Chris Christie's ignorance about the civil-rights struggle may not doom his political future, but his out-of-control mouth sure may

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King are among those at the head of the marchers crossing the Alabama River on Mar. 21, 1965, early in the five-day march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in support of equal voting rights.

“The fact of the matter is, I think people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South."

-- NJ Gov. Chris Christie, on Tuesday

by Ken

Most of us, I think, are accustomed to deriding political consultants and handlers who make a federal case of keeping their candidates ruthlessly "on messsage." The sad reality, though, is that the practical wisdom of this philosophy keeps being reproved.

And I think it's not so much because of the vote-gathering potency of said "message," although naturally those consultants and handlers do whatever they can to press buttons that have been shown to curry favor. No, I think the crucial component to keeping your guy/gal "on message" is minimizing the epic dangers if/when he/she goes off-message. Sure, you or I might think that that's when we find out what they really think, and might possibly get a glimmer of how they might behave if elected. In which case you and I aren't what the political-handling class has in its crosshairs.

Staying on message is no universal guarantee, because there are no guarantees in electoral politics. But there are strong tendencies and odds-tippers. And so while the zealous efforts of the elite corps of Willard Inc. handlers to keep their boy on message, or rather on messages as they try to find some that don't make him sound even more clownish, may not have kept him safe, think how bad things would be for him if he actually said what's on his mind. And in part his message problem stems from too much history of saying stuff -- much of which may actually have been "on messsage" in its time and place but sure isn't in this time, the year 2012, or place, the GOP presidential nominating carnival.

If you want the seeming exception to the rule of message fidelity which may prove the rule, consider Naught Gingrich, who on all evidence is pretty much self-managed and -messaged. It appears to be serving him well at the moment, but that's only because he's competing in such an isolated population segment and against a raft of such hopeless-nothing candidates. But Naught's history of self-destruction has a lot to do with his minimally managed mouth. As bad as the American system of passing on and receiving information is, in a case as crackpotted as Naught's, people do tend eventually to sort of get the idea.)

EVEN THAT BIGGEST OF BLOWHARDS RALPH KRAMDEN
AT TIMES ACKNOWLEDGED, "I'VE GOT A BI-I-I-IG MOUTH"

But Ralph never did anything about that big mouth either.

All of which is a rambling preamble to saying that suddenly I'm less worred about the prospect of a bright political future for one of my less favorite Republicans, "Hefty Chris" Christie, the take-no-prisoners first-term Republican governor of New Jersey. My sense is that the appeal for his own constituents is already starting to wear thin, as they start to measure his immoderate mouth against their inescapable daily reality. But I worried that he might be dangerous precisely for his potential appeal to prospective voters who don't have to experience his actual governance. And while I'm personally appalled beyond measure by this self-revelation of a depth of ignorance so extreme that it should disqualify him from participation in any form in government at any level, it has also given me a good measure of hope that his unmanaged or perhaps unmanageable mouth is likely to disqualify him from any larger electoral prospects.

As so often happens, it's what pols reveal about themselves when they're not speaking directly to the subject at hand that tells us most about what they know, what they believe, and how they think. Which I think is what happened to the Heftyman when he tried to remain true to the bigoted, hate-inspired values he does seem to share with his right-wing base, and thought he had found a slick, seemingly democracy-inspired stratagem to sneak through a bit of a public-relations obstacle course.

The obstacle course materialized when the truly tireless efforts of a lot of highly motivated, highly persuasive activists brought around enough hearts and minds in the state legislature to create the growing possibility that the governor is going to have a bill legalizing same-sex marriage land on his desk. He has already said unequivocally that he will veto any such bill, but he must be realizing that such a position is threatening to become more of a political liability than a vote-getter. Or to put it another way: Any votes that there are to be gotten with a line-in-the-sand position against equal treatment of all citizens are votes that are already in the bag for a right-wing candidate, but among the rest of the electorate it's increasingly becoming a losing proposition.

What to do, what to do? Especially with growing indications that the pro-equality forces have turned around not just a number of the Democrats whose recalcitrance led to the fiasco of the effort to pass a marriage-equality bill in the dying days of the Corzine administration, but if anything more importantly have helped a number of Republican legislators see the light. And what he came up with was what he described as "an alternate move" for marriage-equality proponents: the democratic-sounding proposal to put same-sex marriage rights to a vote. Let's let the people of the state of New Jersey (rather than, say, their elected representatives) decide! What could be fairer or more democratic?

DID NJ'S HEFTYMAN HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT

HE WAS REALLY TELLING US ABOUT HIMSELF?

Now, there are perfectly good reasons why this is not a good idea, having to do generally with the inadvisability of putting people's rights up for a vote. This is unfortunately very hard to explain beyond the concept that Thomas Jeffrerson enunciated so elegantly in the Declaration of "certain unalienable rights." Fortunately, though, thanks to the way Big Chris's big mouth framed the issue, he disproved his own point -- and, I'm suggesting, told us way more about his mind than he meant to, or than I would have imagined.

What he did, as suggested in the quote I've put at the top of this post, was to propose an analogy with the great civil-rights struggle of the '50s and '60s. As it happens, there is a body of quite specific history about this very idea of putting civil rights to a vote back then, when die-hard racists tried to make desegregation go away by means of just such a strategy. It was roundly rejected, as Duncan Osborne sets out in a terrific piece for Gay City News called "Christie Doesn't Like Ike."

But I think what Governor Christie revealed about himself goes way beyond ignorance of this particular. He told the world that he not only knows nothing about the civil-rights struggle -- i.e., what was at stake, who was on which side, and how that struggle played out -- but carries in his head a pack of delusions and lies about one of the most fundamental realities of American history and one of the most turbulent upheavals of the second half of the 20th century. He has announced to the world that he has no compunctions about grounding the way he sees the world in ideologically calculated lies.

Unless the man was just kidding, he actually believes that U.S. voters in the 1950s and '60s would have voted in favor of legal enactment and enforcement of full civil rights for Americans of all races. Which means that, unless he's lying (and I really don't think he is), his brain is totally ignorant of absolutely every single aspect of this crucial development in American history, and of the not-so-distant past, which is crucial to any understanding of the problems of the present. He either doesn't know or doesn't care that everything he thinks on this subject (at the very least) is 100 percent fiction-based.

Which isn't entirely surprising to me. What's surprising is that he was so politically maladroit as to make such a bald, incontrovertible announcement that he's, well, full of doody. Again, his hard-core right-wing home-state constituents and potential out-of-state ones won't care. After all, what's more central to all right-wing beliefs today than the worship of ignorance, hate, and delusion. Add economic predation and you've got the Core Right-Wing Agenda. But when the rest of the electorate is brought into the equation, I think you being to understand that people who believe what the governor has shown himself to believe normally speak, when they're speaking outside their hard-core "faithful," only in code.

Which brings me back to that mouth. I don't kid myself that gross ignorance of and insensitivity to the civil-rights struggle is going to incur any significant political price for the Heftyman. After all, the American body politic has worked hard to develop a convenient case of amnesia on the subject. But a mouth that's capable of dropping a bombshell like this one, even if this particular bomb doesn't do much damage, is almost certainly too uncontrolled to hold up to the rigors of the American media circus.

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