Remember the scene in “The Godfather” when gangster lawyer Tom Hagen urges Hollywood studio chief Jack Woltz to cast crooner Johnny Fontane in his new movie? Woltz says he can’t do it because Fontane stole a girl from him. “A man in my position,” Woltz hollers, “can’t afford to be made to look ridiculous!”
That’s the problem for Chris Christie with this Bridgegate nonsense. The (unlikely) worst possible outcome for him is that it comes out he’s been lying, in which case he’s finished every which way. But the likely outcome may leave Christie looking ridiculous — and a man who wants to be president “can’t afford to be made to look ridiculous.”
Those who hope to make political hay with the lane closures think it plays into his image as a “bully.” Others seem to think it will do damage to his reputation as a no-nonsense plain-speaker and truth-teller, or that it suggests he’s an incompetent who doesn’t know what his aides are doing.
Not at all. In fact, the early polls in New Jersey suggest it hasn’t hurt him very much, and that’s with the wall-to-wall, 24-7 coverage it has garnered everywhere.
After all, this is the very definition of a petty scandal, and it looks pettier and odder every day. Someone decided to close lanes and make traffic, and to cover up that fact with a “study.” It was an awful thing to do, but the sheer peculiarity of the scheme — no matter what the reason — makes it essentially comic in the retelling.
That’s good for Christie in one way, because his enemies in New Jersey and the Democratic Party (and some on the right in the GOP) are already in danger of overplaying their hands and treating this clown show as though it were Watergate.
But it’s bad for Christie in another way. The pettiness of the lane closures threatens to turn him from a formidable presence into an object of ridicule.
On Tuesday night, Jimmy Fallon teamed with Bruce Springsteen on an immensely clever “Born to Run” takeoff that will probably have 50 million YouTube hits by the time the 2016 election rolls around.
“They shut down the tollbooths of glory ’cause we didn’t endorse Chris Christie,” Fallon sang, while Springsteen complained he needed to go to the bathroom but couldn’t because he was caught up in “Governor Chris Christie’s Fort Lee, New Jersey, Traffic Jam.”
Yes, Springsteen is a leftist, and yes, this is a classic mainstream-media hit on a Republican. But to use a term beloved to Internet marketers, the idea behind the video is “sticky.” It will persist.
Christie will forever be associated not only with the inconvenience an invented traffic jam caused but with the cockamamie scheme executed on his behalf — punishing someone through the ludicrous conceit of making gridlock happen. Among the consequences of this ludicrous conceit: Bruce Springsteen shouting, repeatedly, “I have to take a leak” on national TV.
Christie and Sarah Palin have very little in common, to put it mildly, but the moment in 2008 that Palin became the gleeful object of belittling late-night satire, she went from being a raw political talent Democrats deeply feared to a comic wellspring from which they drank deeply.
Up till now, Christie’s main liability as a pop-culture figure has been his weight. He’s working on that, and impressively so. That’s hard work. Maybe it’s preparing him for the equally hard work of avoiding the fate of Jack Woltz, who ended up with a horse’s head in his bed.