man stomped his foot — BOOM — and just like that, a project 20 years in the making, supported by Democrats and Republicans alike, predicted to create 6,000 short-term jobs and 40,000 long-term jobs, and sweetened with $3 billion in federal matching funds, was toast. Hundreds of tunnel advocates — transportation planners, the state’s Democratic U.S. Senators, even the White House — instantly went scurrying, trying to figure out what the hell had happened. But to Christie, it was simple: There was no money to pay for theoretical cost overruns. “In our house,” he said, casting his skepticism of the tunnel in terms of his middle-class upbringing, “when I used to go to my mother and say ‘I’d like something new, I’d like to buy something,’ my mother would look at me and say, ‘Well, of course, Christopher, you can have that — just go in the backyard and take the money off the money tree. You know where that is, right?’”