Many commentators on the Christie bridge scandal have declared that this will harm Christie in the 2016 Republican primary. I don’t agree.
The New York Daily News called it Christie’s “Waterloo.” But Republican primary voters don’t include very many New York commuters who are easily annoyed by traffic problems.
After all, what was Christie doing? Harming ordinary Americans in order to attack Democratic politicians. That’s Republican gospel nowadays.
Consider the long list of actions committed by today’s Republican Party, and purposefully done in order to harm Americans for political reasons. We can begin with shutting down the government.
If you think shutting down part of one bridge for a couple of days was a nuisance and danger to Americans, that’s nothing compared to shutting down most of the federal government for 16 days. And unlike Christie, the Republicans in Congress celebrated this massive nationwide traffic delay as a great accomplishment in itself.
There’s a long list of other Republican policies that have also harmed the country far more than a bridge closure:
--threatening to default on the debt in order to reduce America’s credit rating.
--refusing to extend unemployment insurance.
--sequester cuts to social programs.
--opposing the Obama stimulus plan (which, ironically, included money to fix failing bridges) and blocking additional stimulus when the recession proved to be worse than expected.
The list could go almost forever; please add your favorites.
While it’s true that most Americans were appalled at the actions of these Republicans, as they were appalled by the bridge scandal, it’s also true that most Americans don’t vote in Republican primaries.
No, we should not call this scandal BridgeGate, even though that actually makes more sense than most of the silly -gate names tossed at Obama for 6 years. When we’re talking about harming America for partisan reasons, why should we give this any name other than Republican Party Policy?