Thursday 3 January 2013

GOP Smackdown


Below is a clip that shows highlights of a speech that the Republican Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, gave last night. Don’t let the fact that he looks and sounds like a character from The Sopranos fool you, this is powerful stuff.

As the tense negotiations surrounding the ‘fiscal cliff’ came to a conclusion at the new year, Republican house speaker John Boehner (the guy in charge of Congress, the only Republican controlled bit of the US government) realised that he had already pushed his hard right party as far as it would go on passing measures that would increase government spending, and decided he could not ask them to vote on a bill which would have approved federal government relief for the victims of Hurricane Sandy. Yes, really. Elected Republicans would actually vote against disaster relief for their own people.

Chris Christie is the governor of one of the States most affected by the storm. He is understandably furious that his own party would treat his people in this way. I expect that fury is shared by a great many Americans. I should also mention that Governor Christie is a very serious politician, one of the few in the Republican ranks who could plausibly reach out across the partisan divide and make a presidential run. Indeed, many serious Republicans, including Henry Kissinger if I remember rightly, were urging him to do so last time round. Watch this guy. If there is going to be some sort of Republican revival in the future, it will be based around someone like him. 


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