In a closed-door meeting with the Republican National Committee in Boston on August 15, Chris Christie laid out the template of how the Republicans can capture the White House in 2016. According to the Wall Street Journal, Christie made the case for “a pragmatic form of conservatism.” In other words, Christy is signaling he does not hold any deeply held beliefs, and that his current huge lead over Democrat gubernatorial nominee Barbara Buono in this year’s New Jersey race shows how he can attract women and minorities in a state where Barack Obama easily beat Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election.
Gov. Christie claims that the concern some Republicans have expressed about the federal government surveillance programs is “dangerous” and part of an “esoteric, intellectual” debate within the party. Christie is thus channeling another former federal prosecutor, Rudy Giuliani, who began the 2008 GOP primary season in first place and then flamed out like a comet across the sky falling to Earth. Giuliani, too, was viewed as a pragmatic politician and based his candidacy on being mayor of New York City on September 11, 2001.
If Chris Christie thinks that an overbearing, intrusive, snooping, federal government is the winning formula for 2016, then he obviously lacks the appreciation of what America is all about, namely, a country based upon individual rights, private property and limited government, and has a severe case of amnesia. For more than 100 years presidents of both political parties have violated their oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. And this is coming from a college professor – a segment of our society Gov. Christie apparently disdains – who has looked at the historical record of presidents from McKinley to Obama and has concluded that America’s Empire created by the country’s financial and political elites has undermined our national security, wasted trillions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, and caused millions of casualties. This may be asking too much, but before the summer is over Chris Christie needs to read a few books including the short monograph by Murray Rothbard, Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy, which is available here for free, http://mises.org/document/1223.
Gov. Christie claims “for our ideas to win we have to govern. And if we don’t win we don’t govern.” Christie therefore begged the question, what ideas will be American people rally around in order for the GOP to win?’
In the last two presidential elections, establishment Republicans nominees expressed support for a more aggressive interventionist foreign policy and they both went down to ignominious defeat. If Chris Christie is the GOP presidential nominee in 2016, he too will be defeated if he embraces the NSA’s snooping policies, more intervention overseas, and unequivocal support for the military-industrial complex.
Based on his remarks reported in the Wall Street Journal (August 16), Christie believes the prize, winning the presidency, is his overriding concern. Obviously, the governor is going to try to run one of those campaigns, very short on substance about the great issues facing the American people such as the Federal Reserve’s legalized counterfeiting, the massive federal budget, the unsustainable Ponzi schemes – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – and every unconstitutional and wasteful aspect of the military-industrial complex, and very long on platitudes coupled with his personality cult.
The overriding question for 2016 is will the American people get out of their stupor and reject the federal government Leviathan that has trampled on individual liberty, intervened unnecessarily overseas and undermined the free enterprise system?
Given the rhetoric we’ve heard from several individuals who have been mentioned as potential 2016 presidential candidates, a strong liberty candidate has yet to emerge. We know for sure it will not be Chris Christie.