Chris Christie: Time Magazine's Savior for the 2016 GOP

Here's Moe Lane on Time's fat-shaming cover story, "Time Magazine attempts to fat-shame Chris Christie*."

*Hey. This is the Left’s own sensitivity rulebook. One that they expect us to follow even though they happily abandon it the second that they can go after a conservative. You have to make them live up to their own rules, which they don’t want to do and will avoid whenever possible.

I get the magazine in hard copy, and I'm more perplexed by this meme of Christie as the GOP's 2016 savior:

New Jersey voters never got to hear Chris Christie's most important speech this year, because it took place behind closed doors at a Westin hotel in Boston, where the governor laid out his not so veiled pitch for the party's 2016 nomination. "I'm in this business to win," he told the crowd of Republican leaders, according to an audio recording smuggled out of the room. "I don't know why you're in it."

It was pure Christie, combat bundled in cliche. Ever since he ousted Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine in 2009, he has run the Garden State with combustible passion, blunt talk and the kind of bipartisan dealmaking that no one seems to do anymore. He doesn't claim to be an ideas man or a visionary. He's a workhorse with a temper and a tongue, the guy who loves his mother and gets it done.

All year long, Christie has presented this character he has created as the savior for the Grand Old Party. At the Boston meeting in August, he said ideologues had begun to edge out the winners in Ronald Reagan's Big Tent. (He meant you, Tea Party, Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin.) They acted like college professors, just spouting ideas. "College professors are fine, I guess," he joked, before driving it home. "If we don't win, we don't govern. And if we don't govern, all we do is shout into the wind."

Christie then went out and won, and he won big. In a blue state, he got 61% of the vote for governor on Nov. 5. "If we can do this in Trenton, New Jersey," Christie thundered, "maybe the folks in Washington, D.C., should tune in their TVs right now, see how it's done."

It's awful early to be anointing the GOP frontrunner, and I cringe at the thought of yet another doomed Republican presidential campaign in 2016. The GOP will be crushed if they keep nominating these mealy-mouthed moderates. Damn. I checked with Dan Riehl on Twitter the other night, after I finished reading the cover story. Christie's not very conservative at all:

@AmPowerBlog his rhetoric is that of a progressive. Not libertarian on social issues, not very conservative on fiscal issues. what's 2 like?

— DanRiehl (@DanRiehl) November 10, 2013

The country's ready for conservative leadership in the Ronald Reagan mold. Obviously, Chris Christie's not it. Although, sadly, the JournoList media will be all too happy to foist him off on a hoodwinked electorate. Grassroots conservatives will have their job cut out keeping that from happening.