The Real Bystanders

by: Bertin Lefkovic

Tue Nov 29, 2011 at 09:39:30 PM EST

In what constitutes an article by Politico's standards, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's recent tantrum, which some have described as an audition for the VP slot with the seemingly inevitable Republican Presidential nominee (unless one of the other six candidates not named Herman Cain and hopefully named Michele Bachmann have something to say about it), Mitt Romney, about President Barack Obama's so-called failure to lead the so-called supercommittee to reach a deal on our country's budget deficit, was basically reprinted for public consumption, including Christie calling Obama "a bystander in the Oval Office" and asking him "What the hell are we paying you for?".  His tirade goes further to say the following:

"In New Jersey, the reason [problems got solved] is because I called people into the room and said we're going to solve this problem and I had people of good will on the other side who said they believed it was their obligation, regardless of party, to get done things like pension and benefit reform," the governor said, adding, "Why the president of the United States refuses to do this is astonishing to me."

As obnoxious as Christie's entire tirade was, what bothered me most about the "article" was his stenographer's unwillingness or inability to compare and contrast the political dynamic here in New Jersey with what is going on in Washington and recognize that both are broken for very different reasons.

In Washington, there is a Republican minority in the Senate that can bring our entire government to a standstill by filibustering everything that comes before them and a majority in the House that passes legislation that is so extreme that there is no chance that it would ever survive a Senate committee much less get a vote in the Senate.

Meanwhile, in Trenton, we have Democratic "leadership" that is bought and paid for by party bosses who have more in common with our state's Republican Governor than our party's rank-and-file.  As a result, we have a facade of bipartisanship presented to the general public and the lazy mass media, where the storyline is always that Christie presents an initiative in its purest, right-wing form, the Democratic leadership presents a modicum of resistance, making a little bit of noise in the process, Christie scales his initiative back slightly, and the Democratic leadership claims victory, delivers the votes needed for Christie's initiative to pass, while everyone else votes against it, lamenting its passage, while retaining the "high road" even though most, if not all of them, elected and recently re-elected the leadership that continues to enable Christie on each and every issue, while he crows about all of his "bipartisan" successes.

So who are the real bystanders?  To be fair, I think that President Obama failed our country, once again, this summer when he refused to heed former President Bill Clinton's advice and unilaterally raise the debt ceiling on constitutional grounds and let the fight go from there.  It was not as if the latest in what seems like an endless string of compromises earned him any more good will with the Republicans in Washington, who continue to block him on everything that he tries to do, than every other compromise before it.

But Obama's willingness to capitulate to Republicans on every issue pales in comparison to what we have seen from the Democrats in Trenton who went so far as to let the Republican minority write the first budget that they would pass without even considering for a moment the possibility of a government shutdown like the one which took place when they could not reach an accord with then-Democratic Governor Jon "MF Global Clusterfuck" Corzine on their first budget.  The pen/ben debacle was only the latest in an almost equally long string of capitulations that started before Christie was even sworn in as Governor, when 9 Democrats did not vote for marriage equality legislation that could have passed and been signed into law by Governor Clusterfuck (kudos to Rosi for making it not only acceptable, but cool, to use a word like clusterfuck in political discourse - this is second only to the omnipresence of the phrase "batshit crazy" that people like the aforementioned Congresswoman Bachmann have inspired).

To start, when President Obama and the Democrats in Washington rolled out their "New Deal for the 21st Century" that put every unemployed professional to work teaching in classrooms throughout the country and every skilled and unskilled worker to work rebuilding our nation's infrastructure at a price tag of approximately $5 trillion, the Republicans in Washington would have expressed their concerns about the costs of the program and negotiated it down to $4 trillion.

Then, when Obama and the Democrats pushed for Universal Single-Payer Health Care, the Republicans balked, but eventually agreed to an expansion of Medicaid to include families earning less than 200% of the poverty line, the ability for families earning between 200% and 500% of the poverty line to purchase health insurance from Medicaid, the ability of families earning more than 500% of the poverty line to purchase health insurance from Medicare, and the ability of businesses and corporations, profit or non-profit, to purchase health insurance for their employees from either system.

Finally, when dealing with the banks, in response to Obama and the Democrats proposing to forcibly nationalize the banking and finance industries, the Republicans agreed to a compromise that required the banks to sell all mortgage-backed securities to the Social Security Trust Fund at five cents on the dollar and become the sole holder of all of their underlying mortgages, enabling troubled homeowners to stay in their homes as owners with modified mortgages or as renters, while providing the SSTF with a stable revenue source that will ensure its solvency for the rest of this century and beyond.

Obama's initiatives are so successful at recovering the economy that Democrats expand their majorities in both the House and Senate with 65% of the seats in both bodies after the 2010 midterm elections and 70% of the seats in both bodies after he defeats the GOP Presidential nominee, Herman Cain, in an unprecedented landslide where he gets 60% of the popular vote, including a majority of white voters, and sweeps the electoral college by winning all 50 states.  The first piece of legislation passed during his second term is a constitutional amendment, which bans all private contributions to elections at every level of government in the country and requires that all campaigns for all public offices be publicly financed.

Conversely, after a summer-long government shutdown, Governor Christie finally agreed to sign the budget that was presented to him by Senate President Codey and Assembly Speaker Watson Coleman, which eschewed the millionaire's tax in favor of new tax brackets for incomes over $500K, $750K, $1MM, $5MM, and every $5MM thereafter and sufficiently funded our healthcare system and public schools, making full utilization of President Obama's initiatives, including but not limited to a Race to the Top application that placed New Jersey first in the country.

Also, not only did Christie not cancel the ARC Tunnel project, but with the encouragement of Democrats in Trenton, he fully utilized every New Deal for the 21st Century dollar that our Congresspersons and Senators could deliver to the state to make Newark the hub of high-speed rail lines going from Boston to Miami and from Newark to San Francisco and connect every other part of the state with electric bus and light-rail lines.

Finally, at the insistence of the Democrats in Trenton, Christie signed a complete overhaul of the municipal governance and public education systems, ending home rule by consolidating all spending at the county level, and rewriting the charter school law so that public charter schools work cooperatively rather than competitively with traditional public schools.

As a result of his willingness to capitulate to Democrats in Trenton, Christie is defeated in the Republican gubernatorial primary by Steve Lonegan, who along with his LG candidate, Anna Little, comes in 3rd place in the general election with 14% of the vote behind independent candidate, Kim Guadagno, and her LG candidate, Chris Christie, who got 16% of the vote (almost entirely from South Jersey, which is interesting, considering the fact that their independent candidacy was co-chaired by George Norcross, whose political empire was vanquished during the primary elections by the progressive slate topped by the Democratic gubernatorial primary winner) and Dick Codey and his LG candidate, Bonnie Watson Coleman, who received 70% of the vote and expanded Democratic majorities in the Assembly to 60-20 and in the Senate to 30-10.

During the lame duck session that followed these elections, marriage equality legislation passes the Assembly and Senate with vetoproof majorities.  For some reason, Christie vetoes the legislation anyway and watches impotently as his veto of the last piece of legislation to come before him during his one and only term as Governor is overridden by even larger majorities than the original vote.

Can someone contact J.J. Abrams and find out where I can find a portal to this parallel universe, where Democrats have spines and Republicans have hearts, because I like that one much more than the one in which I live.