Chris Christie: The New Tom Dewey

He won re-election as a Republican governor by almost 60 percent of the vote. He loved to talk about what he called the “Teamwork Government” he had brought to his state capital — especially when it came to contrasting what he and his tight-knit band of advisers deemed as the wild success and popularity of his Teamwork Government with the chaos of Washington.

He boldly went where other Republicans would not go, winning an unprecedented pledge of neutrality from the deeply liberal labor movement. Stunningly, of the 24 members of the American Federation of Labor’s endorsement board, 22 wanted to enthusiastically endorse him, the union finally declining out of respect for the remaining 2 members who favored his Democratic opponent.

He was fearless in taking on his critics in his own Republican Party, repeatedly lecturing them that government was created to meet the needs of man, bluntly rejecting what he called “the blind obstruction which Democrats claim is our habit and some Republicans would like to take as our role.” At one campaign rally he was especially defiant. “It is the job of a majority party to build, not to tear down; to go forward, not to obstruct. It is not the function of a political party to die fighting for obsolete slogans.… In a generation torn by strife between extremists and fanatics, let us have the balance… to prove that democracy can maintain itself as a master of its own destiny, feed its hungry, house its homeless, and provide work for its idle… without the reliance on political racketeers.”

He loved the idea of medical insurance for the poor.

The media loved his bulldog manner, his bluntness (“That’s a stupid question,” he once barked to a reporter), making him the hottest politician to cover. He was, wrote one journalistic admirer, “a live figure in a party of snoozing stuffed shirts.” They heaped on the favorable publicity, “because he was so obviously hard-boiled,” noting admiringly — in one case in capital letters — that he “GETS THINGS DONE.” Particularly striking to his media fans was that he was so bold he never hesitated to excoriate “capital as well as labor.” At one hospital fundraiser, he “rose at the head table to lambaste his hosts,” saying to his “startled” audience of business leaders that “there are few rackets which do not rest securely and luxuriously upon the throne of business,” accusing his hosts of being unable to tell “the truth.” “Headlines surrounded” him, it was written by biographer Richard Norton Smith in Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, “like an inky nimbus.


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