Christie-Romney Food Fight

“ A FINE FOOD FIGHT By now, everyone knows that Mitt Romney’s inner circle was righteously peeved at New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for spending the final days of the 2012 presidential race arm-in-arm with President Obama as they toured the Jersey coastline after its thrashing by Hurricane Sandy. The buddy-buddy act boxed Romney out of national media coverage for days while lending the president some bipartisan street cred. But it wasn’t just the storm. Christie had rankled Romney’s team throughout the campaign: He held back his endorsement as long as possible, flirted with big-shot GOP donors who begged him to jump into the race and used his prime-time address at the Republican National Convention to puff up his Garden State record — without mentioning Romney once. “And it will hit Christie first. Halperin and Heilemann make abundant use of a vice-presidential vetting file dropped into their hands by someone in Romney’s orbit to illuminate secrets about the governor. Delivering the documents to the authors was a stunning breach of political decorum that can only be read as a giant middle finger at Christie and his aides. According to the authors, Romney and his team were shaken by what they discovered about Christie during “Project Goldfish,” as the hush-hush veep search process was known. His “disturbing” research file is littered with “garish controversies,” the authors write: a Justice Department investigation into his free-spending ways as U.S. attorney, his habit of steering government contracts to friends and political allies, a defamation lawsuit that emerged during a 1994 run for local office, a politically problematic lobbying career that included work on behalf of a financial firm that employed Bernie Madoff. And that’s not to mention the Romney team’s anxiety about the governor’s girth. For Christie, who is coasti to rengelection on Tuesday and already laying behind-the-scenes groundwork for a 2016 presidential bid, the book’s revelations are a Drudge-ready public relations nightmare that will send his advisers scrambling to explain awkward aspects of his record and his personal life just as he is stepping onto the national stage.” It's a proper food fight, but now I know all I want to know.  No book buy for you. The book’s loose argument is that both Obama and Romney placed their bets about the race early on and “doubled down” throughout the contest. It’s an apt take on Obama World. The “Obamans,” as the authors call them, set out to annihilate Romney almost two years before the election and executed their plan with brutal efficiency. There were hiccups along the way, specifically Obama’s dreary debate-prep sessions and his cringe-worthy performance in Denver, but his deputies in Chicago rarely deviated from their search-and-destroy mission. Romney’s campaign, though, with its bad habit of reacting to news cycles with snap decisions, always felt more ad hoc, with tactics trumping strategy. ”