Superstorm Christie Demolishes Hillary

Jim Geraghty:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdvFuC7YRjE

We’ll never know precisely what went through New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s mind in the moments before he took the stage Tuesday night. But one can’t help but think he wanted to show that he would have made a much better running mate for Donald Trump than Mike Pence.

He certainly remains one of the toughest attack dogs in the Republican party. It’s not often a convention speaker gets a crowd of delegates to chant “LOCK HER UP!” Christie bit into his role with gusto, inviting delegates to “do something fun tonight,” to “hold Hillary Clinton accountable for her performance and her character,” and asking the delegates to decide whether she was “guilty, or not guilty.”

Delegates were enthralled as Christie listed parts of the world “infected by her flawed judgment” — from the overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya to the lame hashtag campaign against Boko Haram to a reference to Syrian dictator Bashir Assad as “a reformer” to her role in beginning the Iran negotiations to coddling the Castro brothers in Cuba. After each prosecutorial case, the delegates gleefully answered, “GUILTY!” and then chanted “LOCK HER UP!”

The media, which had painted Christie as a perpetually humiliated lackey ever since he endorsed Trump, had to give credit where it was due. The Washington Post’s Paul Rucker called Christie’s speech “a master class on how to prosecute a political opponent.” Salina Zito of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review praised his “gripping case to the American people on Clinton’s judgment.”

It was a little rich to watch Christie hit Clinton for being too kind to Russia, considering Trump’s warm words for Vladimir Putin, and for being too kind to brutal mass-murderer Assad when Trump has stated that the United States has “bigger problems than Assad.” But even Trump-skeptic conservative writers saluted Christie’s relish for his task of tearing apart Clinton’s record as secretary of state.

“Effective and energized the room,” concluded Guy Benson of Townhall. CNN’s Mary Katharine Ham tweeted, “Trump should take notes from Christie on staying on message.” Eric Fehrnstrom, formerly a senior aide to Mitt Romney, said Christie was “throwing serious heat, equivalent to a pitcher hitting 100 mph.”

Praise from anyone on the Romney team was hardly a given tonight.

Four years ago, Christie had the plum role of giving the keynote address at the GOP convention in Tampa. He was indisputably one of the party’s rising stars. He stepped onto the stage to raucous applause, maybe the apex of his political career. And then everything started going terribly, terribly wrong.

In 2012, what the delegates before him and viewers at home didn’t know was that moments earlier Christie had been furiously fighting with the convention director over whether a three-minute video introducing Christie needed to be cut for time constraints. The argument grew more heated until Christie asked a member of the production team “if he had ever heard anyone say ‘f***’ on live television, because that’s what he was about to do if the video didn’t run.”

The director relented in the face of Christie’s threat. The video ran, and then Christie told the national audience a great deal about himself and not so much about nominee Mitt Romney. Christie finished 120 sentences in his speech, discussing his childhood, record as governor, and philosophy, before mentioning “our nominee.”

Tuesday night, Christie made sure he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. In his opening words, he praised Trump as “not only a strong leader, but a genuine caring and decent person.”

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