My cab driver from Philadelphia airport tonight was comically bitching about how NJ Governor Chris Christie – aka Fudgie the Fail Whale – and his wife cruised into town in a brand-new $12.5 million state police helicopter. Hypocrisy One, as we started to refer to it, is the governor’s state-funded personal helicopter, called upon to soar the Christies to a high school playing filed to see their son play in a game. According to the increasingly indignant cabby, Fudgie landed Hypocrisy One on a field adjacent to the baseball diamond, then rode in a trooper driven black limo with tinted windows from the lot to the diamond….100 feet away, befitting the caricature of a bloated idiot faux budget-cutter with no sense of shared sacrifice in tough economic times. On top of THAT bellowed the cabby “Then they took off after the fifth inning…the fifth inning!!” adding that the Christie son ‘was only the catcher anyway”.
A little research told me that Christie rushed back to the governor’s mansion in Princeton, where he dined with presidential campaign fund-raisers from Iowa – among them a hog and ethanol baron and a slew of “insurance barons” – who feasted on ribs and sweet corn.
The cabby’s point was that Christie has built a carefully constructed national profile from an overarching message of fiscal conservatism, slashing funding for education, eliminating money for family-planning clinics and putting a stake through the heart of a much needed rail tunnel project. Why would someone who cuts social programs for the poor to supposedly save money take a helicopter – for which he refused to reimburse the state for -to a kids baseball game? Fudgie had become an improbable figure of popularity in the Republican party for his blustery commitment to slashing spending while hewing to party orthodoxy in refusing to raise taxes and taking on public employees. He’s regularly exceeded his travel budget while the top federal lawman in New Jersey, and has arrived this fall at football games in a four-vehicle motorcade with police motorcycle escorts.
Another bee in the cabby’s bonnet – and a perfectly reasonable one was WHY a fella with such an obvious weight problem take a limousine to travel a mere 100 yards?
Another tidbit I learned in the car was that NJ’s largest teacher’s union apparently chartered a plane and flew a banner over the Jersey Shore on Sunday, seeking to drive traffic to their site MillionairesforChristie.com which features a hiLARious caricature of Fudgie as a monocle-wearing, cigar-chomping -but still way too flattering – millionaire