I saw a second Chris Christie Town meeting, this one in an old VFW meeting room attached to a thrift shop in the small New Hampshire town of North Conway. I had seen an earlier Town Meeting six weeks ago.
He said this was his 25th or 26th Town Meeting in New Hampshire this year.
The experience was familiar because Christie's performance was essentially identical. I say this not as a criticism but as a report on the simple fact that Christie has about 30 minutes of material that he presents to get across his main message about himself so it probably exists in every Town Meeting, as part of his opening pre-Q&A and then in his summary:
He loves his parents and wife and kids.
He learned his values from them, particularly his mother, who taught him to be blunt and confrontational.
He was a prosecutor and has prosescuted terrorists and wants laws enforced.
He experienced 9-11 directly since his wife was near the World Trade Center when it was hit.
He wants a stronger, more engaged military.
He is anti drug, having a close friend lost to addiction to drugs, plus his mother to alcohol.
Then he gets in the rest of the points he wants to make in questions that are predictable:
tell us about immigration
how do you feel about Israel and the Middle East
can you say some critical things about Obama
what about my Social Sevurity
He gets across his key points of personality and character and policy by storytelling and the words--even the intonations--are the same.
A recent comment he made about addiction went viral on Facebook. Christie reported this morning that it had been seen some 7 million times. I had heard the story when I saw him in mid September. The viral recording, reported by Rachel Maddow, was essentially the story I had heard.
I have been telling people in my home town that Christie does an important piece of political theater and inoculation in a story he tells, a story about his mother being an in-your-face person very comfortable with confrontation who said there will be no deathbed confessions. Just say things and be honest. I would relate the story of his mother telling him at her deathbed to "go to work" and not stay there with her. It is a powerful story and I warned my friends that the story works well to put into a favorable context the blunt and in-your-face behavior that has drawn some criticism. The story helps inoculate him from the charge of being a mean bully. Instead, he simply being a good son, having learned a lesson from his mother, just being the honest unguarded person he was brought up to be.
At this morning's meeting I heard him begin to introduce the story so I turned on my video recorder. He gave the story exactly as he had before and exactly as I had related it to others. It takes about six minutes and I hope to figure out a way to upload it onto my blog. Or I will find someone else's recording of it on YouTube, and put a link here.
It is a great story. And this story, like everything he said today, has been said before. At this point in the campaign we are seeing actors, reciting well practiced, well rehearsed lines, with the same pauses, the same gestures. The fact that the Town Meetings are performances, reiterations of the same play, doesn't make them inauthentic. After all, presumably they wrote the lines, and they are the subject of the lines, and they take political and repetitional responsibility for the lines even if someone else helped them craft them. And the reviews and comments of the audience are not just of the candidate as performer but also as the person him or her self.
I am reminded of Steven Colbert, playing the character Steven Colbert. In this case Chris Christie is a performer, only the character Chris Christie plays is his actual self, not an ironic caricature of himself.
He said this was his 25th or 26th Town Meeting in New Hampshire this year.
The experience was familiar because Christie's performance was essentially identical. I say this not as a criticism but as a report on the simple fact that Christie has about 30 minutes of material that he presents to get across his main message about himself so it probably exists in every Town Meeting, as part of his opening pre-Q&A and then in his summary:
He loves his parents and wife and kids.
He learned his values from them, particularly his mother, who taught him to be blunt and confrontational.
He was a prosecutor and has prosescuted terrorists and wants laws enforced.
He experienced 9-11 directly since his wife was near the World Trade Center when it was hit.
He wants a stronger, more engaged military.
He is anti drug, having a close friend lost to addiction to drugs, plus his mother to alcohol.
Then he gets in the rest of the points he wants to make in questions that are predictable:
tell us about immigration
how do you feel about Israel and the Middle East
can you say some critical things about Obama
what about my Social Sevurity
He gets across his key points of personality and character and policy by storytelling and the words--even the intonations--are the same.
A recent comment he made about addiction went viral on Facebook. Christie reported this morning that it had been seen some 7 million times. I had heard the story when I saw him in mid September. The viral recording, reported by Rachel Maddow, was essentially the story I had heard.
I have been telling people in my home town that Christie does an important piece of political theater and inoculation in a story he tells, a story about his mother being an in-your-face person very comfortable with confrontation who said there will be no deathbed confessions. Just say things and be honest. I would relate the story of his mother telling him at her deathbed to "go to work" and not stay there with her. It is a powerful story and I warned my friends that the story works well to put into a favorable context the blunt and in-your-face behavior that has drawn some criticism. The story helps inoculate him from the charge of being a mean bully. Instead, he simply being a good son, having learned a lesson from his mother, just being the honest unguarded person he was brought up to be.
At this morning's meeting I heard him begin to introduce the story so I turned on my video recorder. He gave the story exactly as he had before and exactly as I had related it to others. It takes about six minutes and I hope to figure out a way to upload it onto my blog. Or I will find someone else's recording of it on YouTube, and put a link here.
It is a great story. And this story, like everything he said today, has been said before. At this point in the campaign we are seeing actors, reciting well practiced, well rehearsed lines, with the same pauses, the same gestures. The fact that the Town Meetings are performances, reiterations of the same play, doesn't make them inauthentic. After all, presumably they wrote the lines, and they are the subject of the lines, and they take political and repetitional responsibility for the lines even if someone else helped them craft them. And the reviews and comments of the audience are not just of the candidate as performer but also as the person him or her self.
I am reminded of Steven Colbert, playing the character Steven Colbert. In this case Chris Christie is a performer, only the character Chris Christie plays is his actual self, not an ironic caricature of himself.
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| The room wss starting to fill. Over 100 people jammed into the room by start time. |
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