Ritual Sacrifice in the Garden State- A Guest Post From Tod Theise (D-NJ)

Tod Theise is the intrepid Democrat in northernmost New Jersey taking on the most conservative Republican left in the Northeast, Wall Street shill Scott Garrett. We started covering his race last May and when I was trying to wrap my head around the colossal compounding series of infantile blunders being made by New Jersey's governor I turned to Tod for some help understanding exactly what happened. One thing I saw clearly was that Christie's arrogance is simply amazing. He screws up then blames Obama. When that won't fly, he blames his own Education Secretary, the guy with credibility inside the far right. Christie was already is on thin ice with conservatives in New Jersey, so why would he can one of their genuine icons?  All in all, it looked like a very good week for Democrats in the Garden State. Let's let Tod take it from there: 

- by Tod Theise

Call me a glass-half-full kind of guy, but I actually expected New Jersey Governor Christie to demonstrate a modicum of leadership by taking responsibility for the epic blunder that robbed New Jersey schools of $400 million of federal education funds. In submitting the application for Race to the Top funding, Christie’s administration made a “clerical error” that lowered the application’s score. New Jersey’s loss was Ohio’s gain as the Buckeye State edged past Jersey to garner the tenth and final funding slot.

As the news spread of this debacle, Christie was faced with the first real crisis of personal character of his governorship. He could accept responsibility for this screw-up and ask forgiveness of the people whose interests he’d sworn to protect. Or he could pursue the course taken by your garden variety toddler caught in the act by an angry parent and throw a self-aggrandizing tantrum to deflect culpability. Well, so much for my cockeyed optimism. The Governor formerly referred to by George W. Bush as “Big Boy” proceeded to pitch a fit, attempting to assign blame first to the New Jersey Teachers Association (”NJEA”). Ironically, Christie had wrested the application process from the NJEA as part of his continuing efforts to score political points by pummeling teachers for every evil under the sun.

When this tactic wore thin, he maladroitly turned his sites on the Obama administration. Christie maintained that the President was duty bound to inform Christie’s administrators that they had botched the insertion of rudimentary date information on the application. This flea-bitten dog failed to hunt and Christie was running out of victims to toss on his ritual pyre. The last refuge for Christie’s cowardice proved to be the scapegoating of his handpicked Education Secretary Bret Schundler. Christie’s appointment of Schundler as Education Secretary was hailed by conservatives as a stroke of genius. Bret had built much of his street cred as a leader of Jersey’s right wing based on his support for education reforms such as charter schools. His appointment by Christie served to solidify Big Boy’s support with those on the right who had never quite accepted him as one of their own.

Christie decided to unceremoniously fire Schundler. I knew Bret Schundler back in the day when I was
a Republican. Whether you agreed with Bret or not, he has always been a man of impeccable character and has a heart for people rarely seen in politics. He readily bonded with a young Cory Booker when Booker was a Councilman in Newark and a rising star in the Democratic heavens. Despite his strong conservative leanings, he invariably treated those with whom he disagreed with respect and sought common ground on many issues with his political opponents. He didn’t deserve to be thrown under the bus by an ill-tempered adolescent masquerading as a Governor incapable of taking accountability for his own inexcusable mistake.

This incident isn’t about partisanship or ideology. It’s about right and wrong. And what Governor Christie did to Bret Schundler was incalculably wrong.

Rachel Maddow's perspective in the context of Obama Derangement Syndrome, something from which Christie cerianly suffers... mightily:




UPDATE: Christie And Schundler In A Hot Debate Over Who Lied More

This is ugly and getting uglier. TPM looked into the charges flying back and forth between Christie and Schundler, while people in New Jersey are just dazed that these two ego-maiacs lost them $400 million in education funding.

Schundler now says he made it clear to the the governor that he did not try to provide additional information to the Department of Education officials because the rules don't allow states to correct or add to their applications after they are submitted. He told TPMMuckraker that he told Christie prior to the press conference not to say that Obama was at fault or suggest that his office wasn't to blame. But Schundler has also said that he may have made a mistakenly told the Governor that the conversation with a reviewer about the missing data took place during the official presentation when it actually happened after the camera was turned off.

In addition, this week Schundler admitted that he, not a mid-level staffer, apparently edited out the crucial data this week that caused the state to lose out on the funding. Schundler has said that the federal Education Department recently found a draft of the Race to the Top application that has edits in Schundler's handwriting which remove the data federal officials requested.