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

SOME PEOPLE BEGIN IN POLITICS  by working as legislative staffers. Some press the flesh at picnics. Chris Christie began his first real political race by defaming a 62-year-old grandmother.

Cecilia “Cissy” Laureys is still around, at age 78, and although she had a stroke 11 years ago, she invited me into her kitchen to tell me the story; helping her with some of the details was her son, Christopher, the youngest of her 10 kids. Cissy wore a black housedress and pink slippers, and her gray hair was styled in curls. “After [Christie] made his mistake with me,” she said, laughing, “he didn’t make it again.” (Not altogether true.)

 

This is a long time ago now, 16 years, but it’s a story worth telling because it says a lot about how Christie has moved through the world and moves through it still. It was 1994, and Laureys was serving her first term as a freeholder in Morris County. She had gotten into politics out of sheer restlessness: “I had all my kids, and I was bored.”

It turned out that Chris Christie was restless, too. Born in Newark to middle-class parents, he’d volunteered for the Tom Kean for Governor campaign when he was 14. Something stuck; Christie went on to become the president of his high-school class and student body president at the University of Delaware, where he met his wife, Mary Pat. He got his law degree from Seton Hall and hooked up with Bill Palatucci, a hard-nosed Italian who had driven a young George W. Bush around New Jersey in 1988, campaigning for W.’s father. Christie was a “really, really good lawyer,” says Palatucci, but he eventually got “sick of the billable hours” and decided to challenge a Republican state senator named John Dorsey in 1993. There are two things about that 1993 campaign that a 2010 observer might care to know, and one of them is that Christie challenged Dorsey from the left, painting Dorsey as a right-wing nut job. Christie’s literature specifically blasted Republicans like Dorsey for trying to repeal a state ban on assault weapons, and he also painted himself as a champion of “a woman’s right to choose,” arguing, “A state legislature in Trenton dominated by men should not be passing laws restricting the rights of women.” From the start, then, Christie was an anomaly in a state where corruption is the norm: a nonideological good-government Republican, hell-bent on exiling the extreme and the crooked. And the second thing worth knowing about 1993 is that when Christie screwed up his nominating petitions, and got kicked off the ballot as a result, he then failed to disclose the names of the people who had donated to his campaign, as required by law. Christie argued that since he wasn’t on the ballot, disclosure was “a non-issue.” In other words, here was a guy planting a flag as a reformer, and in his very first race, he was flouting the law and saying, Come on, it’s no big deal.