Chris Christie rising: Alpha Dog and the Scolder-in-Chief
The 9th anniversary of 9/11 rang with hollowness this time. Different than in earlier years. This year we wanted a remembrance and didn’t get one. This time, again, we got a lecture. We came to honor the dead and affirm the valor of the fearless. We got Lady Gaga, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and another scolding from Barack Obama. This, the quaternity of the reigning liberal zeitgeist will continue to hurt the President and the Presidency with its immature associations.
This time, maybe for the first time since, memory has awakened to its demands. It was not enough. Next year, the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it will be decidedly different.
Comparisons with Carter are everywhere now but we called them both out ourselves, Carter and Obama, because we needed to rest a bit and recover. We needed to lick our wounds. But starting this year, starting now, rest period is over.
This is the background against which new Jersey Governor Chris Christie enters the room. I’d first heard him touched upon by Cavuto, half joking, months back; there would be a possibility that Christie, his neighbor, might consider a run in 2012. But greater urgency has come upon us since the 9th anniversary of 9/11 this month and the controversy over the mosque near Ground Zero. Only since then have we turned around and turned on the appeasers and accommodators to ask: Where is Alpha Dog? Where is our Alpha Dog? Who will speak and act for the rest of us who will not be attending the Colbert/Stewart show on October 30?
Alpha is that quality that made Christie stand out in his confrontation with a heckler at the Meg Whitman fund raiser. He has been doing this all the past year.
History turns on a moment and the psychology of Christie’s aggression brought to mind another time. New York was absolutely squalid with drugs and chaos and the chronic harangues of nihilist winged monkeys; bankers were snorting coke and messengers shooting up in the stair wells of Madison Avenue skyscrapers. The Pope had been shot. John Lennon was gunned down in from of his home. There had been an assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan was shot and almost killed. It was all running together.
The country was worn thin and weary. Then one day at a press conference President Reagan told a heckler to “shut up” in a moment almost exactly like Chris Christie’s. And surprisingly, he did. Just at that moment things began to turn around and get back to normal.